In 1978, Sarita Brown told the dean of graduate studies at the University of Texas-Austin that the reason the university had so few minority graduate students was the fault of the university, not the lack of eligible candidates. A well-run program, she said, could bring in many more Black and Hispanic graduate students.
The dean called her bluff and made Brown the head of the new Graduate Opportunities Program (GOP), though she had only just graduated from college.
“I was young enough and naive enough to think I could change the world,” Brown says. Armed with $50,000 and a tiny office with no furniture (prospective graduate students sat on piles of applications), Brown molded GOP into a program that has made the UT-Austin one of the top producers in the country for turning out Blacks and Hispanics with master’s degrees and doctorates.
“She really created [GOP] and developed it and presided over it for a decade-plus, and did it with almost insufferable enthusiasm,” says Dr. William S. Livingston, the current dean of graduate studies at UT-Austin. Livingston says the program has been important not only because it has brought minority students into graduate programs, “but it has had a symbolic effect of telling minority people out in the community that the university is committed to admission.”
