Today’s New York Times reports that the current credit crisis has triggered an unprecedented retreat from community colleges by several of the nation’s major banks. These banks include Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, SunTrust and PNC. Banks have also begun to drop certain 4-year institutions, including less competitive and for-profit schools.

This shift threatens to limit access to higher education for many of the nation’s most economically disadvantaged students, including significant numbers of African Americans. Times reporter Jonathan Glater describe the demographic most vulnerable to shifts in community college aid and the likely impact of major banks’ retreat from 2-year institutions:

[…]if the credit crisis and the ensuing turmoil in the student loan business persist, some of the nation’s neediest students will be hurt the most. The difficulty borrowing may deter them from attending school or prompt them to take a semester off. When they get student loans, they will wind up with less attractive terms and may run a greater risk of default if they have to switch lenders in the middle of their college years.

Tuition and loan amounts can be quite small at community colleges. But these institutions, which are a stepping stone to other educational programs or to better jobs, often draw students from the lower rungs of the economic ladder. More than 6.2 million of the nation’s 14.8 million undergraduates — over 40 percent — attend community colleges. According to the most recent data from the College Board, about a third of their graduates took out loans, a majority of them federally guaranteed.

“If we put too many hurdles in their way to get a loan, they’ll take a third job or use a credit card,” said Jacqueline K. Bradley, assistant dean for financial aid at Mendocino College in California. “That almost guarantees that they won’t be as successful in their college career.”

Some institutions remain committed to providing loans to students at the widest possible range of schools. Glater identifies Sallie Mae, Nelnet, and Wells Fargo as lending institutions that plan to continue offering loans to students, regardless of where they are enrolled:

The government has been taking additional steps to keep the student loan market operating smoothly. And some lenders’ doors remain wide open. Sallie Mae and Nelnet recently reaffirmed their commitment to federal loans regardless of the institution a student attends. Kristin Shear, director of student financial services at Santa Rosa Junior College, said that days after the school was dropped by Citibank, Wells Fargo called to say it was eager to lend to students there.

Citibank’s motivations, as the bank whose withdrawl from the community college sector has been most dramatic, reflect the concerns of many of the major lenders, whose narrowing of the range of institutions to whose students they are willing to lend are based on financial self interest:

The banks that are pulling out say their decisions are based on an analysis of which colleges have higher default rates, low numbers of borrowers and small loan amounts that make the business less profitable. (The average amount borrowed by community college students is about $3,200 a year, according to the College Board.) Still, the cherry-picking strikes some as peculiar; after all, the government is guaranteeing 95 percent of the value of these loans.

Mark C. Rodgers, a spokesman for Citibank, which lends through its Student Loan Corporation unit, said the bank had “temporarily suspended lending at schools which tend to have loans with lower balances and shorter periods over which we earn interest. And, in general, we are suspending lending at certain schools where we anticipate processing minimal loan volume.”

Financial aid officials in California said that Citibank had stopped making loans to students at all community colleges in the state. Mr. Rodgers said the bank would not provide details about which schools were affected.

This recent and ongoing withdrawl from lending to students at community colleges, less competitive colleges, and for-profit institutions speaks to the need for student loans to be administered and funded by the state and/or federal government, rather than by banks that must be accountable to sometimes tempermental stockholders and the widely fluctuating stock market. Whether funded by the state or the federal government, student loans must remain accessible to all students — especially those at community colleges and less competitive colleges and universities — or else a key pathway to economic self-determination and financial stability will be closed to many for whom education might well be the only route out of poverty.

To many, it might seem that the question of whether or not banks and/or governments should fund loans to students at for-profit institutions is less clear-cut. More important than the question of for-profit or not-for-profit is the question of accredited versus non-accredited schools. Non-accredited institutions and/or programs could justifiably dropped from loan rosters without much protest, because the value of degrees from such institutions might be considered negligible in some cases.

You can read the entire text of the New York Times article “Student Loans Start to Bypass 2-Year Colleges” at THIS link.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

First Joshua Packwood stole the show as the college’s first white valedictorian, then the dramatically under reported success of Quinn Rallins’ Morehouse graduate and Rhodes finalist proved that the best and the brightest needn’t be the most privileged.

