Underserved Populations at Historically Black Colleges and Universities

The Pathway to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Cheron H. Davis, Adriel Hilton, Donavan L. Outten, Cheron H. Davis, Adriel Hilton, Donavan L. Outten, Cheron H. Davis, Adriel A. Hilton, Donavan L. Outten

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781787548411
• eBook ISBN:
  9781787548428
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

This book focuses on the lived experiences of underserved student and faculty populations at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and the implications these experiences have for higher education policy. Contributors discuss the contexts and experiences of students and faculty who navigate the political and social spaces of HBCUs while supporting healthy personal and robust professional goals. 

The stigmas and social nuances that plague students and faculty of color do not dissolve with their arrival at an HBCU, but rather they transform into a new set of challenges that demand the attention of researchers. Taking into account institutional supports, identity development, and socialization patterns, this book sheds light on what the experiences of higher education's "outsiders" mean for future research and practice, while emphasizing issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

THE CONTEMPORARY ROLE OF THE HBCU IN DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION IN THE ABSENCE OF ONGOING HISTORICAL RELEVANCE

Alvin Killough, Eryn Killough, James Burnett and Grover Bailey

ABSTRACT

The function for the historically Black college and university (HBCU) has always been a hallmark of resolve educational inclusion and justice to promote the Negro identity, and develop social and economic mobility. Yet despite diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) determinations popular today, the authors contend that to cater to subpopulations outside of the Black community creates a marginalization and distraction from their historic purpose and legacy. As a necessary function of relevance, the focus of underserved populations on HBCU campuses should, instead, unwaveringly remain on African-Americans, descendants of slaves (DoS). We empirically examine HBCU academic curricula for African-American consciousness that is forward thinking for community advocacy and social justice. Research findings of HBCU course catalogs (N = 98) describe a very limited scope of course titles and descriptions that appear to cultivate intellectual tools to engage in racial and ethnic self-advocacy as a vital role for continued survival. The authors contend that the relevance of HBCU institutions cannot be fully realized and promoted absent a comprehensive understanding of the educational and socioeconomic status of the African-American population. Discussed are the implications and recommendations of how HBCUs will be able to retain their uniqueness and viability of purpose, including the application of social reconstructive theory in practice, as a theoretical framework.

Keywords: HCBUs; diversity, equity and inclusion; descendants of slaves; African-American; social reconstructive theory; culture; higher education

INTRODUCTION

Both historical and contemporary racial contexts are important backdrops to the assertions made in this chapter. Higher education institutions were created to teach and train the Negro, only after nearly 4 million slaves were freed following the Civil War. Prior to that, between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was no need or incentive to educate enslaved African peoples. As long as they understood enough English, Portuguese, Spanish, or French (depending on their slaveholder) to do whatever hard labor was required of them, reading and writing seemed to be a needless and unjustifiable endeavor. Particularly after revolts such as the battle at Saint Domingue in Haiti, and Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, many states passed laws that forbade teaching a slave to read or write. There were very few exceptions of White schools that did allow for the education of free Negroes in the North.

The creation of schools now known as HBCUs came after the Civil War with the Morrill Act of 1862 which was extended to southern Confederate States and again amplified in 1890. The Morrill Act designated federal land to be given to states for the purpose of establishing land-grant universities (Second Morrill Act, 1890, U.S.C 323). This idea of separate institutions was favorable to many Whites, especially in the south. Instead of allowing freed slaves into their own institutions, it was preferable to create separate ones for the Negro, and paid for by the government, to keep the races from intermingling. Additionally, the American Missionary Association; the US Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands; Negro churches and individual white philanthropists all started and helped sustain newly founded universities for Negroes. For the next 100 years or so, HBCUs developed and survived as a place of access and refuge for those locked out of other, predominantly White, educational institutions.

