Remarks prepared by Jane Buck for the Ramapo Conference
April 16-19, 2003.
Ramapo College of New Jersey
Mahwah, New Jersey
I am delighted to be here and to participate in this exciting conference. There are two major components to my remarks today, the role of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) relative to the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and to individual minority faculty members.
But first, let me give you a little personal and historical background. I spent 29 years as a faculty member at a public HBCU, Delaware State University, located in the geographical center of a border state that allowed slavery, but that fought on the side of the Union in the Civil War. To give you a sense of the political and social climate in which my institution is forced to operate, I quote an African-American colleague who told me that he felt as though, so far as race relations were concerned, he had gone back in time 30 years when he moved to Delaware from Mississippi in the eighties.
In 1968, the year before I started teaching at the university, the National Guard occupied the campus, with attack dogs and a full complement of weaponry. Both the student body and the administration were, with few exceptions, African-American. The faculty, on the other hand, were only about 50% African-American and roughly equally balanced by gender. Within a few years, the composition of the student body had dramatically changed, with European-Americans comprising anywhere from 35 to 45 percent in a given year, a proportion that has remained fairly constant. African-American and European-American faculty have retained approximate parity and together make up the majority, with the last decade seeing the addition of a sizable minority of Africans and Asians.
Delaware State is probably fairly typical of public HBCUs. It is important, however, to keep in mind that the HBCUs are as varied as the istorically white institutions. There are more than 100 HBCUs located primarily in southern and border states. They are small, private, church-related colleges, with only a few hundred students and minuscule endowments. They are elite, private, liberal-arts colleges whose graduates are virtually guaranteed admission into professional and graduate programs. They are medium-sized public comprehensive universities, dependent in large part on the largesse of state legislatures. And they are large, prestigious research universities like Howard University, which of course, is unique. HBCU student bodies are sometimes almost exclusively African-American, as is that of Lincoln University of Pennsylvania and sometimes, to the surprise of many, almost exclusively European-American, as is that of Bluefield State University in West Virginia.
Most HBCUs were founded to educate former slaves after the Civil War, but the oldest, by one reckoning, Cheyney State University in Pennsylvania, was founded in 1837 to educate free African-Americans separately from whites simply because they were black. Racism was the foundation on which the HBCUs were built. The administrations of HBCUs have always had to be politically sensitive and astute, because the survival of their institutions depended on their ability to negotiate very tricky racial waters.
The HBCUs were the primary provider of higher education to African-Americans in the nineteenth century and throughout most of the twentieth century, but came under pressure during the 1970s to justify their continued existence. The argument that African-American students now had a right to attend predominantly white institutions was used to undermine the need for the continued existence of the HBCUs.
In 1981, President Reagan issued an executive order intended to legitimate segregated African-American colleges and universities and sidestep the constitutional ban on "separate but equal" educational institutions. The administration's emphasis was on equalizing the funding of black and white institutions, a position that the Supreme Court had already rejected. Although intended to increase the flow of federal funds to the historically African-American institutions, the executive order did little to improve their financial status.
In the spring of 1982, Congress cut aid to education and student loan programs. African-American students had a great deal at stake in the outcome. Further cuts would seriously reduce the number of low-income students who could attend college, and African-Americans were disproportionately affected. Some 90% of all African-American students in traditionally black colleges come from families with low income, and aid from either the federal government or the state is necessary for many students to stay in college or to begin. In predominantly white colleges some 50% of all African-American students need some assistance to begin or stay in college.
In the 1990s two developments in higher education had a negative impact on the exercise of shared governance. Governing boards turned increasingly to corporate managers for their members. Market metaphors began to dominate discussions of curriculum, faculty responsibilities, and students' place in the academy, and academic concerns gave way to the bottom line. Most public colleges and universities faced the additional burden of making up the shortfall created by decreasing state appropriations. The public HBCUs, already vulnerable to mounting skepticism about the need for their continued existence, were forced into a defensive posture. The perceived necessity for all components of the institution to present a united front to lawmakers and the general public generated an atmosphere that was less than favorable to the vigorous debate that shared governance and academic freedom require.
This is a critical time for the HBCUs. Standing at the confluence of two broad social trends, HBCUs are especially vulnerable to some of the most dangerous transformations sweeping higher education today. The first trend might best be termed a "managerial revolution" that is characterized by rapidly increasing administrative costs and salaries. In higher education institutions, this expansion at the top is typically balanced by diminishing numbers of new hires and the stagnation of faculty salaries. The second trend of particular concern is the general societal retreat from principles of equity and social justice. This abandonment of principle is evident in everything from the slicing away of government funding for human services to the mounting attacks against affirmative action and other policies designed to rectify historic injustices.
