Add to my previous list of this year’s Black honorary degree recipients the follow scholars, artists, and visionaries (the awarding institution is listed to the far right of each name):

• B.B. King — blues icon — Brown University
• Norman Francis — president, Xavier University — Brown University
• Marvalene Hughes — first woman president, Dillard University — Brown University
• Margaret Burroughs — founder,  DuSable Museum of African American History — Chicago State University
• Joseph Stroud — president, owner of WJYS-TV — Chicago State University
• Oprah Winfrey — talk show host, philanthropist — Howard University
• Mae Jemison — first African American woman in space — Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
• Leon L. Williams — first African American elected to San Diego City Council — San Diego State University
• Henry Louis Gates, Jr. — W.E.B. DuBois Professor of Humanities, Harvard — University of Vermont
• Rep. John R. Lewis — congressman, civil rights activist — University of Vermont
• Vel Phillips — Wisconsin political pioneer — Marquette University
• Thomas Jefferson Anderson — Austin Fletcher Professor of Music Emeritus, Tufts — Tufts University
• Juanita W. Fleming — pioneering faculty member, UK College of Nursing — University of Kentucky
• John T. Scott — artist — Xavier University
• Kenneth Chenault — Chairman and CEO, American Express — Xavier University

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Karen Morris 

If you are a regular watcher of the Oprah Winfrey show, they you’ve already heard of Karen Morris, the history-making African American med student who, on the 28th of this month, will become the first grandmother ever to graduate from Yale Medical School.

If you aren’t familiar with the story of this soon-to-be doctor then this rough timeline, based on a 2003 article in Yale Medicine, will fill you in on some of the details of her inspiring road to the M.D. degree:

• At age 11 Morris decides to become a doctor “so she could take car of her ailing grandmother, who died while Morris was still a teenager.”
• At age 16 Morris gives birth to her first child, feeling that she has disappointed her family and foiled her efforts to go to college and become a doctor. 
• In 1980 Morris completes high school and goes on to marry the man who had been her boyfriend since fifth grade.
• Shortly after marrying, she learns that her husband opposes her plans to go to college.
• Morris completes cosmetology school and runs a beauty shop out of her home.
• At age 29 Morris, now a mother of five, enrolls at Harrisburg Area Community College.
• She separates from her husband when he attempts to interfere with her studies. They eventually divorce.
• In 1996 Morris graduates summa cum laude with an associate’s degree in nursing.
• She enrolls at York College “with her children’s encouragement,” to work toward her bachelor’s in nursing.
• While working at a men’s prison, studying toward her bachelor’s degree, and overseeing her children’s care and education, she begins taking medical school prerequisite courses.
• In July of 2001 Morris attends a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-sponsored summer program for minority students interested in medical school, where she excells.
• In the first half of 2002 Morris is admitted to three of the four medical schools that she applies to, choosing Yale over Penn State and Pitt.
• In June of 2002 she graduates magna cum laude from York College, with a bachelor’s degree in nursing. 
• In the winter of 2003 she is profiled in Yale Medicine.
• In April of 2007 Morris marries William Priester, a police sergeant from Windsor, Connecticut.
• On May 4, 2007 Morris attends an mandatory class meeting of graduating Yale med students where she learns that the Oprah Winfrey Show has singled her out for recognition on its “Cheers to You” episode.
• The following Tuesday Morris tapes the “Cheers to You” episode, during which she is joined on stage by her five children, her four grandchildren, and her husband.
• During the taping of that episode she learns that the Ambi Skincare company has named Morris the first recipient of its Ambi Scholarship in Science and Medicine, and will be paying off all of her educational debt, a total of roughly 160,000 dollars.

Commencement will mark the beginning of the next chapter in Karen Morris’s career. Central Pennsylvania’s Patriot News reports that, “She will spend a year in internship at Lehigh Valley Hospital, near Allentown. Then she’ll move to Boston to study anesthesiology at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a Harvard-affiliated program. ”

There’s a powerful theme that runs through Karen Morris’s story, one that explains her relentless pursuit of a medical career, from associate’s degree in nursing to B.S.N. to M.D. And it is the same theme that at least partially explains Ronald Mallet’s 40-year quest for the secrets of time travel. These extraordinary figures are each driven by their passion for a specific subject or scientific question. In each case, neither could truly settle into or even envision a life in which the pursuit of their intellectual passion did not play central role. Each was willing to do whatever was required to make this so, even including the financial and personal sacrifices necessary to achieve multiple academic degrees.