Packwood’s and Rallins’ success challenged the much storied concept of the Morehouse Man both racially, and in terms of class/pedigree, respectively. Now senior Michael Brewer has embarked on a journey that could challenge the narrowly drawn concept of the Morehouse Man in even more profound ways.

The openly gay senior has taken a leadership roel in organizing a week of gay rights events on the campus, identified by the Princeton Review as one of the 20 most homophobic institutions in the nation. This reputation, and a climate that supports open expressions of hatred and disdain for gays and lesbians, exists alongside a seemingly contradictory reputation for being an institution that harbors large numbers of “down low” gay men.

In the article below, first pub lished in May 22, 2008 , L.A. Times staff writer Richard Fauset uses the experiences of Michael Brewer, Morehouse’s most visible gay undergraduate, as a jumping off point for his exploration of the state of gay-straight relations on this all-male, historically Black college campus.

——

Morehouse College faces its own bias — against gays

ATLANTA — Michael Brewer, a senior at Morehouse College, was strolling purposefully around this storied campus on a hot spring day, his heavy frame dripping sweat, his hands clutching a small stack of fliers.

“No more hate,” the fliers read, in a stylish typeface. “No more discrimination. No more.”

“What’s up, brother?” Brewer said in a lilting, cheerful voice as he approached a fellow student in a dark business suit. “Take one of these, if you will.”

The young man gave the flier a glance. It was promoting what was perhaps the most ambitious week of gay rights events in the history of Morehouse, the only historically black all-male school in America.

“What the hell is this?” he said under his breath. He laughed and threw it in the trash.

But Brewer had already moved, unfazed, into the lobby of WheelerHall, where he was taping up posters. The events had been his idea, and he knew they wouldn’t go over well with everyone.

“Morehouse is like this enclave where Stonewall never happened,” Brewer said, referring to the 1969 New York protest that galvanized the gay rights movement. “It just doesn’t exist in this realm of reality.”

Brewer, 22, didn’t come to Morehouse with the intent of changing it. But he found that he had no choice. He had arrived here from Oklahoma City pretty comfortable with himself: outspoken, proudly smart and, at 5 foot 9 and 300 pounds, hard to miss.

Early on, he decided he wouldn’t water down his gay identity.

And that, historically, has been a problematic strategy at Morehouse. The 141-year-old college has played a key role in defining black manhood in America. But with a past steeped in religion, tradition and machismo, it has struggled to determine how homosexuality fits within that definition.

The private school was founded shortly after the Civil War with the help of Baptists sympathetic to the plight of illiterate freedmen. Over the years, it became famous for turning out the vaunted “Morehouse man” — a paragon of virtue and strength in a society that once institutionalized the destruction of the black nuclear family.

Traditionally, its students have been expected to follow a well-worn path: They were to choose ambitious wives, preferably from Spelman College next door, a historically black school for women. They were to become captains of industry, leaders of men, saviors of a race.

But now, more than ever, students like Brewer are forcing the school to confront a vexing question: Can the Morehouse man be gay? Read the rest of this entry »

“Do African immigrants make the smartest Americans? The question may sound outlandish, but if you were judging by statistics alone, you could find plenty of evidence to back it up.”

–Clarence Page, in “Black Immigrants, and Invisible ‘Model Minority,'” published on RealClearPolitics.com

African American columnist Clarence Page calls them the “invisible model minority” (RealClearPolitics.com); a variety of newspapers have reported that this population makes up a disproportionate segment of the Black student presence on Ivy League campuses; and a Journal of Blacks in Higher Education analysis of U.S. Census data found that this group has, “the highest educational attainment of any population group in the country, including whites and Asians.”

If you have been following the growing media reconition of the diversity that exists within the and among the Black communities of the U.S., then you have probably already guessed that I am speaking of African immigrants to the United States.

Even as scholars debate the possibility of a Black genetic predisposition against intellectual achievement, African immigrants to the U.S. have quietly outstripped their white and Asian counterparts in educational success and attainment.

In a March 19, 2007 opinion piece on RealClearPolitics.com, columnist Clarence Page considers the overwhelming academic success of African immigrants to the U.S. and their children.

Page writes,

43.8 percent of African immigrants had achieved a college degree, compared to 42.5 of Asian Americans, 28.9 percent for immigrants from Europe, Russia and Canada, and 23.1 percent of the U.S. population as a whole.

