From the New York Times:

You might worry about your body weight fluctuating in college, but did you ever think that gaining the notorious freshman 15 could keep you from graduating?

National Public Radio reported this week that at Lincoln University, a historically black college in rural Pennsylvania, more than 20 students are in jeopardy of not receiving diplomas because of their weight.

In 2006, the university instituted a requirement that a student’s body mass index, calculated as weight in pounds divided by height in inches squared, be measured upon matriculation. Students with a B.M.I. exceeding 30 — the threshold of obesity — must take a special one-credit gym class to graduate.

The first class subject to this rule is due to don caps and gowns this spring, and the 15 percent of students whose B.M.I. was judged to be excessive back in 2006 must have taken HPR 103 fitness walking/conditioning to receive their bachelor’s degrees. Some 24 seniors still must take the class, with one semester to go.

— Rebecca Ruiz, for The New York Times

Like Hampton University’s aquatics program (developed in response to the high proportion of drowning victims who are Black), Lincoln University’s BMI requirement was instituted in order to address a public health issues that hits Black communities particularly hard. With diabetes and obesity afflicting greater and greater numbers of African American people at younger and younger ages, many African Americans believe it is time for Black leaders, organizations, and institutions to take action.

I admire Lincoln University for seeking to address Black rates of obesity, but I am disappointed in the ham-handed approach. Shaming people by singling them out for their BMI is more likely to harm than help those individuals who are already struggling with weight and body image issues.

Hampton has had significant success in getting more Black men and women to learn to swim and to make swimming a part of their fitness program, simply by increasing awareness of the importance of knowing how to swim and then making competent and compassionate instruction readily available to the campus community.

Lincoln University could learn a lot from Hampton’s approach. An on-campus awareness campaign to inform students of the benefits of healthy eating and regular exercise might be a good replacement for the current BMI requirement. Increased instruction in fitness, weight training, and other non-team-based althletic activities (kayaking, hiking, yoga, martial arts) at times that are convenient for students (including evenings and weekends) would also be a big help. Events like a “Lincoln Challenge,” in which administrators, faculty, and students would join together to achieve specific fitness goals might also be a good idea. Ideally, those goals would be related to weight only indirectly (like being able to run, bike, walk, or swim a certain distance). Perhaps Lincoln could hold a 10k or team traithlon at the end of the school year.

There are so many ways to encourage people to make healthier eating and activity choices without undertaking such a punitive and shame-based approach as the HPR 103 requirement for those with a 30+ BMI. I would have expected more sensitivity and thoughtfulness from this outstanding institution. The Lincoln U faculty seems poised to overturn this requirement at an upcoming meeting.

Stay tuned.

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin will begin a one-year professorship at Spelman College starting in January, college officials announced Monday.

Franklin will serve as a Cosby Chair, an endowed professorship program started by the comedian and activist Bill Cosby and his wife, Camille. The program supports professorships in humanities, fine arts and social sciences, according to the college.

Kudos to Spelman for taking advantage of this unique opportunity. What better place for Atlanta’s first Black woman mayor than at the nation’s first four-year college for Black women?

Posted by Ajuan Mance

In October of this year, the Blue and Gold Marching Machine of Black North Carolina A&T, a historically Black university, became the first college band ever to play at a NASCAR event. For more on this historic moment, follow THIS LINK.

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UMBC President Freeman Hrabinski giving the 2007 commencement address at Wheaton College, Massachusetts.

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Freeman Hrabowski III, President of University of Maryland – Baltimore County, is the only African American to make Time Magazine’s recent list of the nation’s 10 best college and university presidents. This is not the first time that a major news magazine has recognized Hrabowski for his outstanding leadership at UMBC. In 2008 U.S. News & World Report recognized him as one of “America’s Best Leaders.”

Indeed, Hrabowski has a long and distinguished history as a leader. U.S. News & World Report describes his participation in Brimingham’s “Children’s Crusade” civil rights march:

[…] when he saw his friends readying for the “Children’s Crusade” march for civil rights in 1963, “I just had to join in.”

