Historically Black Colleges and Universities

Charles L. Betsey, Charles L. Betsey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351515641
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Beginning in the 1830s, public and private higher education institutions established to serve African-Americans operated in Pennsylvania and Ohio, the Border States, and the states of the old Confederacy. Until recently the vast majority of people of African descent who received post-secondary education in the United States did so in historically black institutions. Spurred on by financial and accreditation issues, litigation to assure compliance with court decisions, equal higher education opportunity for all citizens, and the role of race in admissions decisions, interest in the role, accomplishments, and future of Historically Black Colleges and Universities has been renewed. This volume touches upon these issues.

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are a diverse group of 105 institutions. They vary in size from several hundred students to over 10, 000. Prior to Brown v. Board of Education, 90 percent of African-American postsecondary students were enrolled in HBCUs. Currently the 105 HBCUs account for 3 percent of the nation's educational institutions, but they graduate about one-quarter of African-Americans receiving college degrees. The competition that HBCUs currently face in attracting and educating African-American and other students presents both challenges and opportunities. Despite the fact that numerous studies have found that HBCUs are more effective at retaining and graduating African-American students than predominately white colleges, HBCUs have serious detractors. Perhaps because of the increasing pressures on state governments to assure that public HBCUs receive comparable funding and provide programs that will attract a broader student population, several public HBCUs no longer serve primarily African-American students.

There is reason to believe, and it is the opinion of several contributors to this book, that in the changing higher education environment HBCUs will not survive, particularly those that are

Truth, Generalizations, and Stigmas: An Analysis of the Media’s Coverage of Morris Brown College and Black Colleges Overall

Marybeth Gasman

A half-century after Brown v. Board of Education, 40 years after Lyndon Johnson’s speech endorsing the concept of affirmative action, and two years after the Supreme Court upheld racial diversity as a factor in admissions, the approximately 80 historically black colleges and universities still enroll more than 10 percent of the African-American students in higher education and award close to 20 percent of degrees. These institutions have produced leaders from Thurgood Marshall to Jesse Jackson to Spike Lee. Their step shows, marching bands, and fraternities and sororities have become integral elements of African American culture. It is [common] in black churches and neighborhoods for parents to believe that their children will have better outcomes in black colleges than in mostly white ones, because the black schools provided a more nurturing, supportive environment, free of white presumptions that blacks are intellectual inferiors or expectations they should portray the role of hip-hop gangsta. But what happens when the truism appears less and less true? What happens when an education emergency is ignored except by those enduring it? (Freedman, August 3, 2004)

The above quote about the dire situation at the nation’s black colleges was penned by New York Times reporter Samuel Freedman and is based on his visit to one historically black institution—Texas Southern University (TSU). In fact, one of the individuals interviewed for the article by Freedman, scholar Jacqueline Fleming, was angered enough by the reporter’s comments and interpretations to write a letter to the editor of the Times. In the words of Fleming, a faculty member and Director of the General University Academic Center at TSU,

I cannot say how disappointed I was with the article by Samuel Friedman [sic] on black colleges… . I do understand his assignment was to investigate low graduation rates, but that is where the problem begins. His assignment could have just as easily been to find out why TSU’s one-year retention rates (the first step in graduation rates) has increased each year since 1997, even while the average test scores of incoming students have declined over this same period. (August 16, 2005)

In her criticism of Freedman, Fleming alluded to what can be seen as a larger problem in the way the media treats historically black colleges. Fleming, the author of the classic book Blacks in College—one of the first comprehensive, longitudinal studies comparing the performance of African American students enrolled at black colleges and historically white colleges, took Freedman to task for his approach in framing the article:

[T]his situation reminded me that when I published the major comparative study of Blacks in College in 1984, a New York Times Education reporter was taken with the research and outcomes for black colleges that were more positive than anyone would have expected at that time. (It is far better understood today that nurturance and the absence of prejudice promote intellectual development among black students.) I was told when to expect the story to appear, but it never did. Apparently at the 11th hour, the Editor canceled it. Could it have been that this story about black colleges was far too positive? Perhaps only a story on a black college crisis is worthy of print. (August 16, 2005)

Of course, the recent New York Times story is not the first account to negatively portray black colleges. As some of the nation’s black institutions have found themselves in dire financial straits—Morris Brown College, Bennett College, and Philander Smith College are a few examples—reporters covering happenings at these colleges have often painted the shortcomings with a broad brush, sometimes generalizing to include all black colleges, both private and public. The claims of these news articles have gained national attention, jeopardizing recruitment efforts, fundraising success, and in some cases, the long-term existence of the institutions (Basinger, April 17, 2003; “Morris Brown loses appeal,” April 8, 2003; Poe, November 14, 2002; Simmons, October 6, 2002; Williams, October 18, 2002). After reading these newspaper articles, I sought to examine bias in the media’s coverage of black colleges on a larger scale.

Morris Brown College, in particular, provides a telling example. The small, private, church supported institution lost its accreditation, is $27 million in debt, and has been convicted by the federal government of misuse of financial aid funds. This paper reports the results of a content analysis I conducted of the media’s coverage of recent events at Morris Brown College in Atlanta. Content analysis allowed me to examine a large mass of written material from a range of media venues. It gave me an indication of the dominant ideas being put forth by the media on the subject of black higher education. Specifically, I was interested in the words and phrases used to describe both Morris Brown and other black colleges mentioned in the articles. I noted the possible generalizations made about black colleges as a result of Morris Brown’s situation. In conducting this content analysis, I looked at local, regional, and national media outlets.