That defies the usual stereotypes of Asian Americans as the only “model minority.” Yet the traditional American narrative has rendered the high academic achievements of black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean invisible, as if it were a taboo topic.

Page notes the relish with which colleges and universities have embraced African (and Caribbean) students, and ponders the relationship between the increase in Black immigrant populations on selective college campuses to the rapid decrease, at such schools, in the numbers of Black students descended from U.S. slaves. He exmines the growing presence of Afro-disaporic students for what it says about colleges’ commitment to combat the legacy of chattel slavery in the United States:

Are elite schools padding their racial diversity numbers with black immigrants who do not have a history of American slavery in their families? This development immediately calls into question whether affirmative action admission policies are fulfilling their original intent.

But as Walter Benn Michaels, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, writes in his book “The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality,” the original intent of affirmative action morphed back in the 1970s from reparations for slavery into the promotion of a broader virtue: “diversity.” Since then, it no longer seems to matter how many of your college’s black students had slavery in their families. It only matters that they are black.

Page does not begrudge Black immigrant populations their success; but he does read in the shrinking proportion of African Americans on selective college campuses a need for institutions and employers to reconsider the nature and meaning of diversity.

I hope that African immigrants’ success in U.S. colleges and universities will strike a blow against efforts to attribute the Black-white/Asian achievement gap to Black people’s inherent and genetically-based  intellecutal inferiority. More importantly, however, the news of African immigrants’ exemplary performance in the academic realm must inspire a deep and unflinching examination of U.S. Black communities’ approach to and attitudes about education. Research indicates that U.S. Black students and their families believe deeply in the significance of education. The challenge, then, is to channel this belief in the value of education into concrete actions — strategies and practices — that insure academic success.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

The announcement that Joshua Packwood, a white student, was honored as the valedictorian of Morehouse College, and HBCU, lit up the blogosphere, and Black on Campus was no exception. Read the Black on Campus blogpost on Packwood at THIS link.

Now, ABC news provides some much-needed context for Packwood’s success at Morehouse, a college that prides itself on its emphasis on individualized attention, leadership, and brotherhood.

This ABC news report reminds us that Packwood is not so much a pioneer as he is the most visible member of a growing movement…of white students to historically Black college campuses.

Changing Face of Historically Black Colleges

White Students Drawn to Small Class Sizes, Low Tuition; Schools Want Greater Diversity

By RUSSELL GOLDMAN

May 19, 2008 —

Two things set Joshua Packwood apart from his 520 other classmates who graduated Sunday from Morehouse College — his GPA and his race.

Packwood is the first white valedictorian in the 141-year history of the Atlanta college and the only white member of his class.

While Packwood was one of a handful of nonblack students at Morehouse, he is part of a greater trend toward diversifying historically black schools. Read the rest of this entry »

I was poised to make this the first Wordless Wednesday on my blog. If you’re not familiar with this phenomenon, Wordless Wednesday is the day that some bloggers set aside to feature a particularly compelling photo that truly captures the mood of the moment.

Because this blog is education-oriented, however, it’s been a little more difficult to find relevant current photos than I had anticipated, especially given that the mainstream news sites seem a bit less than inclined toward publishing photos and stories about Black people graduating from college (the story that I wished to commemorate in today’s images).

Even more difficult was the task of locating pictures of the young man who I simply have to celebrate on this day. His name is Quinn Rallins, and he graduated from Morehouse College this past weekend. His story is compelling and inspiring, but while news outlets across the country have scrambled to cover the story of Joshua Packwood, his classmate and the first white student to be named as class valedictorian at the historically Black institution, only the Chicago Tribune has seen fit to cover the inspiring story of Quinn Rallins.

In the interests of being, if not wordless on this Wednesday, then certainly less wordy, allow me to let Chicago Tribune reporter Dahleen Glanton tell Mr. Rallins’s story:

For 141 years, the nation’s only college dedicated to educating African-American men has graduated “Morehouse Men” representing success and pride within the black community.

Two decades ago, few people would have thought that someone from Rallins’ background would have landed here, graduating magna cum laude and joining the ranks of such Morehouse graduates as Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., former U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher and filmmaker Spike Lee.