As he got swept up in a mass arrest, Birmingham’s notorious Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor spat on him. The jail guards locked the young freedom marchers in with hardened criminals. Hrabowski remembers spending five terrified days and nights shielding younger kids by reading his Bible aloud and singing songs.

At one point, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led a march of parents to the jail. “We looked out and saw him and our parents,” Hrabowski recalls. “They were singing. And [King said], ‘What you do this day will have an impact on generations as yet unborn.’ ”

King was right. Outrage at the brutality against Birmingham children helped build national pressure for laws banning racial discrimination. That outcome gave Hrabowski a life mission: “The experience taught me that the more we expect of children, the more they can do,” he says.

(follow THIS LINK to read the rest of this U.S. News & World Report article)

Appointed Vice Provost of UMBC in 1987, Dr. Hrabowski became president in 1992. During his 17 years at the helm of this 12,870-student institution, Hrabowski has achieved some striking successes. U.S. News explains:

Hrabowski has turned the 12,300-student school into one of the nation’s biggest producers of technology graduates. The 20-year-old Meyerhoff program alone has graduated more than 600 students in the sciences, 69 of whom have gone on to earn M.D. or doctoral degrees. Overall, 43 percent of the nearly 1,900 diplomas UMBC handed out in June were for math, engineering, or science. And UMBC’s student technology pipeline is growing. The number of white science majors at UMBC has almost doubled, to nearly 1,300, since 1985. The number of African-American UMBC undergraduates majoring in science or engineering has increased sevenfold, to more than 400.

Today, UMBC is one of the leading producers of Black bachelor’s degrees and Ph.D.s in the sciences and engineering, this at an institution that is only 12% Black. In addition, Hrabowski’s non-traditional approach to student life and scholarships have made him a model for innovation in both areas. Consider, for example that he refuses to fund varsity football at his institution, choosing instead to direct precious scholarship dollars to those students with a proven record of both academic and extracurricular achievement. Hrabowski funds generous scholarship for competitive chess players, for example; and when the chess team wins national championships, he holds the kind of lavish on-campus celebrations usually reserved for football and basketball champs.

To read more about the life and leadership of Dr. Freeman Hrabowshi, III, check these links:

• Time Magazine — Freeman Hrabowski
• UMBC — About the President
• US News & World Report — Freeman Hrabowski

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Dr. Virginia Watts, the first Black woman student on the U of M campus, and the first Black woman to earn a U of M medical degree.

(Source: Origins of Diversity_UM)

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RPI president, Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson.

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According to last week’s Chronicle of Higher Education,  Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson was the highest paid president of a private U.S. college or university during the 2007-2008 school year (the most recent year for which statistics are available). During that year, Jackson’s total compensation for her duties as president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) amounted to $1,598,247.

Jackson’s compensation is a reflection of her unprecendented success as a fundraiser and visionary for the institution. Next month, RPI will hold a weekend-long celebration to mark Dr. Jackson’s first 10 years as president, a period that the Institute refers to as the “Decade of Transformation.” A recent report in the Albany Times Union describes the success that has mark this decade as well as the planned festivities:

Aretha Franklin will perform at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in December as part of a weekend celebration called a “Decade of Transformation” that celebrates President Jackson’s 10 years on the job and the culmination of the $1.4 billion capital campaign she led.

And Franklin, who performed at Obama’s inauguration in January, is just the Friday- night entertainment. On Saturday, Joshua Bell, one of the world’s most acclaimed violinists, will wow the revelers with his 1713 Stradivarius. Both shows will be held at the $200 million Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center and will only be open to members of the RPI community, including students, staff and alumni, RPI spokeswoman Theresa Bourgeois said Monday.

“One of the premier voices of the world is going to sing at one of the premier venues in the world,” said Bourgeois, who is Jackson’s personal spokeswoman. “It will be spectacular, as is the transformation at Rensselaer, so it’s very appropriate they’re coming.”

