The Color of Our Classroom, the Color of Our Future

Historically black colleges are key to producing African American faculty.

By Dolan Hubbard

Historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) constitute only 3 percent of U.S. colleges and universities, yet they enroll 28 percent of all African American students in higher education and educate 40 percent of the black Americans who earn doctorates or first professional degrees. Just fifteen HBCUs accounted for half of the institutions that ranked highest in graduating African Americans who obtained a PhD in 2003–04 (http://www.webcaspar.nsf.gov/). These statistics show just how important the black colleges are for producing African American PhDs and training black leaders. But these colleges are struggling to survive, and the loss of HBCUs could mean the disappearance of African American professors from U.S. classrooms.

My own institution, Morgan State University, consistently ranks in the top 10 percent of the nation’s HBCUs, of which there are slightly more than one hundred. Designated by the state of Maryland as a public urban university, Morgan was established in Baltimore in 1867, attained university status in 1975, and today has 7,000 students. Its mission is to address the needs associated with the urban community and to educate a relatively broad segment of Baltimore’s increasingly diverse population. Part of that mission includes offering programs that increase the number of minority students with graduate degrees in areas of demonstrated need. Morgan State leads all other Maryland campuses in the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded to African Americans and accounts for a relatively high percentage of the degrees received by African American graduates in English and other key fields. Historically, Morgan has been a national leader in educating African Americans who subsequently receive doctoral degrees from U.S. universities.

Imagine Freedom

Morgan State has been blessed over the years to have had a strong coterie of faculty who have instilled a legacy of excellence in students from diverse backgrounds. For their students, these teachers have made Morgan a safe harbor and a site where students can imagine freedom. Under the tutelage of their instructors, the sons and daughters of domestic workers, doctors, stevedores, steelworkers, teachers, and small business owners have become pillars of the community. Members of this largely black faculty—most with doctorates from the nation’s elite universities—have helped to put their students’ experiences into historical context, thereby enabling those who have been two, three, or four generations removed from slavery to understand the forces shaping their lives.

Generations of Morgan students learned that there are no limits to the imagination and no reason they should not pursue any line of intellectual inquiry. Of course, much of this intellectual inquiry is refracted through the lens of the African experience in the New World, a lens that sees America’s failure to live up to the promise of august national documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. To teach American history within the context of the Atlantic formation without discussing racism would be a failure of nerve.

Minority students, particularly African Americans, have been subject historically to persistent prejudice and discrimination. Their credentials, and even their humanity, have been called into question. The nurturing environment at Morgan, however, has encouraged students to indulge in flights of critical fancy or, as former Morgan student Zora Neale Hurston wrote in her 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, to “go to de horizon.”

In the exchanges that take place in an HBCU classroom, students are free of the almost incessant pressure to interpret, understand, or represent the true nature of “the souls of black folk.” This freedom is evident when students discuss works that some deem racially charged, such as The Tempest, Huckleberry Finn, Heart of Darkness, or Go Down Moses. It is this space that HBCUs open, a space available almost nowhere else, that allows for the wings of the imagination to unfurl to their full breadth. It permits the exercise of freedom, where students learn that they have the capacity to legislate by means of the imagination.

Too many black students’ ability to master subject matter and imitate models of success has been affected by limits placed on their imagination. I was one of about a dozen black students to attend Catawba College, a small, church-affiliated college in Salisbury, North Carolina, during the initial phase of integration in the late 1960s. I was the only black student in the MA program in English at the University of Denver in the mid-1970s, and I was one of three black students in the PhD program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the early 1980s. The unifying thread, as I look back, is my loneliness in what, at times, was an inhospitable environment.

This loneliness and the attendant isolation that I and others like me have felt speaks to the importance of mentoring and affirmation. (I hasten to add that I tell my students that mentors come in all hefts and hues). Without mentors who can jump barriers, and without African American faculty in the system, young African American students are much more likely to fail. Unfortunately, those who survive this rigorous terrain sometimes fall into the trap of believing the hype: they say to themselves and others who come after them that, against the odds, I made it, and so can you—without coming to grips with a system that does not promote their success.

As I listened to the papers of African American students at a recent conference organized by the Phi Upsilon Chapter of the Sigma Tau Delta International English Honor Society, I could not help but wonder: regardless of where they earned their bachelor’s degrees, are African American students who enter graduate schools, especially the most competitive ones, encouraged to pursue their first academic love? Or are they gently steered in the direction of post-1970s area studies such as African American literature, women’s studies, African diaspora literature, or postcolonial literature and away from foundational areas in English studies such as medieval literature, Shakespeare, or the Romantics? Against the odds, some, nevertheless, emerge from a PhD program and confidently say, “Reader, I married British literature.”

