Spring Break
Latting: JHU lacks housing, social life
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News-Letter: Tell me a little about your background.
John Latting: I'm coming most recently from CalTech, which bills itself as a high-powered science and technology school. I was on the admissions staff there for seven years. Prior to that, I was a doctoral student at UC-Berkley in the graduate School of Education there, where I got my Ph.D. Continuing to back up, I spent a year teaching at a private school in England. Before then, I was on the admissions staff at Stanford University — that's where I was an undergraduate. That was my first job.
N-L: After your first few days here, what do you think of Hopkins?
JL: It strikes me as a place similar to CalTech in the sense that people here choose to come here because they want to get things done, and they want to be productive and they're fairly focused in what they want to get out of the experience.
N-L: What do you bring to Hopkins? What do you feel you have to offer?
JL: I think I bring — not in a personal sense — ambition, in the sense that I expect to compete for the very best students in the country, in fact, the world. I've been at places that aspire and expect to do that. I think that I bring that attitude to the staff, not that it's a foreign thing to Hopkins at all. In addition to that, I bring a different perspective, from other places, other parts of the country, but similarly elite institutions.
N-L: What sort of changes are you planning for admissions?
JL: I think my emphasis is going to be — even in the fall when it's just an applicant pool — speaking to the kinds of people who are going to go on to be admitted and competed for in places all around the country, to talk to that sort of person. In more specific terms, I look at the pre-selection process, when we're looking at a group of potential applicants. I believe in trying to be as efficient as possible in defining the mission of Hopkins briefly and specifically and introducing this to people and getting away from the sorts of labor intensive activities that admissions offices peruse in the fall and really hitting hard at students once they have applied and we've identified them as being good candidates.
N-L: What makes a Hopkins student different from a CalTech student?
JL: What makes [CalTech] different is that 99 percent of CalTech students have a primary academic interest in science or engineering, which you wouldn't say about Hopkins. Hopkins is a place which, from the start, has valued intellectual diversity and a community that is intellectually diverse.
N-L: What do you think about Affirmative Action?
JL: I look at what the importance of diversity is on campus, and I think that it is important in the extreme. The material circumstances, the characteristics, who [applicants] are determines, to some degree how they think and what their values are. When you're building a community, it's ridiculous not to take those factors into account. It's just a non-starter for me to not take those issues seriously. We're absolutely going to be implementing strategies to create a more diverse student body. That's a priority here.
N-L: What sort of obstacles do you see preventing you from attracting the best students to Hopkins?
JL: Hopkins, as an institution, is one of the world's best institutions, and that's simply a case that has to be made to more people, more effectively. I don't see Hopkins as an obstacle; I only see potential.
Hopkins is a place which is seen as rigorous and some people don't want that; I don't think that those are the people we want. What might generally be thought of by an average, high-school student as a negative about Hopkins can be turned into leverage for certain students who are especially motivated academically.
I think that when it comes to the infrastructure of the institution when it comes to supporting student life, those things are important. I would like to see four years of housing available to undergraduates. That's [an option] which every school we compete against in a big way offers. I'd like to get rid of the trivial, simple reasons why people don't want to go to Hopkins, and housing is one of them.
Social life has to be something I have to become more familiar with. I hear about a rather off-campus [social] life and I think that's perhaps a function of the housing situation.
I hope to find a place that is trying to create a good quality of life so prospective students don't point to that and say, "Aah, that's why I'm going to go somewhere else."