Growing up on Chicago’s South Side with a mother who struggled with alcohol and crack cocaine abuse, Rallins was among a wave inner-city babies exposed to crack in their mother’s womb, children written off by much of society as a lost generation doomed to failure.

With crack-cocaine abuse peaking in the mid-1980s in cities such as Chicago, experts said, America waged a war on drugs fueled by flawed data that warned of neurologically and socially damaged children who would flood the nation’s public schools and, later, its prisons.

As it turned out, that did not happen. But the stigma surrounding “crack babies” remained.

…

“In the 1980s and early ’90s there was this unscientific panic based on minimal data that this was an intrauterine exposure that was damaging like nothing ever seen in humanity, that these kids would be unlovable, retarded criminals,” said Dr. Deborah Frank, a pediatrics professor at Boston University School of Medicine.

“This fantasy panic around crack mainly had to do with the social aspect of the drug, with the inner city, with violence,” Frank said.

There is not enough long-term research available to determine what happened to most of the drug-exposed children from the 1980s and 1990s. However, many children never escape the impact of a negative environment.

But Rallins is an example of what can happen to disadvantaged children with self-determination and proper nurturing.

He acknowledges that life was not easy for him and his younger sister. Police often were called when his mother, high on alcohol and drugs, got out of control.

“Mom would get drunk and hit me. I had to call the cops and send her to the drunk tank a couple of times,” he said. “When you’re a kid, you don’t understand what’s going on. You see mood changes and you think that’s normal. It got to where I couldn’t take it anymore.”

Finding his escape

Rallins found an escape in school. An avid reader, a positive trait from his mother, he excelled academically at Gwendolyn Brooks College Preparatory Academy, a public school on the South Side. His father moved out when he was young, but Rallins said they remain close.

At age 14, his aunt, Yvonne Womack, a Chicago Public Schools administrator, took him in. His mother, Gail Rallins, suffered a seizure and died in 2006, during his sophomore year in college.

“My aunt’s house was a place of peace,” Rallins said. “She gave me a place that allowed me to grow. She had books everywhere, even in the bathroom.”

Following a tour of black colleges, Rallins said he immediately was drawn to Morehouse.

“The classroom is one place I always felt I had full control over my future. I grew up never having a lot of benefits. I never got a new car for making straight A’s,” said Rallins, adding that his mother instilled in him the value of education. “I did it to carry me to the future, for the sake of doing the right thing.”

As a result, scholarships poured in. He turned down the University of Chicago and Stanford University.

Now the man who never had been out of the United States before college has traveled to 36 countries. His sister, Jessica, 20, is a sophomore at Illinois State University.

He has worked with HIV and AIDS patients in the Dominican Republic, Sierra Leone and South Africa. Morehouse helped him get there.

…

On Sunday, before 41 relatives who traveled to see him, Rallins earned a dual degree in international studies and Spanish. This summer he will spend two months teaching English in Malaysia as an Amnesty International fellow. He has applied for graduate school at Oxford University in England, where he hopes to earn a master’s degree in comparative social policy. He plans to work in the human-rights field on a global scale.

“This is a great time to be young, gifted and black,” Rallins said. “Twenty years from now, I want to say I contributed.

“I might be up for a Nobel Prize for my human-rights work in Africa.”

To read the Chicago Tribune article in its entirety, click HERE.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

… but he just might be the first to have had it withdrawn.

Rev. Jeremiah Wright just before he addressed the National Press Club on April 28, 2008.

That Northwestern University backpedaled on its plans to award an honorary degree Rev. Jeremiah Wright is now old news. In a May 1 article on Bloomberg.com, University spokesman Alan Cubbage explained that Northwestern withdrew its offer of an honorary degree from the controversial former minister at least in part because it wished to avoid the negative pall that his presence might cast over the upbeat mood of this year’s commencement exercises. Said Cubbage, “In light of the controversy around Dr. Wright and to ensure the celebratory character of commencement not be affected, the university has withdrawn its invitation to Dr. Wright.”

I have very mixed feelings about Rev. Wright. I do not believe that candidate Obama should be judged by the comments of his former minister, nor do I necessarily believe that those comments were appropriate. Still, the decision by Northwestern University to rescind his honorary degree troubles me, largely because it seems to indicate a double standard.

