William E. Cox and Frank Matthews discuss the vision they had when they started Black Issues/Diverse 25 years ago and the magazine’s contributions to the higher education community.
For 25 years, Diverse: Issues In Higher Education, formerly Black Issues In Higher Education, has chronicled the plight of minority educators and students, as well as those committed to issues of access and opportunity and helping the underrepresented achieve their full educational potential. Throughout this quarter-century the magazine has served as a tool to help colleges and universities diversify their work force. William E. Cox and Frank L. Matthews formed Cox, Matthews and Associates in 1984, producing publications that for more than two decades have reported on the issues relevant to underrepresented groups in higher education. In their own words, Cox and Matthews discuss their early vision, the transition from Black Issues to Diverse, as well as the magazine’s contributions to the higher education community.
When we were thinking about publishing a newsletter in 1983, no newspaper or any other publication was reporting on a regular basis the plight of Black faculty and administrators in higher education. We were the first ones to come along to pretty much fill that void. We faced incredible challenges as the publication cemetery is filled with the tombstones of failed start-up magazines, newsletters and newspapers.
We knew we were on to something when we first met with faculty and administrators from Black colleges at a NAFEO convention in 1984. Black Issues was embraced by that particular group of conference attendees. The acceptance was so strong that it strengthened our resolve to march forward.
The second thing that really solidified it was a conference during the summer of 1984 at MIT [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology] of Black faculty and administrators from predominantly White institutions (PWIs). Some 1,000 people were in attendance at that conference. We hosted a reception and the room was packed. This experience told us that our appeal beyond the HBCU community would be equally strong.
Those early experiences in the life of the magazine validated that we had reached the Black colleges, but also the Black faculty and administrators working at PWIs that were so few and far between 25 years ago. Black faculty and administrators at PWIs found something in Black Issues they could claim. In a sense they were saying to themselves, “Now people can’t tell us that they can’t find Black faculty and administrators.” Those were critical stepping-stones in our early history and formed the foundation for what Diverse has become today. We began to grow after that, increasing the publication from 10 to 20 issues a year and now to 26.