Each day as I drive through the streets of Oakland, California, I see groups of young Black men, many of them high school aged, standing outside of convenient stores and on street corners during school hours, cracking jokes and talking trash and sometimes participating in the local underground economy. I see these young kids and I think of Ronald Mallet who despite his succes never particularly liked school, and I think Karen Morris who made some of the same youthful errors in judgement that many young women make in high school, and with the same results (teen motherhood). If each of these exceptional minds had not fallen in love with a particular field of study early in their lives (each of them had identified his/her life’s path by the age of 11), would they have spent their teen years standing on the corner, skipping school? I wonder what passion  might draw some of today’s young brothers away from the storefronts and street corners, and back into the classrooms. What passion — for art or mathematics or aviation or automobile design or space travel or the law or something entirely unique — would invest education with new meaning, so that they would finally see it as a means to an end rather than a [dead] end in itself?

Posted by Ajuan Mance

According to a recent New York Times article (Ivy League Crunch Brings New Cachet to Next Tier), Ivy League schools are more difficult to get into than ever before, which is bad news for prospective applicants, but great news for what has traditionally been known as the “second tier.”

As Ivy League admission rates have dropped from the low double digits to the very, very low double digits (from 20% or so down to 12% or less), institutions like Kenyon College (Ohio), Lehigh University, (Pennsylvania), Tufts University (Massachusetts), Pomona College (California), Bowdoin College (Maine), the University of Michigan, and the University of Virginia have experienced dramatic increases in the number of high school seniors seeking admission.

Consider these examples: Kenyon College received 4,200 applications this year, up from 2,000 apps only six years ago; Lehigh’s applicant pool of 12,000 represents a 50% increase over the last 7 years; and the University of Vermont’s 19,000 current applicants are more than double the number of students applying on 7 years ago (7, 400).

This may be great news for the so-called second tier; but is it great news for Black applicants? 

The Ivy League crush and the resulting selectivity trickle down will probably have little impact on Black admission and recruitment at private institutions. The Ivy League has for the most part had greater success that their counterparts in the next tier at recruiting and matriculating the nation’s strongest Black applicants. Using a combination of reputation, nationally recognized Black faculty, agressive minority recruitment, and generous financial aid packages, the 8 schools of the Ivy league have tended to enroll a disproportionate number of the nation’s Black National Merit Scholars (finalists and semi-finalists), National Achivement Scholars, valedictorians, and high scorers on the AP exams. The crush of applicants at colleges like Kenyon, Bowdoin, Lehigh, and Tufts is unlikely to have an impact on this trend, especially given the bold financial aid initiatives that institutions like Harvard have recently put into place to relieve the debt load on students whose families earn less that $80,000 a year.

The increasing selectivity of the second tier will have a greater impact on Black applicants to the nation’s most selective public institutions. Expect a downturn in the admission and enrollment figures at these schools, especially those located in Michigan and other states with ballot initiative systems. As the selectivity of major flagship universities increases, so too will the likelihood that anti-affirmative action measures will be placed on the ballot and approved by voters. Thus a dramatic decrease in the number of African American students in particular is quite likely at popular public universities across the nation.

The least predictable factor is how the smaller private colleges and universities will themselves respond to their greater selectivity. Such institutions might dramatically improve their Black student enrollments if they are willing to seek African American applicants from less traditional sources. Such institutions should be on the lookout for strong academic performers from low-profile urban and rural high schools that rarely send students to 4-year colleges; for first-generation college enrollees whose high school grades and curricula show great promise, but whose SAT scores might have suffered from lack of coaching and preparation; and for Black students whose grades and test scores are strong, but who might be overlooked by public university systems that have abolished their affirmative action programs. 

At the same time that these colleges and universities are beginning to look at themselves as national insitutions, I hope that they will continue or–in some cases–that they will start to cultivate a Black applicant pool that is local. This is a great moment for these smaller institutions. I hope that they will seize the opportunities that their prominence is opening up to them, and that each of the colleges will just the quality of its applicant pool not just by its selectivity, but by is diversity, as well.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

On the responsibilities of being a pioneer in academic administration:

I remember being terrified and really wanting to find a way to say no. I was going to be on a stage and everyone would see my failure, and if I failed, when would the next African-American be appointed to that kind of position?

