(Source: Hero UK University Guide)

In 2007, nearly three quarters of all the Black students enrolled in graduate school (73%) were women. This face raises some issues and questions that are as interesting as they are disturbing.

Some Black kids may very well believe that good grades and an interest in education constitutes “acting white,” but this wrong-headed notion has failed to dissuade African Americans from pursuing post-secondary education. Black people make up only 12-13% of the population, and are currently enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities at a rate that is roughly proportional.

Such is not the case when it comes to gender. African American men and boys are graduating from high school, entering college, graduating from college, and completing graduate degrees at a numbers that fall well below their proportion of the larger U.S. Black population. I cannot say whether or not Black boys taunt those who get good grades with the accusation that they are “acting like girls,” but I fear that somehow the message is being communicated to Black boys and young men that education (especially graduating from high school and entering and completing college) somehow constitutes acting like man.

Black boys and young men are receicing the message that education is for girls and women; and the Black male college experience, during which he may well be outnumbered by women on his campus at a ration of 2-1, reinforces that idea.

I can’t imagine any of the startistics that I have cited for 2007 changing very much during 2008. They question is, however, whether or not Barack Obama’s high visibility as President of the U.S. will have any impact on African American educational attainment. Obama is, in a sense, the “biggest baller” on the planet, with the closest any Black man has ever come to infinite power; and a key stepping stone on the way to achieving to all that he has become was his education.

Might Obama model a new vision of Black manhood, one in which masculinity and power would not be a cross purposes with intellectual engagement and a passion for learning?

I’ll be waiting and watching.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

The average of the (black) race as to intelligence, economic status and industry is so far below the white average that it seems to me futile to build up hope for a great future.

–Ora Wildermuth, and Indiana University trustee from 1938-1949, in a 1948 letter to IU president Herman B. Wells

[T]he Wildermuth name needs to be removed once and for all – not dressed up with the name of an honorable man who cannot object.

–IU Alumnus Russ Bridenbaugh, in a letter to the Indiana Daily Student

In 2007 the Indiana Daily Student newspaper brought to light a series of letters in which the late Ora Wildermuth, an IU trustee during the 1940s, expresses his racist feelings toward African Americans. In addition the quote at the beginning of this post, Wildermuth also wrote openly about his opposition to integrating the University residence halls, stating, “I am and shall always remain absolutely and utterly opposed to social intermingling of the colored race with the white.

Once the letters came to light, IU president Michael McRobbie asked the All University Committee on Names to take up the question of whether or not to change the name of the Ora L. Wildermuth Intramural Center, in light of the former trustee’s racist views.

After lengthy consideration, the Committee on Names has decided to change the name of the building in question to the William L. Garrett-Ora L. Wildermuth Fieldhouse.

William L. Garrett was the first African American basketball player at IU and the first African American to play basketball in the Big Ten conference. He was deeply respected not only for his extraordinary skill on the court, but for his strength of character, this at a time when he was regularly subject to racist taunts from both players and fans at other Big Ten schools. Garrett died of a heart condition in 1974, at the age of 45.

The Committee on Names decision to renamed the athletic center for both Wildermuth and Garrett was unanimous. The idea of simply removing Wildermuth’s name was rejected, based on the committee’s belief that it would unfair to judge him and his beliefs by today’s standards, this according to IU Vice President and Chief Administrative Officer J. Terry Clapacs. Clapacs elaborated on this opinion in a recent IU press release:

As wrong as he was, his views on race were not that uncommon at that time in history. Even our Armed Forces were segregated in those days. What is remarkable is that our society has changed so much in just 60 years.

This is utter foolishness. By the time Wildermuth was penning his racist letters to the IU administration, African Americans and white advocates for social justice had been fighting for the end of segregation for over 50 years. To call Wildermuth’s beliefs unacceptable is to judge him by the standards of his own generation and at least two generations before him. The fact that then IU President Herman continued down the path of integration despite the objection of at least one of his trustees illustrates this very fact; many whites were just as aware as their Black brothers and sisters of the folly of the “separate-but-equal” doctrine.

