At Temple, we like to talk about our mission. We sum it up as “serving the underserved.” This is a legacy that dates to our founding in 1884.
The Trump administration believes Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts punish historically privileged groups (white men) and sacrifice merit when we pay attention to those previously excluded.
Our founder, Russell Conwell, is rolling in his grave. Temple University emerged from his determined view that excluding people from higher education overlooked significant talent and potential in the huge number of newcomers to Philadelphia in his time: immigrants from Europe and the Great Migration of Black people to northern cities in the post-Reconstruction era beginning in 1877.
In Conwell’s lifetime, Temple had no requirements for prior schooling for admission and created its curriculum in direct response to student input. Attending an elite preparatory school was not necessary, but the education was still rigorous. Temple began charging tuition both to cover expenses and to emphasize the value of their education. The students would have to work for the funds to invest in it. Agnes Rush Burr’s 1917 book on Conwell, which quotes amply from him, makes clear his belief that working people could achieve and were central to Temple’s identity:
One thing we have demonstrated —those who work for a living have time to study. Some splendid specimens of scholarship have been developed in our work. And there are other splendid geniuses-yet undiscovered; but the Temple College will bring them to the light, and the world will be richer for them.
“Splendid geniuses-yet undiscovered” not only explains what Temple does, but what the previous regimes of exclusion prevented: uncovering the best talent. What would the Industrial Revolution have looked like if women or people of color had a hand in it? How lucky is the world that Marie Curie’s father-in-law stepped in to take care of her children after the death of her husband, so Marie could return to the lab? What would American agriculture be today without George Washington Carver’s work on soil depletion and crop rotation? We all know that a good idea, applied thoughtfully, does not know gender, race, or class. Why would anyone want to return to the days when uniformity, inequality, and exclusion framed the possible?
Conwell’s philosophy is an interesting mélange of Protestant work ethic, capitalism’s rewards, and a rejection of rigid class structures. His “Acres of Diamonds” essay is both uplifting and a little concerning, as he explains that building personal wealth is the best way to enrich the community. But his goals for our university embody the radical idea that class should not determine social order, as Burr’s work emphasizes:
[Temple’s] enterprise has had its dark days, when great sacrifices were necessary for its continuance. It has had the opposition of some employers who feared that an education would turn their employees into other occupations, and it has had the prejudice of the rich who naturally desire to keep the higher places of earth for their sons and daughters, and who often stated that they feared the institution was educating the common people ‘above their station’ and would lead the poor people to be ambitious for places which could only be occupied to advantage by the wealthy.
Jim Hilty’s excellent history of Temple recounts Conwell’s unsuccessful efforts to secure endowments from rich people of the time, such as John Wanamaker, Anthony J. Drexel, John D. Rockefeller, and William Bucknell. Drexel founded his own institution in 1891, and Bucknell gave so much to the University at Lewisburg that it was renamed after him. To no avail, Conwell made that proposal to Bucknell.
The university’s perpetual struggle for stable funding reveals the central problem: Conwell thought wealthy people had an obligation to enable talent, and schools like Temple that nurture it, to flourish. Temple continues to struggle with that notion to this day.
Temple’s first graduating class in 1892, Hilty points out, had 18 students, four of whom were women. Today, we are a research-intensive institution with 17 schools and colleges offering a wide array of majors. It is impossible to think about how Philadelphia’s businesses and non-profits would run without our graduates. People from all over the United States (and beyond) want to attend our distinguished programs.
If we remove the words diversity, equity, and inclusion from every one of our web pages, would it change Temple University? I do not think so. These days, most of Temple’s first-year students do have a college graduate in their immediate family. Are we still “serving the underserved”? It might be more accurate to say that our students are “unelite.”
Some Temple students do need more help with their basic skills, and some stop attending classes due to numerous external pressures that might not hinder students at elite schools. Those are not reasons for lowering our standards. Faculty here do change their teaching to help students learn skills alongside content. The students who struggle have committed advisors at their disposal who help them take a leave of absence, retake courses, and find emergency funds. Many Temple students need more than four years to finish a bachelor’s degree. I am fond of saying that here, “it’s a journey, not a race.”
Temple cannot, even if it wanted to, require students to live on campus as so many elite colleges and universities do. While being a residential campus certainly creates community more easily, it demands that students either produce more money or go into debt to afford the cost of room and board. For some students, commuting to campus and living with family or friends is the only way they can obtain a university education. As a result, our students sit in class next to each other without even thinking about how long each of them may take to complete their program, when their graduation date is, or even their age. None of those things have any bearing on their eventual contributions to society.
Temple’s continued commitment to DEI is just another way of saying that our mission remains the same. We reject the presumption that only certain people “deserve” to be educated. Today, we do have admissions standards, but they are designed to recognize potential. Our motto, ‘Perseverance Conquers,’ illustrates what some might call ‘grit.’ Conwell recognized that homogeneity, inequity, and exclusion would stifle our society’s ability to grow and prosper. We are proof that a real meritocracy can flourish, but only when barriers are removed.
