Academic Disaster Area

Despite the steady increase of Negro students at the nation's major universities, the U.S. still has more than 120 colleges that have a predominantly Negro student population. How good are they? In the current issue of the Harvard Educational Review, Sociologist David Riesman and Christopher Jencks, a contributing editor of the New Republic, deliver a soberly scathing judgment. The Negro colleges, they argue, constitute an "academic disaster area."

Riesman and Jencks contend that the Negro colleges never had a satisfactory rationale for their separatism, existing only because white colleges would not admit black students. Dependent largely upon whites for financial survival, the schools have never been aggressive in attacking segregation. For officials of these colleges, "the result was usually self-contempt, born either from acceptance of the white view that Negroes were inferior or from disgust at having succumbed silently to an outrageous injustice, or from both." Their schools became "an ill-financed, ill-staffed caricature of white higher education."

Frustration & Boredom. Most Negro colleges, the authors write, are staffed by a "domineering but frightened president" and a "faculty tyrannized by the president and in turn tyrannizing the students." They "admit almost any high school graduate who will pay tuition and graduate most of those who keep paying." But about half the students simply opt out--and not without reason: "These colleges are so monotonous that it may well be the better students who leave, in frustration or boredom."

The researchers consider it "unlikely that any all-Negro school will ever have a first-rate graduate professional program." The only Negro medical schools--those at Howard University in Washington and Meharry in Nashville--"rank among the worst in the nation, and would probably have been closed long ago had they not been a main source of doctors willing to tend Negro patients." The five Negro law schools, claim Riesman and Jencks, "are only one jump ahead of the accrediting agencies."

On the undergraduate level, the authors rate only a handful of Negro schools as exceptions to the role of inferiority. They put Fisk, Morehouse, Spelman, Hampton, Howard, Tuskegee, Dillard, Texas Southern and Morgan State "near the middle of the national academic procession." A few of these schools, they point out, are good enough to attract white students and eventually they may lose their identity as basically Negro schools.

Neurotic Reasons. Riesman and Jencks doubt that the majority of Negro colleges will ever achieve significant student integration. The only whites many can attract are those who attend them "for a mixture of idealistic, exploratory and neurotic reasons." At the same time, white colleges increasingly seek out the best Negro students, contributing further to the decline of the Negro schools. Yet these institutions will not die, say the authors, if only because they "give an otherwise unattainable sense of importance to their trustees, administrators, faculty and alumni."

Separate Negro colleges could justify their continuing existence by "channeling outside money and ideas into the local Negro community," by concentrating on Negro culture, or merely by serving as "residential secondary schools" to offset poor instruction in lower grades. But all these alternatives, the authors admit, would "entail an intolerable loss of status." In effect, Riesman and Jencks urge most Negro colleges to lower their sights. For most academically untrained and unmotivated students, black or white, the best that a college can expect to do is "improve their basic skills a little," give them an idea of what middle-class life is like and provide them with the diploma that could help them enter that life. College comes too late, they contend, to make "the life of the mind" either "attractive or accessible to many students who have been intellectually starved for their first 17 years."

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