Adopt-a-school Plan

Southern Negro colleges may be theoretically obsolete in an integrationist era, but they are a practical necessity for a long time to come. Accepting this fact, foundations have since last fall showered money on impoverished Negro colleges. Encouraged by the American Council of Education, which sees big-scale Northern university aid as the most practicable way of raising Negro college standards decisively and quickly, more than a dozen Northern schools are exchanging faculty members and students with Southern partners. California's Pomona, for example, is matched with Nashville's Fisk, Pennsylvania's Haverford and Bryn Mawr with North Carolina's Livingstone, Cornell with Virginia's Hampton Institute.

The University of Michigan and Tuskegee Institute, in a wider collaboration, are reforming Tuskegee's curriculum in biology, chemistry, engineering and veterinary medicine. Last week Rhode Island's prosperous Brown University and Mississippi's Tougaloo College announced the most ambitious "big brother" arrangement yet.

"Cancer College." The Tougaloo campus, just outside Jackson, is an old Faulknerian plantation dotted with moss-hung oaks. A rundown ante-bellum mansion serves as the administration building. It is the only integrated school in Mississippi; Jackson racists call it "Cancer College." The dean of students, Methodist Minister R. Edwin King, keeps as a souvenir a charred K.K.K. cross--"the handy field model," he jokes--that was set afire this spring on Tougaloo's campus.

The college has a faculty of 34 (half white, half Negro) and a student body of half a dozen whites and 500 Negroes. "We get some students with good potential, but they are undereducated--if they are educated at all," said Adam Beittel, the white president of Tougaloo.

"What they need more than anything else is someone who can give them motivation."

Cram Courses. Foundation grants of $363,000 will pay for some basic necessities. Faculty salary ceilings will be raised from $6,500 to $8,000, to slow down a high turnover rate. The library will be expanded beyond its meager list of 33,000 titles. Brown's share of the job will be to supply what money cannot buy: higher academic standards.

Brown graduate students and professors will go to Tougaloo on one-year assignments to beef up its overloaded staff (only the English department has more than three teachers) and improve instruction in several departments taught by men without doctorates. Tougaloo, in turn, plans to send promising graduates to Providence for a fifth year of study, enabling them to go on to get advanced degrees. Jointly, Tougaloo and Brown will expand the college's curriculum, add a tutorial system.

Starting this summer, Tougaloo will conduct and Brown will supervise five-week remedial classes in English, math and geography for incoming Tougaloo freshmen. Negro high school graduates in Mississippi are usually so far behind normal U.S. standards that they spend the first year or two catching up with college-level courses. Since three-fourths of Tougaloo's graduates become teachers, the cram courses will help to break a melancholy cycle of Southern Negro education that produces poor teachers from inferior segregated schools, who teach a new generation of poor students, who in turn become the next generation of poor teachers.

Brown, with only 37 American Negroes among its student body of 4,300, expects to profit from the partnership by what it will learn firsthand about the Southern Negro. Said President Barnaby C. Keeney: "We welcome the opportunity to participate directly in what could become the most significant educational experiment of this generation."

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