Intellectual Black Power

Not many college presidents are like Charles G. Hurst Jr.--yet. He is a high school dropout who was a husband and father at 15. He has been a boxer, ditch digger, janitor, foundry hand and crane operator, and has served four months and 14 days in a North Carolina jail for being caught with bootleg liquor. Now 43, he delivers evangelistic speeches to his student body, garbed in dashikis, while from a gold chain around his neck hangs a carved African-style tiki in the form of a clenched fist.

For the past 2 1/2 years Hurst has presided over Chicago's Malcolm X College, one of seven two-year community colleges run by the city. This fall, enrollment will increase to 5,000, making Malcolm X one of the largest black undergraduate colleges in the nation. By bluntly adjusting higher education to urban black students rather than trying to adjust the students to the curriculum, Hurst has already been enormously successful in solving depressingly familiar problems.

Ideal Nigger. Like Malcolm X, Hurst emerged from jail armed with "bitterness and determination." He worked his way through Detroit's Wayne State University, and went on to get a Ph.D. in audiology. At 36, he became professor of speech at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he was tapped for the Chicago job. "It looked like I was the ideal nigger," he says dryly. "They thought they were getting a good ole Howard Negro."

Chicago was getting more than that --and needed it. When Hurst arrived at the junior college then called Crane, the student body, once white, had become mostly black. But the teachers were still 75% white, and they were somehow unable to make even remedial programs work: 80% of the students dropped out before finishing one semester. In the face of rising student hostility, the college provided an armed guard and bus to take faculty members the 400 yards from the front door to the parking lot.

Hurst immediately set to work to purge faculty members who were "not interested in the community, the school or the students." He now concedes that he used every technique "including intimidation," a precedent he could regret if the community ever turns against him. By the end of his first year, over half the original faculty had left. Chancellor of City Colleges Oscar E. Shabat ran powerful interference with the infuriated teachers' union, and Hurst assembled a faculty that is more than 60% black (he aims for 80%). It is heavy with recruits who had become frustrated by the city's public school system, and this fall it will be sprinkled with black celebrities, including Sammy Davis Jr.

Redesigning Things. The college was originally named for Richard T. Crane, a white manufacturer of plumbing equipment, which prompted Hurst to declare the decrepit school he took over "an educational cesspool." After an eight-month battle with the board of the Chicago City Colleges, Hurst got Crane renamed for Malcolm X, raised the green, red and black flag of black liberation next to the U.S. and Illinois flags, and won the trust of Chicago's black radicals. Black Panther Leader Fred Hampton had been a student the semester before he was killed in a police shootout. This year, Hurst called attention to the high mortality among black youths in Chicago by awarding a posthumous degree to Reginald Knox, one of his students who was killed, apparently by members of a gang he refused to join. Says Hurst: "In the past, the idea was for a black person to go to a collegiate institution and try to become white in as many ways as possible, then hope to be accepted by the white community. We have begun to redesign things."

Tuned to diverse city rhythms, Malcolm X runs a weekend college every Saturday and Sunday for 1,000 working students who are too weary for the school's night classes. This fall, it will open a day care center to help the several dozen mothers who now take their babies with them to class. Mindful of his own prison stay, Hurst recruits parolees, recently started an extension of the college in a reformatory. Several lawyers on the Malcolm X faculty defend students who Hurst says are often harassed by Chicago police.

Hurst has scant patience with the notion that college is only for the "qualified." Says he: "College courses are overrated. There is nothing in college that the average person cannot learn if given time and the proper motivation. Here, we deal in motivation, and we give them time." Students have unlimited time to complete a course satisfactorily. Much of the motivation comes from Hurst's missionary encouragement of black pride through curriculum in black studies (Hurst teaches the course on institutional racism that is required of all students). In addition, students are spurred by the prospect of solid jobs in the growing fields for which the school's vocational programs prepare them, including medical lab work, industrial plant engineering, nursing and even police work.

No Profanity. Hurst bans profanity and expels anyone seen fighting or selling drugs. He has made academic standards more flexible, but insists that there be standards nonetheless. High school dropouts can be admitted, but they must undergo a probationary semester or pass a high school equivalency exam before fully matriculating; for those who need help with that exam, Malcolm X operates a street academy. Entire classes devoted to remedial work have been eliminated --"they convinced students of their un-educability"--but Hurst says many students come to understand that they need more basic skills. If so, they go to a "learning center" for individual tutoring.

Hurst's heuristic methods have begun to achieve amazing results. Reports TIME Correspondent Jacob E. Simms: "There is a certain hardness to the student body. The usual buzzing and chatter are absent. An almost solemn silence permeates the hallways. Intense arguments go on in the student lounge. Even basketball seems to be played with unusual seriousness." The dropout rate has plummeted; this year less than 10% of Hurst's students failed to complete each semester. Members of last year's graduating class were accepted at colleges from the University of Illinois to Howard to Berkeley; all 115 graduates of the various nursing programs have jobs. Meanwhile the trustees voted to erect a modern, block-long $26 million building into which the college moved last spring.

Unquestionably highhanded and ambitious, Hurst antagonizes people who disagree with him. Even sympathetic visitors occasionally come away with a sense that some of the innovations he talks about are not yet fully successful. No one knows whether the esprit that Hurst generated among the first students can carry over as the college expands. Still, he got a major vote of confidence last week when state and federal officials announced that Malcolm X would get the lion's share of nearly $1,000,000 in grants to Chicago-area colleges. A good many people seem to agree with the view of Civil Rights Leader Jesse Jackson. "The genius of Dr. Hurst," says Jackson, "is his ability to turn the urge for rebellion into a quest for knowledge."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.