We do not fulfill our role as a university when we, effectively, abdicate our charge to foster and maintain diversity in the university environment. - Vilma Socorro Martínez

if the goal of this great university is excellence, and it is and should be, the attainment of that excellence requires diversity as a fundamental element. Anything less is mere pretension.

The pattern of abuses in Uvalde County is strikingly reminiscent of the Deep South of the early 1960s. The Civil Rights Commission's study documents that duly registered Chicano voters are not being placed on the voting lists; that election judges are selectively and deliberately invalidating ballots cast by minority voters; that election judges are refusing to aid minority voters who are illiterate in English; that the tax assessor-collector of Uvalde County, who is responsible for registering voters, refuses to name members of minority groups as deputy registrars; that the Uvalde County tax assessor repeatedly runs out of registration application cards when minority voter applicants ask for them; that the Uvalde County tax assessor-collector refuses to register voter applicants based on the technicality that the application was filed on a printed card bearing a previous year's date. Other abuses were uncovered by the study of the Civil Rights Commission in Uvalde County, and elsewhere in Texas: Widespread gerrymandering with the purpose of diluting minority voting strength; systematic drawing of at-large electoral districts with this same purpose and design; maintenance of polling places exclusively in areas inaccessible to minority voters; excessive firing fees to run for political office

What does it take to build a great university? One must start from the premise that a great university is much more than a campus which provides a home to a group of professional schools. The courses which it chooses to offer, the people it chooses to employ and to teach, and the questions it chooses for research ultimately derive not exclusively from discussions in faculty meetings, but from society: society's demands, its questions, its dreams. The university is both the creation of and the intellectual force for the society in which it lives. A university flourishes as it examines and teaches the intellectual questions arising from the society of that time and place.