— Ruth Simmons, President of Brown University, at a meeting of all the female presidents in the Ivy League, on being offered the presidency at Smith College (from The Boston Globe).

On  presidential candidate Barack Obama:

There’s no one else who could say what he said about black people and their responsibility to the larger community.

— Charles Ogletree, Harvard’s Jesse Climenko Professor of Law, on Barack Obama’s recent critiques of the African American community (from The Charleston Daily Mail)

On Black colleges’ uneven response to demands for divestment from Sudan: 

“You can’t ask Fisk University to join the divestment movement when the state of their economic situation is so bad. Those movements are reserved for universities that have the money, that have the valid alternatives. Most of them can afford to follow a social investment strategy.”

— Ron Walters, Professor of Political Science at the University of Maryland, College Park (from The Baltimore Sun)

On UK efforts to mark the 200th anniversary of the end of the British slave trade:

Like many of you I’m sure, I really wanted to support the commemoration. But I found it hard to join in the official version of it.

For me it felt too much like a “business as usual” operation.

It was missing the elephant in the room – capitalism – and what the history of slavery tells us about the transition of capitalism from its mercantile to its industrial forms, and what these commemorations tell us about the condition of contemporary capitalism in our country.

— Paul Gilroy, Anthony Giddens Professor of Social Theory, London School of Economics (from The Socialist Worker Online)

On the Don Imus controversy:

The bitter reality of the pill Mr. Imus is forcing us to swallow is that each one of us has played a role in creating this climate. Many people in this country have a vested interest in perpetuating the stereotypes of the black community. Additionally, there is a segment of our nation that is most comfortable when receiving negative images of the black community…

The real tragedy of Don Imus isn’t what he said. The true tragedy of Don Imus is that it took so long for people to become outraged. I don’t begrudge Mr. Imus for being a racist. I begrudge us for making him a rich one.

— Michael J. Sorrell, President of Paul Quinn College (from The Dallas Morning News)

Posted by Ajuan Mance

For all the research that shows that the system must change to accommodate boys’ needs, it’s shocking that more educators and policymakers aren’t addressing the problem — or even talking about it.Certainly, the press hasn’t discovered the issue in mass yet. So the public is largely unaware of how bad the problem is — and thus, does not pressure politicians to do more.

But I suspect that it’s also because neither the right nor the left like this issue. Liberals have focused so much on women’s disparity, it’s not politically correct to focus on boys.

And conservatives who argue that gender does not or should not matter — and who successfully helped pass Michigan’s ban on affirmative action in certain public programs and institutions — hate the fact that the programs that would help boys catch up in college-going are essentially affirmative action.

That’s a terrible shame. Now that boys need affirmative action, at the university level and earlier, it’s not there for them.

–Amber Arellano, in her May 7th column for the Detroit News

Detroit News columnist Amber Arellano believes that men and boys should be the next group to be targeted with a comprehensive affirmative action program. Like reporters for Newsweek, Time Magazine, BusinessWeek, and other mainstream newsmagazines, Arellano is disturbed by the fact that girls now outnumber boys on a number of U.S. college campuses.

I’ve read a number of articles on the subject of young males’ perceived “failure” relative to girls, and I remain skeptical. It’s not that the statistics quoted by journalists like Arellano are inaccurate. Indeed, all of Arellano’s facts are irrefutable. Girls are doing better in school that boys are; girls are applying to and getting accepted into college in greater numbers than their male classmates; and, in the end, young women are graduating from college at a higher rate than young men. 

All of the bits of evidence that Arellano offers to support her assertion that boys are underachieving relative to girls is true. But these facts have, to a greater or lesser degree, always been true. Girls have always done better in school than boys have. They have always been more likely to turn in their assignments on time, to score well on assignments and classroom exams, and to graduate, from both high school and college. Society has opened up sufficiently, however, that girls’ greater school success is now reflected in greater admission rates for girls at selective colleges and universities, greater admission rates to doctoral programs, and dramatically increased rates of admission to MBA, medical, and law programs.

Gone are the days when academically talented girls would be discouraged from prestigious careers like medicine and law. Gone are days when the nation’s most selective private colleges and universities were closed to women. Today’s guidance counselors are encouraging their female students to set the same goals as their male students, to take the same college entrance exams, and to apply to the same colleges and universities that past generations of advisors would have discouraged their female students from even considering.