The managerial revolution undermines the professional authority and autonomy of the faculty, and does so, in part, by adding to professorial workloads while systematically starving faculty members of the resources that they require to properly serve their students' needs. The retreat from principle erodes the educational opportunities and rights of minority students and, to the extent that education is a vehicle for social mobility, rigidifies the present structures of wealth and privilege in our society.
The AAUP engages these injustices on as many fronts as possible. A little more than a year ago, the AAUP, along with the Howard University Faculty Senate and the American Conference of Academic Deans (ACAD), hosted a conference on shared governance with a special focus on HBCUs and their issues. Assisted by a Ford Foundation grant, we subsidized the attendance of many HBCU faculty members and initiated a dialogue on the role that faculty can play in shaping their future through collegial governance. Last October, we again subsidized the attendance of a large number of HBCU faculty at our Governance Conference in Atlanta. More than half of the country's HBCUs have been represented at one or the other of these two conferences.
More recently, we affiliated with the independent faculty organization at LeMoyne-Owen College in Memphis. We did this largely to support the faculty's effort to compel their administration to recognize the Organization as the legal collective bargaining representative for faculty at LeMoyne-Owen. Towards that end, I assigned one of our staff specialists to work with that faculty and will lend whatever support that I can, including a visit to Memphis in the coming months, to keep that campaign moving forward. LeMoyne-Owen is the latest HBCU to join the ranks of AAUP chapters organized for collective bargaining. Others include my campus, Delaware State University, Edward Waters College, Wilberforce University, Central State University in Ohio, and Lincoln University of Pennsylvania, which is part of the Pennsylvania state-related system.
On the political and legal fronts, we, along with a host of other higher education organizations (the United Negro College Fund and the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education among them), are lobbying hard to make access the focus of the Congressional reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. We have filed amicus briefs in several affirmative action cases that are presently before the Supreme Court (the University of Michigan cases, Gratz v. Bollinger, et al. and Grutter v. Bollinger, et al.) and have numerous resources available from our web site for those who are seeking information on the imperative of maintaining diversity in all our colleges and universities.
The problems of individual minority faculty members at both the HBCUs and majority institutions are also of great concern to the Association. HBCU faculty complain of crushing teaching loads, coupled with accelerating demands for research productivity, a lack of effective participation in governance, and pathetically low salaries. Although faculty at majority institutions also face increasingly difficult criteria for promotion and tenure, especially in the area of research and publication, the historic emphasis at most HBCUs on teaching means that the demand for scholarly productivity is grafted on a teaching load of four or more courses a semester.
African-American faculty members at majority institutions often feel isolated and overburdened. They feel compelled to perform exceptionally well because they perceive the need to prove their worth in the face of overt or covert accusations that they have achieved their positions simply because of their race. Women faculty of color report even greater pressure than their male counterparts because of the traditional expectation that women will provide service to their students, the department, the institution, and the larger community in greater measure than their male colleagues.
In the AAUP world, faculty from around the country confer on best practices and higher education policy that affect everyone. At the same time, we assist faculty members themselves to develop solutions for problems that are particular to their local institutions. The mechanism for such work is the AAUP chapter on campus. Chapters do not necessitate unionization, but, to be effective, they do require that many faculty members at the institution belong to the national association. The vast majority of AAUP chapters are what we call "traditional" advocacy chapters. Such chapters, like the one at Howard, provide a focus for faculty activism and can tackle tough governance problems and other campus issues by becoming a coherent voice for the faculty's interests. The AAUP is committed to the defense of the principles of shared governance and of academic freedom and tenure, responding to attacks from critics who seek to change the nature of the academic enterprise.
We are also addressing issues such as the proliferation of part-time and non-tenure-track appointments, the increasing difficulty of obtaining tenure, and the use of budgetary weapons to control curricula and to limit faculty prerogatives. The trend to wield control through fiscal means is always troubling, but it is especially so in a time such as this when it is probably accurate to say that most public colleges and universities are facing crippling cuts in state support, reductions in endowment income, and declining contributions. The HBCUs, almost always underfunded, are particularly vulnerable in times of fiscal crisis. Through our lobbying efforts at both the state and federal levels, AAUP encourages legislation that will benefit faculty, students, and their institutions.
Please consider joining us as we continue our work on behalf of the profession and higher education. We are not always right when we speak out, but we are always wrong when we do not.
Jane Buck, Ph.D.
National President
American Association of University Professors