The weekend of celebration will be Dec. 4 to 6 and will include public events that showcase improvements to the school under Jackson’s tenure, including the construction of EMPAC, the recently unveiled $92 million East Campus Athletic Village, the renovation of student living quarters and a doubling of student applications, Bourgeois said. She said the weekend is also designed to recognize the hard work of the “hundreds of people” who have transformed the school in the past decade, including gardeners who shaped the grounds, fundraisers and professors who expanded programs and labs.

The school did not immediately disclose a price tag for the event, though it is certainly well into the six figures as both performers are internationally recognized and regularly command significant fees.

Biographical Notes: Shirley Ann Jackson holds a B.S. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) and a Ph.D. in theoretical elementary particle physics, also from M.I.T. Her research interest is in “theoretical condensed matter physics, especially layered systems, and the physics of opto-electronic materials” (source: RPI.com).

Prior to her appointment as RPI president, Dr. Jackson was, “Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission; a theoretical physicist conducting basic research at the former AT&T Bell Laboratories; and a professor of theoretical physics at Rutgers University” (source: RPI.com).

She and her husband, physicist Morris A. Washington (B.A. Fisk University, M.S. NYU, Ph.D. NYU), have a son, Alan (B.A. Dartmouth, 2003).

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Lou Jing, a student at Shanghai’s Theater Academy, dress for a night of competition on Go! Oriental Angel.

Lou Jing, a junior at Shanghai’s prestigious Theater Academy, considers herself completely Chinese. Many in China’s TV viewing audience would say otherwise. The daughter of a Chinese woman and an African American man she never met, Lou Jing nevertheless felt comfortable in the nation of her birth, that is until she appeared on a popular television singing competition. Her sudden visibility to those far outside the Shanghai region that she calls home sent shockwaves across the nation as viewers were confronted with the realityof multiracial identity, embodied in a talented young woman who is both Black and Chinese.

A contestant on the popular American Idol-type show, Go! Oriental Angel, Lou Jing made it through the first several rounds of the program and became one of 30 finalists. While she does have some supporters and fans, the sheer volume and intensity of her detractors’ comments have made news across China and around the world. In late September 2009, Time Magazine described the controversy as it was unfolding:

In August, Lou’s appearance on the show not only boosted viewer numbers but also sparked an intense nationwide debate about the essential meaning of being Chinese. Over the past month on Internet chat rooms, where modern China’s sensitive issues are thrashed out by netizens long before they reach the heavily censored mainstream media, Lou’s ethnicity has been the subject of a relentless barrage of criticism, some of it crudely racist. Many think she should not have been allowed to compete on a Chinese show, or at least not selected to represent Shanghai in the national competition. She doesn’t have fair skin, which is one of the most important factors for Chinese beauty. What’s more, her mother and her biological father were never married; morally, the argument goes, this kind of behavior shouldn’t be publicized, so she shouldn’t have been put on TV as a young “idol.”

These kinds of posts on the most popular chat rooms have attracted thousands of comments. A few have been supportive of Lou, but the rest range from expressions of fear and ignorance to outright racism. One of the most popular posts about Lou Jing on the KDS Life forum asked in mock seriousness, “Is it possible that she is Obama’s daughter?” Another poster said, “I can’t believe she’s so shameless that she would go on TV.” Most of the critics are agreed on one point: that this black woman cannot be regarded as a “real” Chinese.

Other posters called her skin “ugly” and “gross,” and referred to her as a “bastard” whose mother is a “whore” (Source: chinaSMACK.com, NPR.org)

In the end, Lou Jing did not win the competition, but her Go! Oriental Angel experience has forever changed her perspective on being Chinese and Black. In an interview with NPR, Lou Jing described the shift in her attitude:

Before, on the street, people might say things like, ‘How come she looks like that?’ But that was just a small number of people. When I was younger, I thought life was beautiful. Why is it that now I’ve grown up, I don’t think that anymore?

Lou Jing hopes to leave China, if not permanently, at least in order to finish her education in peace. According to NPR.org, “[h]er dream is of escape. She wants to study journalism at Columbia University. She believes the lack of knowledge about racism in China is such that many people didn’t even realize their comments were discriminatory or hurtful. But for her, the world suddenly seems a different place.”