As a result, girls’ greater maturity and focus at earlier ages, and girls’ substantially lower investment in forms of rebellion and resistance that would endanger their chances for academic success (troubled girls are less likely to be incarcerated, to commit violent crimes, or to drop out of school) are being rewarded with greater rates of acceptance into college, higher grades once there, and graduate school acceptance rates outstrip their male counterparts.

I do not believe that today’s teachers are biased against boys. I do believe, however, that teachers are less biased against girls that they once were. Today’s teachers are just as appreciative of enthusiastic learners, just as likely to reward strong students with academic and career mentorship, and just as intolerant of disruptive behavior as they were 50 years ago. Unlike the teachers of 50 years ago, however, teachers are just as likely to be supportive of strong female students with high aspirations as they are of strong male students with high aspirations. In education, with regard to gender, the playing field is finally, truly level. Teachers’ expectations are not tougher. It’s simply that without the academic glass ceiling looming overhead, girls — historically more enthusiastic about school that their male counterparts — are working harder than ever. Arellano’s interview with education researcher Kathy Stevens confirms this observation:

“We convinced girls that they needed to get serious about school so they can get good jobs and support their families,” says Kathy Stevens of the Gurian Institute, one of the country’s foremost training institutes trying to close the gender gap.

“And girls listened to us. They applied themselves. Boys even admit that girls study harder, they show up for class, and they turn in their college applications. A lot of boys are just not doing that.”

Today, for every 100 girls who graduate from high school, 96 boys graduate. For every 100 women who earn a bachelor’s degree, 73 men earn one.

–from Amber Arellano’s May 7, 2007 column in the Detroit News

Stevens and Arellano both believe that the absence of male teachers has contributed to a feminization of education and good grades in the minds of young boys:

Fewer male teachers means that boys increasingly view academic learning as feminine, which naturally they don’t want to be.

“This is important,” says Pollack. “Boys need to have male teachers and mentors, and they’re not enough of them.”

As the educational system has zeroed in on testing, language skills have become increasingly important, too. Boys’ brains are built differently. They take longer to learn to read and write than girls. As a result, they see girls mastering language skills first — and again, see learning as a girly thing. 

–from Amber Arellano’s May 7, 2007 column in the Detroit News

This is a very strong analog to the association in some African American communities of learning with “acting white.” Black activists respond to this phenomenon by demanding that young Black children be taught the fallacy of that belief. I believe that the same course of action would be appropriate for those young men who associate learning with being “girly.” This, I believe, is where the solution to the gender achievement gap lies. In an rapidly-changing and increasingly techonological society in which communication skills are key, in a 21st century America in which there are fewer and fewer career opportunities for those who do not have very strong writing, reading, and critical thinking skills, parents are continuing to raise their sons with an understanding of maleness and masculinity more appropriate for a largely rural, largely agrarian society, like the U.S. in the 19th century.

While they are encouraging their girls to value learning, to respect the authority of their teachers, and to avoid unnecessarily risky and anti-social behaviors, many parents are either ignoring or subtly reward their sons’ disruptiveness, underachievement, anti-intellectualism, and generalized rebelliousness (in other words, rebellion not against a particular social injustice, but simply for its own sake). Hence boys and girls, though raised and educated alongside each other, are entering school with very different ideas about they value of the learning and knowledge acquisition.

This is reflected in the degree to which boys — especially boys in communities of color — are rapidly being outpaced by their female classmates in virtually all areas of education. Arellano’s wish for schools to change is misplaced. While schools can always improve, in this case it is parenting practices that need to transform. No amount of affirmative action for males will succeed until the values that young boys learn in the classroom — the value of education, the importance of sharing ideas, respect for one’s teachers and other elders, etc. — are reinforced at home.