If IU’s Committee on Names wishes to retain the Wildermuth name, so be it; but they should not hide their true motivations for this decision behind the mask of a weak, ahistorical argument.

Bill Garrett in his IU basketball uniform

(Source: IU Newsroom)

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Derek Walcott (b. 1930)

***

“Forty Acres”

Out of the turmoil emerges one emblem, an engraving —

a young Negro at dawn in straw hat and overalls,

an emblem of impossible prophecy, a crowd

dividing like the furrow which a mule has ploughed,

parting for their president: a field of snow-flecked

cotton

forty acres wide, of crows with predictable omens

that the young ploughman ignores for his unforgotten

cotton-haired ancestors, while lined on one branch, is

a tense

court of bespectacled owls and, on the field’s

receding rim —

a gesticulating scarecrow stamping with rage at him.

The small plough continues on this lined page

beyond the moaning ground, the lynching tree, the tornado’s

black vengeance,

and the young ploughman feels the change in his veins,

heart, muscles, tendons,

till the land lies open like a flag as dawn’s sure

light streaks the field and furrows wait for the sower.

(2008)

***

Biographical Notes: Noble Laureate and Boston University professor Derek Walcott was born in 1930, in St. Lucia, the West Indies. His published his first poem at the age of 14, and by 19 had already published two volumes of his work (25 Poems [1948] and Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos [1949]). He was educated at St. Mary’s College in St. Lucia and the University of the West Indies.

During the last 60 years Walcott has published many collections of poetry, including:

• 25 Poems, Port-of-Spain: Guardian Commercial Printery, 1948
• Epitaph for the Young, Xll Cantos, Bridgetown: Barbados Advocate, 1949
• Poems, Kingston, Jamaica, City Printery, 1951
• In a Green Night, Poems 1948 - 60, London: Cape, 1962
• Selected Poems, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1964
• The Castaway and Other Poems, London: Cape, 1965
• The Gulf and Other Poems, London: Cape, 1969
• Another Life, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux: London: Cape, 1973
• Sea Grapes, London: Cape; New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1976
• The Star-Apple Kingdom, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1979
• Selected Poetry, Ed. by Wayne Brown. London: Heinemann, 1981
• The Fortunate Traveller, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1981
• Midsummer, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1984
• Collected Poems 1948-1984, New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1986
• The Arkansas Testament, New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1987
• Omeros, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1990

In 1957, Derek Walcott was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to study the American theater. Since that time he has written a number of plays, including: The Odyssey: A Stage Version (1992); The Isle is Full of Noises (1982); Remembrance and Pantomime (1980); The Joker of Seville and O Babylon! (1978); Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays (1970); Three Plays: The Last Carnival; Beef, No Chicken; and A Branch of the Blue Nile (1969). His plays have been produced throughout the United States.

Over the course of his career, Professor Walcott has received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen’s Medal for Poetry and, in 1992, the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is also an honorary member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Derek Walcott has been a professor in the English department at Boston University since 1981.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

(Source: Methodist Adventures in Higher Education by Jay Stowell, 1922)

President-elect Barack Obama

This week’s JBHE bulletin provides a point-by-point description of President-elect Barack Obama’s plan for higher education. To summarize, his plan will address many of the obstacles that have traditionally limited low-income and minority students’ access to educational opportunity.

Obama’s proposal for higher ed reform includes:

• A simplified federal financial aid for.
• Funding to create partnerships that will aid community colleges in transferring greater numbers of students to 4-year institutions.
• Early assessment programs to determine whether low-income and minority high school students are being adequately prepared for post-secondary education.
• An increase in the maximum Pell Grant award.
• A $4000 credit for college students.

To read the JBHE article in its entirety, click on this LINK.

I applaud Obama’s efforts to increase low-income and minority student access to higher education. In our rapidly changing economy, a college education is fast becoming a necessity for any level of upward mobility and financial self-determination.

