Champion of diversity widens pathway to opportunity

Hunt provided community members with research the center had been conducting on the declining number of blacks being admitted to the nation’s most prestigious universities, including UCLA, and recommendations about what could be done to increase the numbers.

 

He served as a consultant to the Alliance for Equal Opportunity in Education, a community group that was formed to increase the number of blacks applying to and enrolling at UCLA.

 

And Hunt then worked with campus officials on what all agreed was an admissions crisis. Three years later, he headed the university’s Committee for Undergraduate Admissions and Relations with Schools that sets policies for admission to UCLA.

 

For those efforts and many others, Hunt, a sociology professor who this year marks 10 years as the Bunche Center’s director, was awarded this year’s Academic Senate’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Award.

 

The Senate’s Committee on Diversity and Equal Opportunity presents the award to a faculty member and student whose contributions go “beyond the call of duty” in furthering a diverse, impartial and inclusive environment at UCLA. The student winner is Ernie Zaveleta, who has been a leader in the formation of the Salvadoran Union of University Students, the first organization of its kind in the country.

 

 “It is difficult to imagine a more deserving candidate than Professor Hunt,” wrote William Roy, chair of UCLA’s sociology department, in nominating Hunt. “In his campus leadership, research, teaching and presence in the community, Professor Hunt has made a profound and permanent contribution to diversity, equity and inclusion at UCLA.”

 

Hunt, who has authored a myriad of sociological books and research on diversity, said his proudest moment so far has been working with LA community members on admissions.

 

“I feel particularly proud to have been a part of that process ... and of being able to provide the group with the research and feedback necessary for them to be successful in advocating change,” he said.

 

Hunt’s college admissions research —  which was funded by the Ford Foundation and was known as the College Access Project for African Americans — suggested that UCLA change its admission policies to a holistic model in which one reader would review the application in its entirety rather than having sections reviewed by different people.

 

The university adopted the model for the 2007 admissions cycle. That year, the number of African Americans enrolled at UCLA more than doubled to 204.

 

 “What our research told us is that UCLA’s old admissions policies unfairly neglected certain aspects of the candidate’s record,” Hunt said. “We felt that what needed to be incorporated into the admissions process was a more holistic model that really placed the students’ academic achievements in the context of their opportunities.”

 

But Hunt’s contributions to fostering a diverse environment extend far beyond admissions.

 

The Washington, D.C., native left the East Coast for Los Angeles in 1981. He enrolled at USC to pursue a double major in film and television studies and architecture, two of his passions. When he realized the two majors weren’t compatible, he opted to major in film and television and journalism.

 

He then worked for nearly two years for Hill and Knowlton, one of the nation’s largest public relations firms. After reluctantly working on the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company  account, he decided to take a different career path.

 

Enrolling in the MBA program at Georgetown University, Hunt was accepted into the NBC Management Associates Fellowship program, which paid for his studies. After graduation, he was hired as a management associate for the NBC affiliate in Washington, D.C., and worked in various units, including the newsroom.

 

But Hunt said he was disturbed by the lack of diversity in the newsroom, which affected news coverage. “The on-air talent was African American, but the news management team was almost entirely white.  They would talk in the planning meetings about ‘bad’ neighborhoods, and I knew they were solidly middle class neighborhoods,” he said.

 

“I started to do research and found a little bit about the news construction process, but not a lot about that and race,” Hunt added.

 

Although the NBC station offered him a job working for the business office, Hunt decided he wanted to study how race affects news coverage. So he enrolled in a doctoral program in sociology at UCLA.

 

Hunt published his dissertation, “Screening the Los Angeles ‘Riots’: Race, Seeing and Resistance,” which sociology chair Roy described as “not only the best interpretation of media coverage of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, but … an enduring analysis of how racial dynamics affect news coverage in general.”

 

Hunt’s second book, “O.J. Simpson Facts and Fictions: News Rituals in the Construction of Reality,” also explored how race shapes both news construction and audience perceptions of the same event.

 

In the early 2000s, Hunt authored reports on the lack of black, Latino and Asian actors on primetime television that garnered national media attention. He continues to conduct research on the lack of diversity among Hollywood screenwriters for the Writers Guild of America, West.

 

Most recently, Hunt and Bunche Center Co-director Ana-Christina Ramón edited a broad collection of essays, “Black Los Angeles: American Dreams and Racial Realities” (NYU Press, 2010), on the history, music and culture of the city’s African American communities, in addition to other topics.

 

Hunt and Rámon worked with a group of community members who offered advice on what should be covered in the research for the book and even wrote some of the chapters.

 

“That’s been a central theme at the center — involving community members in much of what we do,” Hunt added.

 

In addition to conducting research and organizing lectures and conferences featuring leading black intellectuals, the center also runs various programs that reach young African Americans.

 

For example, the center has received nearly $1 million from the Mellon Foundation to support the Summer Humanities Institute at UCLA. Students from historically black colleges and universities and other small colleges each summer take part in the intensive, eight-week research program that’s aimed at increasing the number of African American graduate students in the humanities and social sciences.

 

And last year, the Bunche center and the Kanye West Foundation launched “The College Drop-In” program that exposes low-income Los Angeles middle and high school students to African American studies and encourages them to set their sights on college.

 

“Dr. Hunt has been a mentor and role model to so many students who are part of our programs,” Rámon said. “Whether it’s mentoring graduate students or speaking to a group of middle school students about going to college, Dr. Hunt always makes the time to meet with them.”