Struggling Black Colleges and Diversity in Higher Education

I must commend Oprah Winfrey, who - unlike her millionaire counterpart, Bill Cosby - chooses to inspire a different kind of dream for African American youth rather than dismiss them. Notwithstanding my previous posts that have criticized her South African school, I am commending her strengths at media. In particular, her decision to produce the film, The Great Debaters (I included a trailer on my blog in an earlier post this week), directed by and starring Denzel Washington.

Because of their efforts at Hollywood exposure, Wiley College, the subject of this film, has now received instant celebrity, has garnered new resources and even a Walmart-funded scholarship, an endowed chair position, and a sudden increase in student applications, according to the New York Times. And that's all before the film has even opened across the country!

Good news for Wiley College, but what has me more concerned is the way that it, like so many historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), have been struggling for survival. On numerous occasions, Wiley College has almost closed its doors, as have so many others. The great irony, considering that one of the members of Wiley's award-winning debate team, James Farmer, Jr., later went on to found the Congress for Racial Equality in 1942 and lead the civil rights struggle toward racial integration, is that school desegregation is responsible for the great evacuation of both black students and faculty from HBCUs into more mainstream colleges and universities. When I was a high school senior, I had included, among a diverse listing of colleges and universities (including Ivy League institutions) that I had applied to, three HBCUs on my list - Spelman, Howard, and FAMU (because a cousin of mine from the U.S. Virgin Islands was attending there at the time, having been recruited to play on their basketball team) - but it just so happened that a state university offered me a "minority" scholarship that proved the most feasible and fiscally made the most sense (HBCUs can be costly).

Later, when making decisions on dissertation fellowships and going on the job market for tenure-track positions, my dissertation adviser - a prominent black female senior scholar - promptly told me that I wouldn't want to teach at an HBCU because they tend to be "run like old plantations." Hmmmmmm.

So, here I am, at a public university, now in a position to "recruit for diversity" as my program welcomes graduate applicants for admissions, and I'm now reading an article about the intense struggle for HBCUs to stay alive, while I bemoan the state of my own university in not doing enough to diversify our student body and faculty staff. If mainstream colleges and universities are doing very little to diversify, and if HBCUs have so few students and top-notch black faculty to hire that they are on the brink of closing their doors forever, then where are our students and faculty of color? What are the unique challenges that each type of higher education institution faces?

And no sooner do I read this article than I read two posts from Professor Black Woman, one containing an open letter from the former Africana Studies chair at Rutgers University protesting the dismantling of his department, and another one on the pathetic ways that mainstream colleges and universities recruit for diversity. In other words, the realities seem rather grim for students and faculty of color in both HBCUs and mainstream colleges and universities, proving - at least to me - how the problems of racism are so real and our struggles to dismantle it so overwhelmingly necessary.

At the same time, I am an advocate for diversity through and through - at all college campuses. I think it's time for HBCUs to recognize that, at one time in their history, they were necessary beacons of hope in a hostile environment of legal racial segregation. Interestingly, we're still very much a segregated society, but if we're going to achieve the "dream" of integration (is it still a goal?), then both campuses are going to have to be committed to the "dream" of diversity. It's time for HBCUs to consider recruiting across a diverse range of racial and ethnic groups and international students and faculty. I know one college, Lincoln, did such a thing because it had to, when it opened its doors to a number of working-class white students who attended as "commuter" students, never really getting into the predominantly black cultural "student life" of step shows, superb marching bands during halftime shows, and other aspects that have defined the HBCU atmosphere, a la Spike Lee's School Daze or the recent HBCU films of late, like Drumline and Stomp the Yard. Still, such recruitment is necessary; I'm not saying that HBCUs need to stop focusing on educating black students, for their legacy is truly an important one, and the dignity they instill in black college students is immeasurable, but somehow both HBCUs and non-HBCUs really need to think seriously about what a critical mass of diverse student and faculty really brings to their institution.

There are pros and cons with learning in a segregated environment. One of my current graduate students, a Spelman grad, once came to me in a panic earlier this semester, because she was experiencing the "culture shock" of going to school in a predominately white setting, where she is now the "only one" in many of her classes - so unlike her undergraduate experience. I calmed her down by telling her to face reality: that the higher up one goes in their education and even in their profession, the higher the chances of racial isolation. That this will continue to be the case until all institutions start making diversity a serious goal. In the mean time, it is what it is, and she would just have to learn the negotiations of surviving and striving, sometimes in a racially hostile environment. To make strategic friends and find "safe spaces" where she could socially interact with other students of color.

She has definitely found ways to do this, but I was still concerned that, having spent her undergrad years at an HBCU had not prepared her for the realities of life in these Americas, creating "safe spaces" that don't necessarily build up resistance strategies for when black people have to interact with white people and others. At the same time, I have also observed that, having come from one of the prominent liberal arts colleges in this country, this same student is so self-assured and confident. She walks with that pride of being a "Spelman woman," and she unhesitatingly speaks her mind. I've seen her discombobulate both her white student colleagues and professors, who have felt the need to "apologize" often, whenever she questions - in bell hooks fashion - the ways that they exclude certain issues and texts in their discussions. It's an attitude that I have not noticed in my other students of color at my university, who have unfortunately learned to keep their mouths shut and mumble under their breaths, so soon have they learned to accommodate themselves in a predominately white and at times hostile setting. My HBCU-educated student has a certain confidence and dignity that I don't find in my state-university-educated students. And, while this may be due to the simple fact that she's a graduate of Spelman and not some more marginalized school that does not carry the same prestige (for one can also observe the same confidence in black students educated at Ivy Leagues and other prestigious institutions), I do recognize that there is both an attention to black students' abilities to excel (which does not happen at non-HBCUs) and engraving of heritage pride that HBCUs offer, which I would like to see get transferred over to non-HBCUs.

The struggle to desegregate education should not have the collateral damage effect of seeing HBCUs close their doors, especially since non-HBCUs have certainly not opened the windows as the back-up alternative for black students and faculty. Obviously, school integration and the struggle for diversity must be a main topic for the new anti-racism movement in this 21st century.

Image: from The Great Debaters.