Review of Literature

Throughout American history the media and higher education have had a lukewarm relationship. Conventional wisdom and scholarship suggest that higher education has only recently come under intense and sometimes unfair scrutiny by the media due to accountability questions and corporate scandals (Jones, 2004). According to this view, prior to the 1980s the press treated most postsecondary institutions with a hands-off attitude (Stepp, 2003; McLendon & Peterson, 1999). In contrast, when one looks at the history of media coverage of black colleges and universities, it appears that these institutions have been the recipient of countless jabs and continuing skepticism since their beginnings (Willie, 1978; Jones, 2004).

In recent years, several scholars have explored the relationship between higher education and the media. Rochelle Stanfield (1998) examined the ways in which the media misleads the public with regard to tuition costs—claiming that costs are increasing at greater rates than is supported by national data. Michael McLendon and Marvin Peterson (1999) analyzed media stories pertaining to the 1995 state appropriations conflict between the University of Michigan and Michigan State University to examine the influence of the media on public policy. The authors discovered that the media had considerable influence over local and regional politics, shaping the public discourse and selectively reporting on the appropriations conflicts. When race was considered alongside higher education coverage, the results were quite interesting. For example, Jane Rhodes (1999) explored national press coverage of the Black Panther Party, finding that initially the national press had no interest in the group. However, once the organization gained momentum in cities and on college campuses, the media sharpened its portrayals of Black Panther ideologies—eventually elevating the Panthers to celebrity status. Perhaps the closest study to that undertaken here is Bruce A. Jones’ (2004) study of 1980s Chronicle of Higher Education coverage of university scandals, including black colleges and their historically white counterparts. Jones found that between 1980 and 1989, there were twenty-five stories in the Chronicle on scandal and corruption. Many of these pertained to black colleges. Unlike the treatment received by historically white institutions (usually a “slap on the hand” by the media), newspapers called for the closure of some black institutions. Subsequently, state governments threatened to close some institutions. As a result, some black college administrators began to claim that the media had a dual standard of treatment toward college and university scandals.

Conceptual Framework and Method

It is not a secret that the media is attracted to controversy; however, many reporters still maintain that they operate with the heightened sense of objectivity emphasized in journalism school. According to Cohen (1963) “the pattern of news coverage … influences public perceptions of what current issues are important” (p. 229). Cohen referred to these patterns as the “media agenda” (Cohen, 1963; McCombs, 1992; McClendon and Peterson, 1999). Moreover, according to media scholar Iyengar (1988), “there can no longer be serious doubts over the ability of the mass media to influence the political agenda. The agenda-setting effect has proven to be quite robust, spanning a variety of issues, media channels, and target audiences” (Iyengar, 1988, p. 338). With the concept of “agenda setting” in mind, I examined the media’s treatment of Morris Brown College during its recent accreditation and financial situation, looking at how the media might shape the public’s understanding of the institution in both positive and negative ways. In addition, I examined the media’s interpretation of the situation for black colleges overall based on their understanding of Morris Brown.

There is no single definition of content analysis as a research method. Thus, to guide this project, I borrowed from several sources (Bishop, 2003; DeVaney, 1987; Fitsgerald, 2000; Gall, Borg, and Gall, 1996; Lincoln and Guba, 1985; Tuckman, 1978; Zelizer, 2002). However, my approach was primarily informed by David Altheide’s Qualitative Media Analysis.In his book, Altheide describes a three-part process that calls for the identification of frames, themes, and discourses within the content of written material. Specifically, he notes: “Frames focus on what will be discussed and how it will be discussed… .”; in other words, how the media selects the content for the article (Altheide, 1996, p. 31). According to Altheide, themes pertain to the recurring and dominant ideas that appear within the material that has been selected. Lastly, Altheide describes the discourse as the actual messages being communicated by the documents (in the case of this study the newspaper/website/television reports)—that is, the words, the images, photographs, phrases, etc. Thus, according to Altheide, the documents analyzed “carry the discourse that reflects certain themes, which in turn are held together and given meaning by a broad frame” (Altheide, 1996, p. 31).

To acquire data for this research project, I systematically collected newspaper and magazine articles, television transcripts, and web-based publications for a period of two years. In order to obtain wide reach, I subscribed to an Internet news search service that finds all of the news stories published on black colleges each day and sends a summary and corresponding Internet link to my email address. In addition, I sifted through newspapers and magazines and conducted ten Lexis-Nexis searches covering the two-year period of Morris Brown’s recent financial and accreditation struggle. These efforts yielded a total of 407 news stories pertaining to Morris Brown College and/or black colleges in general. I did not include articles that were about individual black colleges other than Morris Brown. The stories that I examined were found in Atlanta newspapers, regional and national papers, as well as trade papers and magazines such as The Chronicle of Higher Education and Black Issues in Higher Education. In acquiring articles from a multitude of sources, I aimed to get a sense of the treatment of black colleges in a broad cross-section of media outlets. I read each of the articles carefully, identifying frames, themes, and discourse as described above. The resulting paper is divided into three sections according to Altheide’s structure: Frames, which focuses on what the media discussed and how they discussed it; Themes, which highlights the dominant ideas that appear in the media’s discussion; and Discourse, which emphasizes the way the media represents the issues at Morris Brown using descriptors and phrases.

Origins and Mission of Morris Brown College

In 1885, the State of Georgia issued a charter to Morris Brown College, an institution founded on the idea of serving students from low-income backgrounds.¹ Unlike most other black colleges, Morris Brown was started by African Americans, a fact that gave the institution few resources but greater autonomy.² As members of the African Methodist Episcopal (A...