Columnist Arellano mourns the fact that in the current anti-affirmative action political climate, few politicians would support gender-based preferences for males, but I think her grief is misplaced. The current achievement gap between boys/young men and girls/young women is the result of the recent and widespread retreat from two centuries of a ingrained gender bias in education and employment that functioned as defacto affirmative action for males. Another way of saying this is that society’s retreat from many forms of institutional sexism has resulted in what is effectively a national version of those anti-affirmative action measures that are sweeping the country, except that it is gender preferences for males that have been eliminated, by virtue of cultural shifts, as opposed to race-based preferences eliminated by legislation. Centuries of male preferences in education and employment have led us to where we are today, with boys lagging behind and educators scratching their heads. A new version of affirmative action for males — who have experienced no fundamental historical discrimination in this society or any other — is not the solution.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

 

Dr. Paulette McRae

“The fact that I’m making history for this is mind-blowing. It makes you think, wait, what year is it again?” –Paulette McRae (as reported by Maggie Reid, Yale Daily News)

The year is, in fact, 2007, a full 306 years after Yale University was founded, and more than 130 years after Edward Bouchet became the first African American to earn a bachelor’s degree from that institution (in 1874) and then the first African American in the U.S. to earn a Ph.D. (also from Yale, in Physics, in 1876).

Although Yale was originally founded exclusively for the education of white Christian men, the institution has since opened its gates to students of all ethnicities, religions, classes, and genders. And yet progress in each of these areas has been uneven. At universities across the country, men outnumber women in many graduate programs in the sciences, and white students and faculty outnumber their Black counterparts by an even greater margin. These differences are more exaggerated at the nation’s most selective universities.

It is in the context of this set of realities that I extend congratulations to Paulette McRae, Yale’s first African American man or woman to earn a Ph.D. in neuroscience. The Yale Daily News describes Dr. McRae’ achievement:

In 2002, after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Rutgers University, Paulette McRae GRD ’07 applied to the neurobiology department at Yale, crossing her fingers that she would make it into the program. Little did she know that, when she did get in, she would make history.

McRae matriculated at Yale in the fall of 2002 and spent the next four years working diligently alongside her classmates and her professors, never once feeling out of place. But one day, while working in a lab class, McRae realized that she was the only black student in the room.

After asking peers and professors if there were other black students in their classes, McRae found that nobody could think of any others. It was then that she realized the significance of her enrollment.

On March 13, 2007, McRae became the first-ever black student to earn a doctorate in neurobiology at Yale.

— Maggie Reid, Yale Daily News

While she and her fellow graduate students were aware of the low number of Black graduate students, it was a while before either McRae or her colleagues figured out that she was alone in her department:

“Nobody noticed for a few years. The refreshing and amazing thing is that nobody was consciously thinking about it when I entered or the couple of years I had been there,” McRae said. “They’re just looking at the scientist I am.”

— as reported by Maggie Reid, Yale Daily News

Ironically, McRae’s singular status is an affirmation of her original motivation for pursuing doctoral study:

[For most of her undergraduate career] at Rutgers, McRae was planning to go to medical school and only changed her mind after a long conversation with her academic adviser and careful reflection on the pros and cons of medical school versus graduate school.

“Really, it was the lack of minority representation in academia that led me to my choice,” McRae said. “In school, I only ever had two African-American professors, and they were both in African-American studies.”

— Maggie Reid, Yale Daily News

Congratulations to Dr. Paulette McRae. May your career be challenging, fulfilling, and long. May you live and work long enough to experience that day when there will be no more first Black Ph.D.s in any field, the day when Black Ph.D.s in the sciences are no longer a rarity, no longer surprising, and no longer alone.

Posted by Ajuan Mance 

The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (JBHE) recently reported that the number of doctoral degrees awarded to Black scholars is on the decline. In 2005, the most recent year for which statistics are available only 1,688 doctorates were awarded to African Americans. This number represents a decline of nearly 10 percent from 2004, during which African Americans earned 1,869 doctorates.

This surprising and disturbing report inspired me to further investigate the current state of affairs for African Americans in the academy. In compiling the following list of current facts and statistics I was especially interested in how dramatically the decreasing numbers of doctorates earned by Black graduate students, the heavy concentration of Black doctorates in a limited range of disciplines, and the dearth of Black doctorates in other fields deviates from the much more promising outlook for  Black bachelor’s degree earners (whose increasing numbers and wide range of majors indicate significant progress).  

Interestingly enough, the main similarity that I noted between the current state of affairs for Black doctorate and bachelor’s degree earners is in the realm of gender. Women graduates outnumber men at both the undergraduate and doctoral levels.

