As a research engineer, Alan Payne constructs computer simulations. As president of Penn State’s Forum on Black Affairs, he helps build a better campus environment for black students, faculty and staff.

Payne, 70, of Ferguson Township, has been at the university since 1977. This month, the Georgia native will oversee the forum’s signature event, the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Banquet. The rest of the year, he’ll work on leading the forum’s 100 or so members on improving diversity during a pivotal period for the university.

Q: How did you get started with the forum?

A: Well, when you go anywhere and you’re new, you try to find people that you’ll be interested in. And it was as simple as that. I was told when I started work that there were several groups around the university. I was told what each did, and this one appealed to me. It was a group that deals with black issues, thus the name Forum on Black Affairs. Now, it does have members from all over. Our membership includes faculty and staff and administrators. ... We do try to appeal to all campuses. In fact, I have a major goal this year to extend our reach as far as possible, across the commonwealth campuses. That’s proceeding along reasonably well.

Q: Has your Southern upbringing helped you lead the forum?

A: It certainly helps me with this group ... the fact that I’m not abrupt. I can be abrasive, but I’m not abrupt. That’s somewhat of a requirement because you turn people off pretty quickly if you’re too abrupt. They have expectations. You have to honor those expectations if you expect to deal with people. That I learned when I was very young, and it has helped me deal with people all over.

Also, I think my parenting helped somewhat because one of the things my mother always taught was: You don’t have the only correctness, the only right. All people have opinions, and that’s all they are until those opinions are established as fact. So you should always approach other people’s opinions as though they might be right, no matter how strongly you feel about something. That’s also very helpful in dealing with people because it allows me not to be turned off immediately if something I say is rejected and maybe even attacked. ... I’m rarely truly mad at people, almost regardless of how they act.

Q: How has Penn State advanced in diversity since you arrived?

A: What has happened here over the years, starting in the ’80s, was you started having more women being recruited and other minorities [being] recruited, because government started requiring more numbers, and the university tried to respond to that. ... The university pooled all the minority groups under one umbrella, around 1990 or so, and then called it diversity and came up with the [Office of the Vice Provost for] Educational Equity ... it’s supposed to handle everything that has to do with equity — diversity equity.

That was the big step. It formalized a lot of programs, which were then dispersed throughout the university. People were given everywhere the opportunity to start little help groups for diversity. So you’ll find, probably, a thousand of them across the university, thousands of such smallish groups, ranging in size from maybe club size, 30 people, all the way up to the huge [Office of] Educational Equity.

... Once this university decided to go ahead and push diversity, they decided, as with many things, to be the best at it. They said, ‘Who are we comparing ourselves with?’ We had just joined the Big Ten, so that then became the comparison. At that time, Michigan State was top dog as far as pushing diversity, accomplishing diversity. ... It was decided we should do better than them. So at some point, I forget exactly when, the provost, along with Educational Equity, decided this would be a process of improving diversity that everybody would participate in. Everybody in the university would tell what they were going to do to achieve certain goals, and they would be accountable. And the last stage of accountability to that is to the public. ...

It’s a very formalized process, and it’s been going on for 12 years now. Every time they go about it, maybe twice every five years, a group is put together of perhaps 30 or 40 people. They’re broken up into groups of six or eight, and they’re given so many of the units to evaluate. ... And then these groups evaluate the performances, make recommendations and send them back to the individual units. Those units then respond as to how they’re going to correct certain things. All of those conversations are put online, on the Internet, for anybody in the world, for the public, to see. So if anybody wants to jump on anything, it’s right there for them to do so. And I find that to be perhaps the best thing that I can think of that really makes it incumbent upon every unit to perform, because it’s in the public eye.

Q: About 10 years ago, students protested the campus climate for minority students. Has there been progress since then?

A: Oh yes. ... You talk about the differences between now and 10, 15 years ago. What has happened is, because of some of the things I’ve mentioned, we definitely have made progress. But also, you have to understand, what you saw with the Black Caucus uprising or whatever we want to call it, you could see [discontent] again. Because even though you make progress, people’s expectations are refined. They expect more. So just because we have moved ahead by an amount that we can easily document does not mean that someone is not going to come along and think, ‘Well, there’s a lot more that you can do.’

Q: Penn State is doing a lot of soul-searching now. Is this a window for FOBA to effect change?

A: Not only FOBA, but for every organization. See, what I’m afraid here is that this corrective action will be more in the business sense than in the institutional sense, the institution of learning sense. ... I think that organizations like FOBA ... will certainly be involved in constantly trying to remind administrators that your only job is not repairing the reputation of Penn State, but repairing the institution itself, in how people operate within this environment. ...

We have an opportunity here to really start changing some of the institutional way we look at some things. We have almost a mandate to do so. To groups like mine, and Faculty Senate, for instance, [we need] to make sure that doesn’t get lost, the fact that we need to correct things: We need to correct our house. We don’t just sweep out the dirt. We need to keep other dirt from being able to settle. ... We really have an opportunity here because the university is going to be in a state of flux as far as its mind-set goes. That gives us great opportunities to be able to change some things. When it was just sitting there, everything was working well, people will say, ‘Don’t rock the boat.’ OK, but now the boat is rocking badly, so you have a lot of opportunity to get things in that will not only stabilize the boat, but will right it in a more fundamental sense.