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The Toast Bar, where Lionel McIntyre’s debate with Camille Davis degenerated into violence.

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The general consensus among Black bloggers is that, while arguments about race can get heated and frustrated, there is no excuse for Lionel McIntyre’s violent attack on Camille Davis. Many Black bloggers have asserted that while they can understand McIntyre’s intense feelings on the subject of white privilege, they are appalled by his choice to punch someone who disagreed with him, especially a woman.

Janet Shan for The Hinterland Gazette:

What I find appalling is that this man knows the struggles that blacks went through in this country, but yet, he got so angry that he hit a woman. According to the World Leaders Forum, he worked in civil rights and labor organization in the deep South from the mid-1960s to mid-1970s. He served as the director of planning for the Harlem Urban Development Corporation from 1989 to 1994 and served as advisor to the president of Columbia University on community development and the Empowerment Zone.  I have yet to see a statement issued by the university and I am wondering why he hasn’t been placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of this case in a court of law.

Dr. Boyce Watkins for Black Spin:

It’s not that black scholars dislike their white colleagues, it’s that many of us are tired of being thought of as second-class citizens. If any black Ph.D. student or professor says they haven’t thought about jumping over someone’s desk and “whooping ass” at least once, they’re telling a lie. Some of us hold in the frustration until we die of heart disease. Some of us submit ourselves to the system and become groveling Sambos, while many black scholars simply leave academia altogether. Either way, there is as much frustration for black scholars in America as there is within nearly every other profession dominated by whites. So as the comedian Chris Rock once said in a skit about O.J. Simpson, “I’m not saying he should have done it, but I understand.”

Chauncey DeVega for We Are Respectable Negroes:

I must admit, as frustrated as I may have been in my many discussions of white privilege, they have never come to fisticuffs. Unfortunately, on Monday of this week Professor McIntyre’s self-control was far less stalwart. Random thought: will tenure protect him on this one? Or is he out on a moral’s clause?

People of color have long learned the merits of sucking it in. Apparently, this policy of silent annoyance does occasionally result in moments of explosive rage.

Rob Taylor for Red Alerts:

Building bridges and breaking down the barriers that hold the Black man back. That’s what every Uncle Tom liberal who crawls off to places like Columbia to spend the better part of his life tap dancing for academia’s armchair Marxists and promoting policies that have destroyed the Black community will tell you he’s actually doing. In reality, “brothers” like Lionel McIntyre (or Beltway Sniper defending Jesse Taylor from Pandagon) know that they are part of the reason the Black community is in the shape it’s in and just don’t care.

SLAUS for O Hell Naw:

I completely understand WHY you would want to punch […]someone during a conversation regarding white privilege. Doesn’t give anyone the right to  actually DO it, but i definitely understand the feeling.  Which is why I don’t ever get into discussions on the topic while face-to-face  since I know it is a severely sensitive hot button with me and chances are I am going to completely make matters worse by hauling off and stabbing fools all in their face.

So… Professor, you can’t go around doing that ridiculous s**t. You can’t just go punching folks in the face over a damn discussion.

The Buzz at The Root:

Uh, professor? Race relations and white privilege are definitely topics that can get The Buzz worked into a lather but…you can’t punch women in the face.

Lionel McIntyre’s attack on Camille Davis  hurts all of the communities of which he is a part. There is no doubt that many women in the Columbia community will feel disrespected and unsafe as a result of his actions. Many Black students will feel embarrassed and betrayed, and many Black male students may well find themselves under increased scrutiny, all based on the behavior of someone whose actions have nothing to do with them…And then there are Lionel McIntyre’s Black faculty colleagues, at Columbia University and beyond.