The List

• Number of doctorates earned by African Americans in 1987: 787 (From JBHE)
• Number of doctorates earned by African Americans in 2004: 1,869 (From JBHE)
• Number of doctorates earned by African Americans in 2005: 1,688 (From JBHE)
• Percentage of all U.S. doctorates earned by African Americans in 2005: 6.4 (From JBHE)
• Percentage of all U.S. doctorates earned by African Americans in 2004: 7.1 (From JBHE)
• Of all 2005 U.S. doctorates earned by African Americans, percentage that were in the field of education: 39.2 (From JBHE)
• Of all 2005 U.S. doctorates earned by white Americans, percentage that were in the field of education: 18.8 (From JBHE)
• Of all 2005 U.S. doctorates that were earned by African Americans, percentage that were in fields other than education: 4.8 (From JBHE)
• Number of Ph.D.s awarded in astronomy in 2005: 72 (From JBHE)
• Number of astronomy Ph.D.s awarded to African Americans in 2005: 0 (From JBHE)
• Number of Ph.D.s awarded in physics in 2005: 1300+ (From JBHE)
• Number of physics Ph.D.s awarded to African Americans in 2005: 10 (From JBHE)
• None of the Ph.D.s awarded in the following fields were awarded to African Americans: geometry, computing theory and practice, astronomy, meteorology, theoretical chemistry, geochemistry, geophysics and seismology, paleontology, mineralogy and petrology, stratigraphy and sedimentation, geomorphology and glacial geology, acoustics, elementary particle physics, biophysics, nuclear physics, plasma/fusion physics, polymer physics, hydrology and water resources, oceanography, petroleum engineering, polymer and plastics engineering, communications engineering, engineering mechanics, ceramic science engineering, metallurgical engineering, agricultural engineering, engineering physics, mining and mineral engineering, ocean engineering, animal breeding, animal nutrition, agricultural plant breeding, plant pathology, horticultural science, fishing and fisheries science, forest science and biology, forest resources management, wildlife/range management, biotechnology, bacteriology, plant genetics, plant pathology biology, plant physiology, botany, anatomy, entomology, zoology, and veterinary medicine. (From JBHE)
• Percentage of all Black doctorates that were earned by women in 1977: 38.7 (From JBHE)
• Percentage of all Black doctorates that were earned by women in 2005: 64.9 (From JBHE)
• Percentage increase between 1990 and 2005 in the number of doctoral degrees earned by Black women: 99 (From JBHE)
• Percentage increase between 1990 and 2005 in the number of doctoral degrees earned by Black men: 68.7 (From JBHE)
• Percentage of 2005 Black doctorate recipients who intended to pursue careers in academia: 59 (From JBHE)
• Percentage of 2005 white doctorate recipients who intended to pursue careers in academia: 47 (From JBHE)
• Percentage of all U.S. doctorates awarded to African Americans in 2004: 7.2 (Chronicle of Higher Ed)
• Percentage of all U.S. doctorates awarded to Asian Americans in 2004: 5.6 (Chronicle of Higher Ed)
• Percentage of all U.S. doctorates awarded to Latin Americans in 2004: 4.6 (Chronicle of Higher Ed)
• Institutions granting the greatest number of doctorates to African Americans in 2004:

Nova Southeastern U.	465
Howard U.	263
U. of Michigan at Ann Arbor	146
U. of Sarasota	137
U. of Maryland at College Park	120
Ohio State U. main campus	117
Wayne State U.	115
U. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill	113
Loyola U. Chicago	109
Walden U.	108
Temple U.	105
Harvard U.	102

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Here are the most recent additions to the Black Milestones in Higher Education timeline that I maintain over at twilightandreason.com:

1883 — Hortense Parker becomes the first African American to graduate from Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. In 1898 Martha Ralston would become the first African American to graduate from the newly reconfigured Mount Holyoke College.  According to Linda Perkins (in her article “Racial Integration at the Seven Sister Colleges,” in The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education), “the race of both Ralston and Parker was a surprise to the officials of the college when they first arrived” (Perkins, JBHE: No 19, p. 105). 

Anita Florence Hemmings

1897 — Anita Florence Hemmings becomes the first African American to graduate from Vassar College. While she was enrolled, however, Vassar officials were unaware that she was Black. In 1927 Hemmings’s daughter Ellen Parker Love graduated from Vassar. It is unlikely, however, that Vassar officials knew that she was Black either. Her application listed her ethnicity as French and English. Vassar was noted for its resistance to admitting Black women, even women like Hemmings and Love who could pass for white.

1898 — Alberta Scott becomes the first African American woman to graduate from Radcliffe College. Scott would go on to teach at Tuskegee Instititue until 1900, when illness forced her to return to her childhood home in Cambridge, Massachusetts where she would remain until her death in 1903, at the age of 27. 

Otelia Cromwell

1900 — Otelia Cromwell becomes the first African American woman to graduate from Smith College. The daughter of John Wesley Cromwell, she would go on to study in Germany and to earn a master’s degree from Columbia University (1910). In 1926 she would become the first African American woman to earn at Ph.D. from Yale (English).

1931 — Enid Cook becomes the first African American to graduate from Bryn Mawr College.  Linda Perkins explains, “In 1903, Jessie Fauset, an African American from Philadelphia, graduated at the top of her class at the city’s Girls’ High. It was customary that the school’s top student would enter Bryn Mawr on scholarship, but when it was discovered that Fauset was black, President Thomas raised money for Fauset to attend Cornell rather than have a black woman attend Bryn Mawr” (Perkins, JBHE: No 19, p. 106).  ** Belle Tobias becomes the first Black graduate of Barnard College. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate, Tobias would go on to earn a master’s degree from Wellesley College in 1932.

1970 — Nathaniel Owens becomes the first African American to graduate from Sewanee, The University of the South. Owens graduated with honors in English. Drafted right out of college by the Cincinnati Bengals, Owens decided to forgo a professional football career, choosing instead to enroll in Sewanee’s law school.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

 Inside The Citadel’s Summerall Chapel

“Some schools, like Washington and Lee University and The Citadel, have maintained a strong emphasis on Confederate heritage while achieving a reputation for academic excellence.”

-Cameron McWhirter, “Colleges Suffer Identity Crisis,” Atlanta Journal Constitution, February 12, 2005 
 

Many U.S. colleges and universities used slave labor on their campuses to erect buildings, serve meals, clean dormitories, and carry out other forms of manual and domestic labor. Similarly, a number of 18th- and 19th-century college presidents, trustees, students, and faculty owned slaves and/or profited from the sale and importation of Black people for slavery.

Few colleges, however, were founded expressly for the purposes of defending and maintaining the institution of slavery. The Citadel, South Carolina’s public military college, is one such institution. Since the mid-1960s The Citadel has regularly made headlines for its reluctance to admit, and for its questionable treatment of, Black students and women. In the mid-1800s The Citadel was noted for the vehemence with which it’s cadets and alumni defended the institution of slavery, a purpose for which the institution, founded as the Military College of South Carolina, was created. The Citadel library website explains the relationship between the fear of slave insurrection and the early history of the institution:

“By winning the lottery Denmark Vesey was able to buy his freedom and become self sufficient and influential. By being self sufficient and influential he had the resources to plot an insurrection. The insurrection that almost took place put fear in the hearts of the planters. The fear of another insurrection caused the planters to establish a municipal guard. The expense of a municipal guard caused the planters to look for a cheaper alternative. The cheaper alternative was a body of cadets. Ergo, the Corps of Cadets and The Citadel were established. The Citadel came into being because a poor slave purchased the winning ticket to a lottery. (Source: HN.) For an interesting article in the Atlantic Monthly published in 1861 click Atlantic Monthly.. ”

— from the Research Assistance/Knob Knowledge website of The Citadel campus library.

In this excerpt from his address at the 2006 inauguration of The Citadel’s current president, Clemson history professor Rod Andrew Jr. describes how cadets at The Citadel and other southern institutions took their pro-slavery partisanship to the national stage during the Civil War when large numbers of students and alumni joined and fought with the Confederate army:

As the Civil War approached, however, they showed that, while preaching patriotism and public service, they could also represent the forces of tradition and conservatism. As sectional tensions mounted in the 1840s and 1850s, southerners scrutinized all their institutions for their ability and willingness to defend southern “rights” if necessary, including the “right” to own slaves. Southern military colleges proved faithful to the states who bore them, purging their curricula of texts that might encourage abolitionism. When the guns fired at Fort Sumter in 1861, Citadel cadets were there, pulling the lanyards, following their governor’s orders, determined to show that they were willing and able to defend the southern version of republicanism. Teenaged cadets from VMI, The Citadel, the University of Alabama, and Georgia Military Institute fought bravely, and tragically, in the Civil War. Hundreds of alumni from these schools, especially VMI and The Citadel, volunteered as Confederate officers, proving that patriotism, state loyalty, and service were not empty words to military school graduates.