Of course, academic specializations in ethnic area studies were not available to graduate students before the civil rights movement. Students are now free to pursue these options. Although it is right to applaud the opening up of these areas and the important work that has helped to redraw the boundaries of the academic universe, it is worth remembering that students should be allowed the freedom to choose their own paths. Too often, assumptions about race curb the development of students of color and leave them without the guidance of mentors who are sensitive to these issues.

Social Equality

The current debate about who should have access to higher education is framed in such way as to presume that merit and access are mutually exclusive principles, thereby shutting down a meaningful discussion of access and equity. This reasoning stands in opposition to W.E.B. Du Bois’s vision of smashing “the color line” in a world where the black subject is excluded from history. The weight given to merit reflects the anxiety white Americans may feel at the prospect of integration and the failure of America to come to grips with the emergence of a truly multicultural society. Exclusion is antithetical to democracy, if by democracy we mean practicing social equality.

Democracy demands that the academy address the obvious underproduction of African American PhDs. African American graduate students should be encouraged to walk freely in all sections of the academic garden. Freer access might just make the difference in whether a student emerges from graduate school with a sense of self-fulfillment instead of a feeling of mere survivorship. More African American graduate students should have the opportunity to experience the joy that comes from the development of the scholarly imagination.

But who will speak in defense of African American students once they enter graduate school? Will they be encouraged to pursue areas of intellectual inquiry that match their passions? Will they continue the weary tradition of being “firsts” in their departments and have to overcome obstacles just to earn their degrees, or will they be primed to direct all their energies into becoming authorities in their fields? We want our students to be the best they can be, so it’s no wonder that those of us mentoring HBCU students routinely direct them into programs that have established track records of supporting and graduating African American students. We steer them toward departments that promote the success of African American students, not those that simply send anxiety-ridden new graduate students in the direction of the two or three black faculty members and consider their responsibility fulfilled.

Democratizing the academy means opening what Du Bois called the “doors of opportunity” and making it a receptive place for African American students. A competitive environment and a nurturing one need not be mutually exclusive. We must work to remove the perception that the academy is a private preserve in which African Americans are all too often spoken of but rarely spoken to or with. African Americans are frequently out of the loop in regard to meaningful academic discourse; many of them discover upon their arrival in the academy that they are tolerated in an atmosphere of benign neglect. This neglect may serve to create feelings of inadequacy and ambivalence on their part and may prevent their departments from benefiting from their presence. These black students can help us to see our field anew, no matter what specialty they choose. Their success is the success of all members of the department as well as the university.

Black Scholars

Are we scholars who are black or blacks who are scholars? As African American students wrestle with this question, those outside the academy see them as having made it, while those on the inside sometimes perceive them as necessary but unwelcome interlopers. The fortification that occurs in HBCUs often helps to nourish the young scholars who take this journey and prepares them for the times ahead when the legitimacy of their own imaginations may be challenged.

According to the 2004 Fall Staff Survey of the National Center for Education Statistics, 57.9 percent of the full-time faculty at HBCUs in fall 2003 were African American; only 4 percent of the full-time faculty at all other U.S. institutions were African American. Although some people view the nation’s HBCUs as a pale simulacrum of their traditionally white counterparts, they in fact contribute to a culture of excellence and fulfill an important function.

Despite the nearly forty-year push to integrate the academy following the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., HBCUs remain the colleges of choice for many of the nation’s black students. They see them as sites where they can imagine freedom, places where they are affirmed. Black students need to see someone who looks like them and who can speak with authority, and without restrictions, on the great issues that confront the human community. White students need to know that academic citizenship is not a property right and that the world in which they will reach their majority will be a mostly black and brown one.

HBCUs practice a pedagogy of success, instilling in their students an intellectual toughness that, in the words of a well-known spiritual, invests them with the determination not to “let nobody turn me ’round.” The number of future PhDs HBCUs produce is testimony to their success. Graduate departments looking for more minority PhD recipients need look no further than the nation’s HBCUs for the scholars who will make it in their programs. And we can all take lessons from HBCUs when it comes to inspiring undergraduates of color to become the faculty members of the next decade.

Dolan Hubbard is professor of English and chair of the Department of English and Language Arts at Morgan State University. He teaches courses on slave narrative, the African American novel, and W.E.B. Du Bois. His publications include The Sermon and the African American Literary Imagination and The Souls of Black Folk: One Hundred Years Later. He is a member of the editorial board of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. His e-mail address is dolan.hubbard@verizon.net.

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