On many campuses in the U.S. and around the world, Black scholars struggle to be taken seriously and to be seen as something more than the sum of 4 centuries of old and pernicious stereotypes and fears. A brief foray into the comments section of any newspaper that has reported on this case reveals that many non-Black readers have experienced McIntyre’s assault on Camille Davis as an affirmation of their worst and most bigoted ideas about Black professors (that we are nothing more than savages with fancy credentials), about African American studies, and about the role of all Black people in higher education. As a Black professor and as a woman, I am shocked and angered and disturbed by Lionel McIntyre’s actions. I am also angered and disturbed (but not at all shocked or surprised) by the viciously racist comments of so many of those who have weighed in on the coverage of this horrible event.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Black on Campus trivia: Howard University women’s lacrosse team is the first and only such team to be fielded by a Historically Black College or University (HBCU). To learn more about Howard Women’s Lax and it’s outstanding women athletes, follow THIS LINK and cheer them on during their upcoming spring 2010 season!

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“It was a very unfortunate event. I didn’t mean for it to explode the way it did.”

— Columbia University Professor Lionel MacIntyre on his physical altercation with female college Margaret Camille Davis

Lionel McIntyre

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Lionel McIntyre, the Nancy and George Rupp Associate Professor in the Practice of Community Development and the director of the Urban Technical Assistance Project at Columbia University, was arrested on Monday and charged with assault for his Friday evening attack on colleague Camille Davis.

The New York Times reports that Lionel McIntyre and Camille Davis, a theatre production manager for Columbia’s School of the Arts,  were having drinks at the Toast, when they got into a heated discussion about the issue of white privilege. The Times reports that, “Professor McIntyre liked to engage fellow patrons on the subject of race, according to one regular customer, Daniel Morgan, who considers himself a close acquaintance of both Professor McIntyre and Ms. Davis.”

The New York Post provides this account of the events leading up to McIntyre’s arrest:

The professor, who is black, had been engaged in a fiery discussion about “white privilege” with Davis, who is white, and another male regular, who is also white, Friday night at 10:30 when fists started flying, patrons said.

McIntyre, who is known as “Mac” at the bar, shoved Davis, and when the other patron and a bar employee tried to break it up, the prof slugged Davis in the face, witnesses said.

“The punch was so loud, the kitchen workers in the back heard it over all the noise,” bar back Richie Velez, 28, told The Post. “I was on my way over when he punched Camille and she fell on top of me.”

The other patron involved in the dispute said McIntyre then took a swing at him after he yelled, “You don’t hit a woman!”

“He knocked the glasses right off my face,” said the man, who would only give his first name as “Shannon.” “The punch came out of nowhere. Mac was talking to us about white privilege and what I was doing about it — apparently I wasn’t doing enough.”

McIntyre had squabbled with Davis several weeks earlier over issues involving race, witnesses said. As soon as the professor threw the punch Friday, server Rob Dalton and another employee tossed him out.

“It was a real sucker punch,” Dalton said. “Camille’s a great lady, always nice to everybody, and doesn’t deserve anything like this.”

Davis was spotted wearing sunglasses yesterday to conceal the black eye. Reached at her Columbia office, she declined to comment on the alleged attack.

McIntyre was released without bail at his arraignment last night.

“It was a very unfortunate event,” he said afterwards. “I didn’t mean for it to explode the way it did.”

I’ll be following the developments in this case, and I’ll definitely post when and if I learn anything new.

I am still having a bit of difficulty making sense of how a seemingly reasonable faculty member could engage in a physical attack on a colleague because a disagreement over this topic. White privilege is certainly a challenging and emotional topic, one that can be very frustrating to discuss both for people of color who are daily exposed to their benefits that white skin privilege confers and for those white people who perceive any assertion that they have “privilege” as an attempt to hold them individually culpable for the existence of racism.

McIntyre is an experienced professor, though, and thus should have been quite experienced in engaging productively with those whose understanding of white privilege differs from his own. I hope that his egregious behavior does not have any long-term negative impact on the racial climate on the Columbia University campus; I hope that Ms. Davis recovers from her injuries without any permanent damage; and, finally, I hope that Prof. McIntyre gets professional help for his anger management issues.

Posted by Ajuan Mance