Black Colleges Matter

 By Alexander Nazaryan 8/18/15 at 4:37 AM

Coutesy of NewsWeek - http://www.newsweek.com/black-colleges-matter-363667

Medgar Evers College, an overwhelmingly black branch of the City University of New York, sits atop a hill in central Brooklyn. It is across the street from the mustard-colored high-rises of the Ebbets Field Apartments, named for the long-gone baseball field where the Brooklyn Dodgers played until 1957, and where Jackie Robinson had broken the color barrier in major league baseball in 1947. Medgar Evers is a cluster of newish glass-and-brick buildings that radiate competence and promise. The college’s crest shows the scales of justice, a lamp and a pair of hands struggling against shackles.

Medgar Evers is not one of the historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) discussed by journalist Ron Stodghill in his new book Where Everybody Looks Like Me: At the Crossroads of America's Black Colleges and Culture. Its plight, however, aligns almost perfectly with the ailments Stodghill diagnoses at those paragons of black scholarship in the South and the Midwest, where the vast majority of HBCUs are located. Medgar Evers may not be the equal of Howard University, but if Stodghill is right, both schools are heading down the same perilous path, taking black aspirations with them.

As is often the case at HBCUs, many students at Medgar Evers are the first in their families to attend college. Few Evers students, however, graduate: According to U.S. News & World Report, its four-year graduation rate is only 4 percent, about five times less than the average at non-flagship American public institutions (some of this may be because of the school’s open admissions policy). Overall, no HBCU had a graduation rate higher than 70 percent as of last year, with Spelman (69 percent) and Howard (65 percent) coming closest. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, which compiled the statistics, found that the bottom half of HBCUs had a graduation rate of no higher than 34 percent. This may be in line with public flagship universities (36 percent), but below the Northeastern colleges whose equals the HBCUs have long aspired to be. Yes, the HBCUs graduated the likes of Martin Luther King Jr., Alice Walker, Ralph Ellison and Oprah Winfrey, but whom are they graduating today?

Not only are fewer students graduating HBCUs, many fewer are choosing to attend them. HBCUs made much more sense in 1925 than 2015, when a top-notch black student may find herself choosing between, say, Spelman, Oberlin and Cornell. What can Spelman offer her that the predominantly white institutions can’t? As recently as four decades ago, Stodghill writes, some 80 percent of black students attended an HBCU; today, that figure is a mere 9 percent.

Colleges without students do as well as airlines without passengers, and as black students snub HBCUs, HBCUs face the first true existential crisis in their collective history. St. Paul’s College, in Lawrenceville, Virginia, has closed; Fisk University, in Nashville, Tennessee, has sold off half its stake in an art collection left to it by Georgia O’Keeffe. Morris Brown College, in Atlanta, was stripped of its accreditation in 2002 and was limping along with only 35 students last year.

HBCU administrators often take the blame, though the ship rarely goes down from captain error alone. At Medgar Evers, President William L. Pollard was ousted two years ago, accused, as the The New York Times put it, of acting “without an appreciation for the institution’s history.” Among his early transgressions was “switching the campus automated teller machines from the black-run Carver Federal Savings Bank to Citibank,” according to a Times report on his tumultuous first year. His appeals to long-term planning and cost-cutting were met with suspicion from those who loved the place with all its imperfections. “The administration is out of character with anything we need,” one professor complained.

That same year, Howard President Sidney A. Ribeau was forced to resign for strikingly similar reasons. The Washington Post noted that his departure came in an autumn of developments that “many Howard boosters found dispiriting: a drop for the university in a major national ranking and a downgrade in its credit rating. It also came a year after enrollment at the university suddenly fell 5 percent.” He was accused of enriching himself and top administrators while starving the university. Stodghill capably chronicles the school’s troubles, from the missing Academy Award of Hattie McDaniel to the recent travails of the university’s hospital, a fabled institution that once treated freed slaves but whose $37 million annual losses were responsible for a downgrading of Howard’s credit rating in 2014.

Most Americans are only marginally concerned with the state of higher education, but Stodghill argues that the decline of the HBCU is a national crisis, not just a black one, and that we should all care. “It is hard to imagine a single greater threat to the future of African-Americans than the demise of its higher education system,” he writes. Stodghill, who is African-American and teaches at an HBCU in North Carolina, isn’t downplaying the issues of discriminatory policing and excessively punitive criminal justice that, others would argue, are far more threatening to the prospects of black America. He argues, instead, that HBCUs are the “main artery connecting to the heart of black America.” Sever it, and the race cannot survive.

The nation’s first college for African-Americans began in 1837 as the Institute for Colored Youth (today, Cheney University), about 20 miles west of Philadelphia. Most HBCUs, though, were founded during Reconstruction “to educate some half-million newly freed slaves,” Stodghill writes. Howard University was founded in 1867 and has long been sustained by a congressional appropriation, now totaling $223 million per year. All-men’s Morehouse College was founded that same year, in Atlanta, while all-women’s Spelman College was founded in 1881 next door. Together, the three formed a sort of mini Ivy League for black students who wouldn’t be allowed into those great patrician colleges of the Northeast. The Harvard Man had an equal in the Morehouse Man.

The most famous HBCU, though, may be a fictional one.

Photo and Photo Credit: