Dillard University, the New Orleans institution with which Brown established a partnership of support following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the alma mater of President Ruth Simmons, was recently ranked ninth on a U.S. News and World Report list of the top 81 historically black colleges and universities. Spelman College in Georgia earned the top spot in the poll, which was released earlier this month.
Dillard - with just over 1,100 students and an endowment of $40.8 million, according to the university's Web site - was awarded 63 points in a scoring system that considered SAT/ACT scores, student-to-faculty ratio and graduation rates, among other factors. Spelman finished with 100 points.
Some of the more impressive numbers reported by U.S. News included Dillard's student-to-faculty ratio - 11 to one - and the fact that 92 percent of its faculty members are full-time.
Rankings were also based on surveys distributed to administrators at peer institutions asking them to compare their universities with others in their peer groups.
"Our peer institutions, people who were in a position to know what we do, thought we did well," Dillard Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs Emily Moore told The Herald. Dillard achieved a peer assessment score of 3.5 out of 5.
Moore said the university was not surprised by the favorable ranking, though she did not expect to see a ranking system of historically black colleges - this is the first year U.S. News has ranked historically black colleges.
"We were surprised about the ranking itself, but not being in a ranking," Moore said. She stressed that Dillard had scored high in rankings among Southern comprehensive colleges in 2006 and 2007.
Moore said Dillard works to provide a quality education to its students, not to earn high marks on rankings. "We do what we do to provide the kind of education (that Dillard students value)," Moore said.
In order to qualify as a historically black college, a school must be entered in the U.S. Department of Education's "Historically Black Colleges and Universities" registry, which was established by the Higher Education Act of 1965, according to the U.S. News Web site. In order to qualify, a school must have been established prior to 1964 and its principal mission must have always been the education of black Americans.
Two strengths for which Dillard has received acclaim in the past are its National Center for Black-Jewish Relations and its Institute of Jazz Culture, according to an Oct. 8 article in the Louisiana Weekly. Moore acknowledged the strengths of these programs when asked what contributed to Dillard's lofty ranking, but she said the university had other strengths to offer as well, mentioning the university's partnership with the Melton Foundation, an international foundation that addresses global issues.
Dillard has been the beneficiary of a Brown assistance program established to help the university recover from Hurricane Katrina. According to a Brown press release, the school suffered more than $350 million in damage from the storm.
Moore said the disaster has not affected the school's quality of education. "I don't think Katrina had much of an impact" on the U.S. News and World Report ranking, Moore said, though she added that the storm has affected the Dillard community and the university is "concerned with our whole community coming back."
Most of the assistance Brown has provided to Dillard has been in-kind. University Librarian Harriette Hemmasi flew to Dillard and helped the New Orleans university restore and repair books damaged by the hurricane, and Richard Spies, executive vice president for planning and senior adviser to the president, has traveled to Dillard at least four times to help its administration with long-term financial planning.
In September, Simmons announced that Brown would continue to provide assistance to Dillard for the foreseeable future.