— How Much is Still Relevant? The Citadel and American Military Traditions in the Nineteenth Century. Speech delivered by Rod Andrew Jr., Associate Professor of History, Clemson University for the President’s Inaugural Celebration at The Citadel, in April of 2006.

Today The Citadel continues to struggle with its history of pro-slavery partisanship and Confederate loyalty. As recently as 1992 Black and white cadets were embroiled in conflict over the use of “Dixie” as the institute’s official fight song, and in 2000 Citadel cadets were entrusted with the handling of the Confederate battle flag after it was lowered for the last time from the South Carolina Statehouse. Although these overt symbols of Confederate and pro-slavery loyalty have been officially abandoned, the image of the gentleman officer as white, southern, and male, maintains a prominent place in the hearts and minds of many in the Citadel community. Until that ideal has been abandoned for a more inclusive vision, The Citadel will continue to make headlines, and for all the wrong reasons.

To reach The Citadel’s official website, click here.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Ronald Mallett at the Einsten House in Bern, Switzerland

When Ronald Mallett was only 10 years hold, his father died suddenly and unexpectedly. Young Ronald was stunned by the loss. He had admired his father greatly. He was a smart, hard-working man whose skill in electronics and natural curiosity had dazzled and impressed his young son.

Shortly after his father’s death, young Ronald read a book that would change his life forever. Mallet describes how his encounter with a science fiction classic set him on his life’s course:

Fortunately, among the many gifts my father bestowed on me was a passion for reading, and it was in books that I found some measure of solace. A little more than a year after Dad’s death, one book in particular became the turning point in my life: The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. I was consumed by the possibility that I might be able to build a time machine that would allow me to travel to the past and see my father again. This time I would warn him that his bad habits would kill him – and soon.

The possibility of time travel became more real in my mind when, a few years later, I came across a popular book about the work of Albert Einstein. Einstein, said the book, was able to show that time is not unchanging but can be altered; in fact, if you move a clock fast enough, time slows down! This gave me hope that one day I might actually be able to build a time machine. I learned, too, that Einstein was a physicist. There was no other route: I would have to take science and learn higher mathematics to understand his work and embark on my own journey.

Daily life was a constant struggle for my family after my father’s death. I was the oldest of four children my mother had to provide for on her own. Somehow her inner strength kept the family together and allowed us to survive. My dream of a time machine remained a secret and after high school I enlisted in the US air force to get money for college.

Studying on my own while I was in the military, I learned that Einstein had developed two theories of relativity. His special theory of relativity, which has to do with the speed of light, allows the possibility of time travel into the future. This form of time travel had already been demonstrated experimentally. His other theory, the general theory of relativity, has to do with gravity and allows for the possibility of time travel into the past.

When I was discharged from the air force, I set to work and eventually won my PhD in physics from Penn State University. At college, I researched cosmology, which allowed me to study the structure and evolution of the universe as well as the theory of black holes. These subjects provided cover for my interest in building a time machine, which I feared would not be taken seriously.

— Ronald Mallett in New Scientist

Eventually Mallett’s passion would earn him tenure at the University of Connecticut. More importantly, his work on black holes, of great interest for their ability to slow and distort space and time, has earned him the respect of his colleagues as a cutting-edge theoretical physicist.

Ironically, the young Ronald Mallett was not terribly enthusiastic about school. His drive to excel was fueled by his singular passion to uncover the mysteries of space and time and return, eventually, to the past to reconnect with (and possibly to save) his father.

Mallett’s story serves as a reminder that the difference  between reluctant or apathetic learners and engaged overachievers can be as simple as the presence of a passion, an interest, or question, or topic, or skill that lends relevance to the pursuit of knowledge.

If you have a passion, share it with a young person you know, especially if it’s a kid who seems disinterested in school and learning. You just might ignite his or her intelletual curiosity. You might just be setting him or her on the path to become the next Einstein, the next Feynman, the next Banneker or Carver, or Woodson… or the next Ronald Mallett.

Check out Ronald Mallett’s personal website (with lots of links to recent articles and interviews).

Posted by Ajuan Mance