Detroiter thaws minority students' way to Michigan Tech
February 4, 2007
Betty Chavis knows first-hand that the big, bad winters of the UP are a tough sell to black Detroit kids: When Michigan Technological University flew her in to seduce her with an important job, she made up her mind before a word was said.
"I got off the plane and it was snowing sideways. It snowed the entire time, and I was sloshing through snow from one building to another."
Michigan Tech wanted her -- needed her -- as its first minority recruiter, a challenge that excited her.
But Betty told herself, "Hell, no," while telling her suitors a little white lie: "I'll think about it."
Instead, she forgot about it until, a few months later, they flew her back.
"The weather changed," she recalls, in both Houghton and her life. "A very bad love affair had just ended, and I figured this was the farthest I could get away from it. I knew nobody was gonna follow me up here."
Betty had worked as a dancer, a drug counselor and a political aide and fund-raiser. But Michigan Tech gave Betty a chance to take on what seemed a nobler mission.
Do whatever you must, the university told her, to enroll minorities on a campus that, when she arrived, counted just 17 black students.
Now, 17 years later, this 72-year-old woman who grew up in the Brewster projects of Detroit has made peace with Houghton's white population and icy winters. By being who she is -- curious, high-spirited, fearless -- she has warmed up the place for everyone else.
Says her boss, Chris S. Anderson, the diversity guru on campus: "Betty is an icon here."
On Wednesday, when Houghton's Winter Carnival begins, she'll stroll among the huge snow sculptures, sipping hot chocolate, greeting everybody with hugs and kisses. She'll wear UGG boots and corduroys (long underwear beneath), in a hooded Patagonia parka and a colorful scarf and a funny-looking cap called a Stormy Kromer, a favorite with Yoopers.
As director of Outreach and Multiethnic Programs, she has helped lure hundreds of black, Hispanic and American Indian kids over the psychological hump of winter, their biggest fear. Now, among a student body of 6,500, the black student enrollment is 126.
Almost all are in the sciences or engineering. About 90% come from metro Detroit.
"You can't lie to 'em" about winter, she says. You can't promise global warming or point to this winter, with scant snow, to forecast the future.
"I tell 'em you won't ever have seen snow like you'll see in the UP. We talk in terms of feet, not inches. I show them pictures of snowbanks over my head, and I'm no shorty. I tell 'em I sometimes have to push hard against my door to get out of my house.
"But I say, 'You'll not have seen snow as pretty. It's not funky and dirty like in Detroit after two hours.' And I say that, probably the first two days you're here, you'll feel sick because you're breathing fresh air for a change."
She laughs heartily. "Then I tell 'em to try something different in your life," as she did.
As for the overwhelmingly non-black population: Welcome to the world.
"My own daddy told me 'You won't learn anything hanging around only black people,' and I'm ever grateful to him for that."
I first met Betty during my travels last summer when another woman described her as witty, passionate and "a true visionary."
I learned that the year after she arrived Betty founded the Parade of Nations, an annual fall event that now draws 5,000 spectators to taste ethnic foods and watch students from 82 countries carry their flags.
And, in a brilliant move, Betty now brings in for the parade the marching band from her Detroit alma mater, Cass Technical High School.
As a result, young black Detroiters who hadn't considered Michigan Tech are enrolled here.
One is Gabe Agboruche, a tuba player in the band. When the band visited in 2005, Gabe found the town and campus impressive: small and friendly, conducive to serious study.
"I'd heard it was, oh, so cold, but I like to experience stuff for myself," says Gabe, who at 18 is majoring in computer and electrical engineering. "And there are people here from everywhere. So much diversity! I love it. In the job market, you've got to be comfortable with all races."
As we talk, on a 10-degree morning near a snow sculpture in progress, Gabe wears items he never owned when he was in and out of cars in Detroit: white long underwear, a scarf around his neck and an MTU cap, with ear flaps.
He calls Betty a friend and says: "She's our source of black history up here. She gives it to us all the time."
Michigan Tech has 580 foreign students among its 6,500, but American minorities amount to only 4%. That sounds puny but Betty's boss, Chris Anderson, says it's comparable to engineering programs at bigger schools.
And a Brewster projects kid catalyzed that improvement.
How did it happen? A distant relative serving as writer-in-residence at Tech suggested Betty as someone who could help it attract more blacks.
"I'd never done recruiting," Betty recalls, "but she told them I knew how to talk to people."
She credits that skill to her father, who sent her to middle school on the opposite side of Detroit, where blacks were in a minority and she knew no one. She graduated from Cass Tech at 15, dropped out of Wayne State and moved to Manhattan to study dance.
Back home she danced with a group that, with fire and snakes and African drums, opened for Motown acts around the country, including Marvin Gaye and the Four Tops.
She opened a Detroit dress shop, but it went bust after the 1967 riots. She slunk back to school, earned a degree in communications, worked for Highland Park and eventually for the former dean of the Michigan Senate, the late Basil Brown.
When Betty fled to Houghton in 1989, nursing the wounds of love, she missed mostly one thing: someone who knew how to cut black hair. She still returns to Detroit for that, wearing her hair very short so she can make that 10-hour road trip just three or four times a year.
Except for a carload of teenagers who once called her a name and told her to go home, she found people friendly beyond her hopes.
One morning muffins appeared on the seat of her car, parked in the driveway of her new rental home. Her landlord, a retired white professor, took a platonic fondness to her, escorting her to concerts and receptions, talking with her about African Americans in the arts.
Eventually, he left the house to Betty in his will.
Although she never felt iced out of Houghton, she took on the challenge of retraining white folks she suspected still carried stereotypes of black people as criminals or buffoons.
Within months of her arrival in 1989, Rosa Parks gave Michigan Tech's commencement speech, the first -- and so far only -- African American to do so.
Later Betty brought in other big-name black speakers: Cornel West, Shelby Steele, Lanie Guinier, the wife of Eldridge Cleaver, the sister of Malcolm X.
She hosted Tech Teas on Wednesdays for minority students to meet minority professionals.
And she offered her time to local schools in town so kids could meet a black person. "Whatever they wanted, I would do. If they wanted Dr. Seuss read, I would be there. Now, kids I met in kindergarten hug me on the street."
In the early years, she personally coaxed scores of black students, many from Cass Tech, to take a chance at Michigan Tech, emphasizing its small size and its 98% job placement rate.
Now she supervises five people, and the school has minority recruiters in Detroit, Chicago and elsewhere.
She is proud of Tech's handful of black PhDs but discouraged they haven't returned as faculty. "The hue and cry has always been that we can't find any faculty of color in engineering. It still is. But now they're being eaten up by corporate America, lured by big bucks. The pickings are much larger now, but at a premium."
Her eight black graduate students are her family. She drinks with them Friday nights and says, "They watch over me as if I were their mother."
She can't retire or move back to Detroit, she says, "because I've promised all those parents I'd be here for their kids."
And, despite every implausibility, it has come to feel like home.
Copyright © 2006 Detroit Free Press Inc.
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