This is, after all, the institution that, in 2005, chose to grant honorary degrees to both John McCain, controversial for his his spoken references to his Vietnamese captors as “gooks” (for example, “I hated the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live“), and NY Times Columnist Thomas L. Friedman, whose less-than-respectful list of “basic rules for reporting in the Middle East” (NY Times, 1/13/2005) includes these gems:

Rule 1 Never lead your story out of Lebanon, Gaza or Iraq with a cease-fire; it will always be over by the time the next morning’s paper is out.

Rule 4 In the Middle East, if you can’t explain something with a conspiracy theory, then don’t try to explain it at all – people there won’t believe it.

Rule 5 In the Middle East, the extremists go all the way, and the moderates tend to just go away – unless the coast is completely clear.

When it comes to getting an honorary degree from Northwest, there is clearly a hierarchy of acceptable (ahem) misstatements at work, in which racial slurs and anti-Arab humor is forgiveable, but anti-Americanism of the sort for which Rev. Jeremiah Wright is now famous is completely unacceptable.

Click HERE for ABC News coverage of Rev. Wright’s controversial statements.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Algernon Austin is director of the Thora Institute. Austin is a 1990 graduate of Wesleyan University. He earned his M.A. (1995) and Ph.D. (2001) in sociology from Northwestern University.

The myth that Black students equate getting good grades in school with “acting white” took a major hit last week. In a piece published on the “The Daily Voice” Black news site, author Algernon Austin took the rising campaign against this dangerous myth one step further in his May 2 post, “Are Black Students Really Afraid of Acting White.”

According to Austin, the “acting white” myth grew out of a single study, published in 1986. Anyone who has even a passing familiarity with contemporary debates on Black academic achievement can affirm that, 22 years later, the “acting white” myth continues to figure prominently in discussions of all issues related African American educational attainment. Austin describes the study, it’s limited scope, and the problematic nature of the researchers conclusions:

In 1986, in an Urban Review article, two scholars studying a Washington D.C. high school claimed that black students did not achieve academically because of a fear of being perceived as “acting white.” People pounced so quickly on this idea that they failed to realize that the researchers did not actually present any black students who said they were afraid of being called “white” [emphasis mine].

Of the eight students discussed in the article, four indicated that they were worried about being called “brainiacs.” The other four raised other issues. A fear of “acting white” was the researchers’ highly debatable interpretation of what was going on, but it was not a direct quotation.

Many white students have been called “brainiac,” “nerd,” “geek,” and similar names by other white students. It is unfortunate that students tease and bully each other. But this is not “a black thing.” The real question therefore is whether academically-oriented teasing is more common among black students than among whites. There is no convincing evidence that this is the case. A 2003 study by the Girl Scout Research Institute, for example, found equal levels of concern about school-related teasing among black and white girls.

Austin’s juxtaposes the considerable attention given 1986 Urban Review findings with the limited exposure given to those studies whose findings suggest that African American youth place a high value on education. This throws into relief the sad fact that, when it comes to African Americans, research is rewarded, not for the validity of its conclusions or for the quality of its analysis, but for the degree to which it reinforces familiar stereotypes.

Just below, I have included three of my favorite passages from Algernon Austin’s “Are Black Students Really African of ‘Acting White'” ; or click on THIS link to read the entire piece:

Contrary to the popular stereotype, much of the evidence suggests that black students value education more than whites. The same year the Urban Review article was published, the Monitoring the Future survey found that 74 percent of black high school seniors believed that getting good grades was of “great” or “very great importance,” but only 41 percent of white seniors felt as strongly. Half of black seniors reported that knowing a lot about intellectual matters was of “great” or “very great importance,” but only one-fifth of white seniors felt the same […] and more recent surveys have had similar results. A 2006 survey by Public Agenda found that black students were more likely than white students to believe that “increasing math and science education would improve high school.” The Higher Education Research Institute’s 2006 survey of college freshmen found that the majority-black students at historically black colleges were more likely to aspire to obtain a Ph.D. than college freshmen generally.

Since the 1970s, the best standardized tests have shown a greater increase in black students’ scores than in white students’ scores. The long-term trend National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) math test for eight graders, for example, shows a 14 point gain for white students but a 34 point gain for black students. There remains a large gap in scores on this test, but it was 20 points larger in the 1970s.

