Woodhouse Stands In The Eye Of Storm At Cwu -- Mostly White Community Faces Race Controversy

ELLENSBURG - The students and teachers who walk across Central Washington University on a gray spring day are mostly white.

But race is a major issue on campus.

Ivory Nelson, the first black college president in state history, has just taken office.

Yet his first days are clouded by a struggle over the reappointment of R.Y. "Roz" Woodhouse, a black woman who chairs both the board of trustees and the committee that selected Nelson.

More than two dozen faculty heads and numerous civic leaders have demanded that Woodhouse, the head of the Seattle Urban League, be ousted from the board for incompetence.

POLITICALLY INCORRECT

Woodhouse's supporters say the critics are racists.

The fight has animated this college town and created a politically incorrect nightmare for the administration.

"It's caused a real polarization of thought on campus," says Larry Lium, a vice president and school spokesman.

The conflict provoked two days of hearings last month by the state Senate Higher Education Committee, and an inch-thick stack of letters to the committee and Gov. Booth Gardner.

"Our concern was competence," says computer-science Professor Barry Donahue, who along with 26 other faculty heads signed a Jan. 23 letter calling for Woodhouse to be denied another six-year term.

"Dr. Woodhouse is only being attacked because she is an African-American woman," Keith Champagne, assistant vice president for student affairs at CWU, wrote in her support.

Horrified administrators produced news releases proclaiming that most faculty and staff supported Woodhouse. Donahue says the administration's claims trumpeted a support for Woodhouse that did not exist.

"There was an effort on the part of a few people to try to make people believe that the situation was other than it was," Donahue says. "I assume they felt it was the best way to protect the university."

A petition circulated in support of Woodhouse got about 20 signatures from faculty members and 20 more from students and staff. Donahue says anti-Woodhouse petitions have been signed by nearly 90 out of 360 faculty.

The Senate committee declined to take action. That froze Woodhouse in place until a new governor is seated next January, at which time she would likely be replaced.

Central has 6,600 full-time students. About 9 percent are minorities. Its setting is overwhelmingly white. Only 151 of Kittitas County's 26,700 residents are black.

Ellensburg is in many ways a typical Western university town, a place where boot-clad ranchers rub elbows with Birkenstock-wearing students. Central is neither a bastion of liberalism nor a redneck think tank. For 100 years it has been primarily engaged in producing teachers.

SCANDALS GALORE

In the past two years the school has been hit with a basketball scandal, the forced resignation of several top administrators, a computer pornography ring, and the loss of national accreditation for teacher-training programs.

"She (Woodhouse) had an opportunity to reunite the campus from the negative things of the past two or three years," Donahue says. "That didn't happen."

Critics portray a trustee chairwoman who rarely showed up on campus, was contemptuous of the school and the community and who lacked the management skills to run the board.

Specifically, the charges are that Woodhouse appointed herself as head of the search committee, wrote and published an unsuitable first job advertisement without consulting others and conducted the search in a secretive manner.

Woodhouse, who has a doctorate in philosophy and was the first woman to serve in a state Cabinet position, has made her only public comments to the committee. Numerous requests for an interview have been unanswered.

"I suggest that what is actually operating here is a discomfort with diversity, not only with racial diversity but also with cultural diversity and diversity of style," Woodhouse told the committee.

The school newspaper, The Observer, took Woodhouse to the woodshed for that defense.

"Central is neither a racist nor a sexist university," wrote Managing Editor Jill Johnson. "Her constant insistence that it is only proves how really out of touch she is with this university."

But one black faculty member says she has encountered unpunished racism among colleagues.

"As an African-American woman on the Central Washington University faculty, I feel that I have been lynched while the administration has looked on in silence," English professor Bobby Cummings wrote. "I feel the rope's now swinging toward Dr. Woodhouse."

Woodhouse certainly had numerous critics, as the file of letters proved.

"Dr. Woodhouse seems to hold the rural close-knit community of Central Washington in contempt," wrote state Sen. Frank (Tub) Hansen, D-Moses Lake, just before he died.

"Dr. Woodhouse is a total mismatch with the university and the community in which it is located," wrote F. Steven Lathrop, a lawyer who is vice president of the CWU Foundation. "She attends university functions very rarely and participates in the community not at all."

Letters in support of Woodhouse praised her management abilities and implied the real target was President Nelson.

"Many individuals who are not people of color are not prepared to willingly follow the leadership of African Americans," King County Councilman Ron Sims wrote.

Woodhouse's critics have declared their support of Nelson.

"Everybody wants very much for him to come in and succeed," Donahue says.

In 1990, about 40 African Americans who headed predominantly white four-year colleges in the United States, most of them in large cities, according to the National Association of State Universities.

"I think a majority of people are tired of dealing with the past," says Lium, the school spokesman. "We have a great opportunity to move on with a new president."