I would also encourage the President-elect to consider the following additional proposals, each of which would expand access to higher education even further, by addressing some of the hidden issues of access, funding, and equity that have come to light in more recent years:

• Eligibility for federal financial should be expanded to include those undocumented young people who completed all of their formal (K -12) education in the United States. A growing number of young people are facing the difficulty of having crossed the U.S. border with their parents, as babies or pre-schoolers, and then educated and raised in the public school system, but without ever acquiring permanent resident or citizenship status. A number of such students are not even aware that they are undocumented until they attempt to apply for federal financial aid, at which point they find themselves in a type of financial and educational limbo. Without citizenship or permanent resident status, such students are subject to the same financial aid guidelines that are applied to international students, a label that contradicts how such students understand themselves, as American students with immigrant parents.
• Institutions a) whose endowments total either $1billion dollars or more, or b) with endowments of more than $1 million dollars per students should be required to offer tuition-free education to students whose family incomes are less than 5x the annual cost of tuition, room, and board. Such institutions’ non-profit status will be conditional, pending their adoption of this policy.
• Young men would no longer be required to register with Selective Service as a condition for receiving federal financial aid. The various branches of the armed forces would, however, have the same rights (no more and no less) to recruit on college campuses as corporations and other government and non-government employers.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Glenn Loury

Something we never imagined happened, and now the system is open and malleable. Reform now seems possible….[But] One in seven adult black men are in prison, and that didn’t vanish last night. The ghettoes in Chicago and Detroit did not disappear last night. The fact that African-Americans are underrepresented in elite universities, law schools and scientific institutions didn’t change last night.

–Glenn Loury, quoted in the Brown Daily Herald

Glenn Loury is Professor of Economic and Public Policy at Brown University. He is also the Merton P. Stultz Professor of the Social Sciences at Brown’s Alfred A. Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions.

***

While all of Dr. Loury’s statistics are correct, I disagree with the subtext of his statement. Loury seems to suggest that our enthusiasm and exhiliration at the election of an African American president should be tempered by the reality that many African Americans are still living very much at the margins of society. If anything, the fact that disproportionate numbers of Black people a struggle under poverty, within the criminal justice system, and within/or against the social services establishment should give us all the more reason to celebrate Obama’s  victory.

You see, Obama won because he entered the presidential race as a candidate whose Blackness coexists with and informs his political vision, but does not define or limit his political agenda, his goals, or his rhetoric. This poses an interesting model for how we as a Black community might in the future approach issues like incarceration, drug dealing and addiction, poverty, and academic underperformance.

These isssues and challenges can impact all types of communities, regardless of ethnicity. This is not to say that the social ills that plague a given neighborhood or region cannot take on a racial or ethnic dimension (when a family member who is addicted to heroin, for example, his or herher participation in certain racially- or culturally-specific activities or roles will be compromised). Still, though, there is nothing specifically “Black” about poverty, drug abuse, incarceration, etc. Thus, the lesson of the Obama campaign may well be that race-specific approaches to cross-racially occurring issues like incarceration, poverty, and illegal drug use and sales  have exhausted their usefulness. The lesson of Obama’s successful campaign might be, in other words, that when there is a common and pan-racial interest in addressing, say, the problem that confront convicted felons who attempting to re-enter soceity, the most fruitful approach could well be the one that is rooted in the common threads that link all ethnic and racial communities that are impacted by the inability of newly released convicts to find work and housing.

I would be very interested to see what would happen if the Obama campaign catch phrase, “Yes We Can,” became the ethos that informed the new administration’s efforts to address those issues that disproportionately impact communities at the economic margins. Just as in Obama’s political campaign, the we in “Yes We Can” could become an expression by the new president’s supporters of their willingness to privilege their common belief in their candidate’s ability to lead over any other identity category (including race, gender, class, faith, or region), at least in terms of their political interests. Thus, the identity category Obama supporter comes to trump all other identity categories as that special interest group that defines their political goals and desires. As such, the needs of one sub-group among Obama supporters (Black people, for example, or Latinos or women or gays) would become the need and interest of all members of that group.

Stay tuned…

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Anything is achievable, never say never. Obama exemplifies what Ghandi said –– to ‘be the change you want to see in the world.’