What the current academic research shows is that much of the black-white achievement gap exists prior to first-grade, many years before academic teasing begins. This gap is due to broad social and economic disadvantages among black families in comparison to white families. The gap grows during school years because these disadvantaged black students then attend schools of lower quality than white students.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Black Women in the Ivory Tower, 1850 – 1954: An Intellectual History by Stephanie Y. Evans, Ph.D.

Stephanie Evans is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Women’s Studies at the University of Florida, Gainesville. She holds a B.A. in Comparative Humanities (gender and cross-cultural American studies) from California State University, Long Beach. She holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in African American Studies from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

After reading an interview with the author on InsideHigherEd.com, this book has climbed to the top of my summer reading list. Click on THIS link to read the entire interview, or else check out these highlights. Ironically, in an interview that coincides with Evans’s book on Black women in the academy, some of her most provocative statements were on the educational achievement of African American men:

*With very few exceptions, in all races, at all levels, women are either on par or slightly above men in college enrollment and degrees earned. However, the disparity between the numbers of collegiate black women and men, however, is drastic.

*Tracking black men into prison and away from college shows that black men experience different barriers because of the relationship of gender to their race.

*Although black women dominate black men in the student ranks, black women’s faculty numbers are consistently lower than black men’s. Black women’s college enrollment has been higher than black men’s since the early 20th century, but by 1995, black men had earned 30,000 Ph.D.’s compared to black women’s 20,000. Moreover, this trend of black women holding fewer academic positions, while being relegated to junior ranks, and receiving tenure in lower numbers, is unyielding.

*Ultimately, it is unproductive to say that either black men or black women have it worse — there are definitely gendered aspects of race, both of which need to be addressed. To say that the issue of black men in prison or in college is more or less important than black women’s faculty positions or domestic violence is to fall into the divide-and-conquer trap. We must work to improve all areas.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Joshua Packwood, Morehouse College valedictorian for 2008

Each May, Morehouse College, the historically Black all-men’s institution in Atlanta, honors as its valedictorian the graduating senior with the highest G.P.A. This year, for the first time in the school’s 141-year history, that student is white.

Joshua Packwood, the valedictorian for the Morehouse College class of 2008, is reported to have turned down institutions like Columbia University and Stanford to attend the historically Black men’s college.

A Rhodes Scholar with a 4.O G.P.A., Packwood took advantage of all of the opportunities that Morehouse had to offer. He did summer internships in New York with Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, and he studied abroad in London and Costa Rica.

Far from being ostricized, has been embraced by his Morehouse brethren. A popular student on campus, he was elected dorm president during his freshman year. These statements by his friends and classmates, from a feature article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, speak to his full acceptance as a true Morehouse man:

“Josh Packwood is Morehouse,” the college’s president, Robert Franklin, said in his inauguration speech in February. “He happens to be Euro-American and brings much appreciated diversity to our campus.”

Wendell Marsh, a junior English and French major who is black, said talking to Packwood as a high school senior helped make up his mind to come to Morehouse.

“Right now we live in a time where people say the black institution is obsolete, that you can get a better education at a majority institution,” Marsh said. “To see a white guy who had declined Harvard for Morehouse, I figured it was good enough for me.”

Packwood raised “the bar for everyone,” said Stanton Fears, a senior economics major.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking

Who can forget the disturbing comments made by James Watson about the incapacity of people of African descent to reach the same levels of achievement as white people? It is a genetic reality, suggested Watson, that Black people simply do not have the same intellectual capacity as their white counterparts. (Click HERE to read my blogpost on Watson’s comments)

How refreshing it is, then, to read of physicist Stephen Hawking’s comments upon visiting Cape Town, South Africa. Said Hawking, “The world of science needs Africa’s brilliant talents, and I look forward to meeting prospective young Einsteins from Africa in the near future.”

Hawking, 66, understands that academic performance is, in the end, more closely tied to opportunity than to some sort of genetic predestination; and this was evidenced in his statement that he would be “delighted” if his visit, as part of the African Institute for the Mathematical Sciences science talent search (“for the next Einstein”), opened up greater opportunities for young people on the continent to enter math and science fields.

You can read more about Stephen Hawkings on his African trip at THIS link.

Posted by Ajuan Mance