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The HBCU Presidents Who Almost Got Away...

I have frequently noted the irony, or worse (hypocrisy?), of ?civil rights? advocates loudly proclaiming that pigmentary ?diversity? is indispensable to a decent education even as they also loudly sing the praises of, and seek more funding for, historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), perhaps the least ?diverse? institutions in the country.

Indeed, I like to think I follow these issues with some care, but had it not been for Mychal Massie, chairman of Project 21, an advocacy organization of black conservatives, I would have missed the enlightening and amusing controversy over HBCUs that recently broke out in the pages of the Washington Post over a typically impressive OpEd piece in the Wall Street Journal several months ago by Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, which I also inexcusably missed. (My staff is really falling down on its job, or it would be if I had a staff.)

HBCUs were created when blacks were excluded from all other higher education institutions in the South and largely excluded elsewhere as well. Today, however, virtually all colleges and universities are clamoring for more black students to provide ?diversity? to others, and so the Thernstroms asked a number of sensible, reasonable questions about their current role. HBCUs are no longer exclusively for blacks, they point out, but

they are racially identifiable--much more so than most of the urban public schools that liberal critics routinely denounce as disastrously ?segregated.? Well over 80% of their students, and more than six out of 10 faculty members, are African-American. These institutions are defined by a commitment to a black identity that, for many students, remains meaningful. Morehouse, for instance, proudly advertises itself as ?The Best College in the Nation for Educating African Americans.?

But overwhelmingly white institutions are also eager for a significant black presence. If all educational doors are so wide open to black students and professors, should we really hope that schools such as Fisk survive?

The Thernstroms go on to point out the valuable role that HBCUs in fact do continue to play, graduating a disproportionate number of the blacks who major in the hard science and those who go on to get Ph.Ds, and the fact that they remain ?racially identifiable? does not, by itself, mean they should be closed down.

Whatever the true story (and the inadequacies of the data make a definitive judgment difficult), the evidence does not indicate that HBCUs are ?the best? schools for African-Americans across the board, as some enthusiasts claim. But they do seem to meet a real need, serving their students well in important respects.

In a free society, many private and public institutions will have a distinctive profile. Group clustering is not necessarily unhealthy; indeed, it?s an inescapable feature of a multiethnic nation. No one worries that there are ?too many? Jews at Yeshiva and Brandeis, ?too many? Catholics at Notre Dame and Holy Cross, ?too many? Mormons at Brigham Young. And so it should be with Howard, Fisk and Mississippi Valley State. That?s what democratic pluralism means.

For some reason best known to themselves, the presidents of four Maryland HBCUs took offense, and after several months published this response in the Washington Post. (However, giving new meaning to the term ?invisible man,? this response was directed only to Abigail Thernstrom, ignoring Stephan, her co-author.) Inadvertently providing disturbing new evidence of the quality of education at HBCUs (assuming for the moment that presidential utterances reflect to some degree that quality), the four black presidents begin their response with the following odd comments:

The age-old debate over the role and relevance of historically black institutions is again taking center stage, fueled, in part, by those who seem not to understand that a main object of the civil rights movement was to enhance educational opportunities for African Americans by eliminating the vestiges of segregation and enhancing their educational institutions -- the HBIs.

Apparently, one such person is U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Abigail Thernstrom, who suggested in a recent Wall Street Journal column that the object of the civil rights movement was to eliminate historically black colleges and universities and move the most talented black students into white institutions rather than providing both black and white students equal opportunities to a quality education at either an HBI or a traditionally white campus. Such mistaken interpretations of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the landmark 1992 Fordice Supreme Court case do a great injustice to historically black institutions and the students they serve. Most unfortunately, they threaten to open old wounds related to race and poverty.

The Thernstroms said no such things, but what is even more remarkable about this passage is its own distorted understanding of Brown and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. (You can read Fordice for yourself, here, and I have written about similar misunderstandings of Brown too often to cite all of them, but see especially this one and this one, which cites a number of others.)

In his own response last Saturday to the president?s response, Project 21?s Mychal Massie says their view of Brown et. al. ?is nothing short of revisionism.? This is a polite but massive (Massi[v]e ?) understatement. The notion that Brown, the Civil Rights Act, Fordice, et. al. were intended to establish a separate but equal system of higher education to ?enhance educational opportunities for African Americans by eliminating the vestiges of segregation and enhancing their educational institutions? is nothing short of risible, or would be if it weren?t so sad.

One can understand why the presidents of black institutions might come to define civil rights as the rights of blacks to have ?their institutions? enhanced, but the idea of separate black, or white, institutions is the polar opposite of the vision that animated Brown and the principle that was enacted in the Civil Rights Act.

As Gertrude Stein famously said of Oakland (spelling modified for current purposes), regarding the racial ownership of public institutions in the United States there is no ?their? there.

Full post as published by Discriminations on February 25, 2008 (boomark / email).