– Alan Henderson, a Howard University senior and architecture major, as quoted in the Howard U Hilltop.

In 1962, James Meredith became the first African American to enroll at the University of Mississippi. In 1966, he was shot during a voting rights march from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi. Meredith would survive his injuries and go on to complete the march.

(Source: The University of San Diego History Server)

***

1965: James Baldwin, Joan Baez, and James Forman on the march for voting rights in Alabama.

(Source: HungryBlues blog)

***

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Ward Connerly in one of his lighter moments.

Black on Campus hopes that you will consider the potential impact of tomorrow’s election on the future of education for Black men and women throughout the African diaspora.

One of the key issues in higher ed that could be dramatically impacted by the presidential election is that of affirmative action. Whether the winning ticket is Obama/Biden or McCain/Palin, affirmative action is likely to change. The changes that are likely to take place, however, vary from candidate to candidate.

Barack Obama’s comments on the topic (described in an earlier blogpost) suggest that he would favor a more nuanced approach to the policy, one that might still take into account an applicant’s race, but within the larger context of his or her socio-economic status. Click HERE to read my most recent blogpost on this issue.

Curiously enough, Obama’s suggestion that economic privilege might exclude some Black people from receiving affirmative action considerations has drawn an enthusiastic response from a most likely figure, the notorious affirmative action oponent, Ward Connerly.

Politico.com reporter Ben Smith describes Connerly’s perspectives on a possible Obama presidency:

Among the California voters suffused with hope at the prospect of the election of Barack Obama is one Ward Connerly.

He supports Senator John McCain out of small-government principle, but on the cause for which Connerly is best known—the drive to end the programs referred to by most as “affirmative action” and by him as “race preferences”—he says of a potential Obama administration: “I’m hopeful.”

“[Obama] is a very, very bright man who thinks through the nuances of issues and I cannot help believe he realizes the inherent flaw in race preferences,” Connerly, 69, said in a telephone interview last week. “If you listen to him carefully, you cannot help but think he is really torn by this issue, and that he is leaning in the direction of socio-economic affirmative action instead of race preferences.”

Whatever your opinions on affirmative action or any other issues, be sure to take the time to cast your ballot. Celebrate Democracy. Vote your issues, and vote your conscience.

Happy Election Day!

Posted by Ajuan Mance

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Vanessa Siddle Walker

***

Revisionist historical accounts have shown that many of the school environments maintained by black educators during de jure segregation were ones in which institutional and interpersonal caring permeated the climate, despite the oppressive learning environments forced upon them by local school boards. With strong community support and professional educators whose training (by 1954) in many Southern states exceeded that of their white counterparts, African American children often were buffered in their schools from the negative societal messages about their potential and encouraged to believe in what they were capable of achieving.

–from “A Half-Century of Challenge,” The Emory Report, August 23, 2004

[The assumption that] nothing good happened in segregation is incorrect and is impoverishing our ability to move forward. [There was a] cadre of black educators who managed to uplift without resources” during segregation.

–at a recent conference on racial, ethnic and class divides (Emory U, October 2008), as quoted in The Emory Wheel.

***

Biographical Notes: Vanessa Siddle Walker is the Winship Distinguished Research Professor of Education at Emory University in Atlanta, GA. She holds a B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an Ed.M and Ed.D from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Professor Walker is the author of Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South (UNC Press, 1996), winner of multiple awards, including the American Education Research Association First Book Award. She is also the co-editor of Facing Racism in American Education (Harvard Education Review Reprint Series, 1990). She has also published numerous articles and book reviews in academic journals.

The University of Georgia School of Education’s online news site describes her career prior to joining the faculty at Emory:

Walker began her career as a high school teacher in Chapel Hill High School and then at Cummings High School. She also taught English seminars for minority students at Phillips Academy. Prior to accepting a position at Emory, she taught at Wheelock and Elon Colleges and the University of Pennsylvania.

Professor Walker’s primary research interest is in what she describes as, “Historical and cultural influences on the teaching and learning of African American students,” including the history and culture of segregated schools during the Jim Crow era.

Posted by Ajuan Mance