Undoubtedly the role of HBCUs, historically, has demonstrated its relevance and necessity. The question today is, to what extent can HBCUs now move beyond traditional academic course curricula to create pathways toward social and political reform? This perhaps may be best captured by the recollections of one former HBCU student:

I have realized that I received a traditionally colonial education…what this really meant was that I was in Academia to advance the agenda, values and ideals of those who controlled the Academy. Having graduated from an HBCU, I naively thought that I would advance the interest of my race and improve the quality of life and collective empowerment for our critical mass but I quickly ran into the glass ceiling of multiculturalism, diversity and all lives matter. I slowly lost my identity in order to compete and maintain my token position. However, during the 2008 Wall Street economic meltdown, I realized that my education was not a protection from “Last Hired-First Fired Syndrome” as I faced entrenchment. I came to the realization that the course of study I took did not teach the empowerment needed to improve life for my target population. To me, a college education that does not empower is not a sound education. (J. Burnett, personal communication, June 26, 2017)

ON DEFINITION, PURPOSE, AND CONTEXT OF CURRICULA DEVELOPMENT

HBCUs are defined as any historically Black college or university that was established and accredited (or making progress toward accreditation) prior to 1964, whose principal mission was, and is, the education of Black Americans (Exkano, 2013). This race distinction is significant for several reasons. Namely, in context of most of its history, the United States (US) has had two major racial groups, Whites and Blacks. While the term “people of color” has come to mean a multitude of subgroups, this chapter concentrates exclusively on descendants of slaves (i.e., DoS), and uses the terms African-American, Black and Negro in the historical and contemporary sense interchangeably. In other words, the African-Americans who fall into a unique category of DoS with historical claim not attributable to other immigrant groups. The US has been, and debatably remains, a society whereby Whites have more rights and privileges than people of other races, both implicitly and explicitly. Thus, there should be no lack in clarity of the HBCU’s mission.

Since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which afforded more African-American students the opportunity to attend predominately White colleges and universities, enrollment in HBCUs has steadily declined. According to the National Center for Educational Studies, among Black students, the percentage enrolled at HBCUs has steadily declined opting instead for a predominantly White institution (PWI) enrollment: falling from 18 percent in 1976 to 9 percent in 2010, then showed no measurable change between 2010 and 2016 (NCES, n.d.). Conversely, more and more White students are increasing their attendance at HBCUs because of low tuition rates and “minority” status that qualifies for obtaining scholarships.

Today, these trends carry significant implications for curricula development in the context of the emerging twenty-first century as efforts are now underway to broaden inclusion and internationalize curricula in higher education. However, these such efforts may not only marginalize the unique Black experience of DoS, they come at the expense of HBCUs’ intended purpose and bring about a diversion of limited resources to become simply another part of a larger, indiscriminate group.

Throughout history, numerous noted educators and authors have expressed different opinions on the purpose of HBCUs, their curricula structure, and their equity to non-Black institutions. Although by no means exhaustive, what follows is a brief, but relevant representative narrative of the inextricable relationships between the context of the educational and political structure, and socioeconomic status of the Black population.

During the beginnings of the industrial revolutions of the South, 1885–1895, Booker T. Washington stated:

The next census will probably show that we have nearly ten million black people in United States, about eight million of whom are in the Southern states. In fact, we have almost a nation within a nation… While [the Negro] enjoys certain privileges in the North that he does not have in the South, when it comes to the matter of securing property, enjoying business advantages and employment, the South presents a far better opportunity than the North. (Washington, 1889)

Du Bois, in contrast, believed:

[…] the larger problem of Negro education sprang up the more practical question of work, the inevitable economic quandary that faces a people in the transition from slavery to freedom […] And above all, we daily hear that an education that encourages aspiration, that sets the loftiest of ideals and seeks as an end culture and character rather than bread-winning, is the privilege of white men and the danger and delusion of black. (Du Bois, 1902)

Bunche wrote in The Journal of Negro Education (Bunche, 1936), highlighting the dilemma facing HBCUs when creating curricula that would be appropriate to meeting the needs of their students, based on an environment of racial inequality:

The real hitch seems to be in the apparent impossibility of giving them, in our public and private schools, the sort of education which will actually equip them to fight the terrific battles which must be waged in order that they may win economic and political justice […] an education which will give them a true understanding of their status in the industrial order and an insight into the nature of that order. (Bunche, p. 358)

Moving to more contemporary times, the concern of continued inequality toward HBCUs was addressed by another Howard University Professor Kenneth B. Clark, also in the Journal of Negro Education,

[…] because they reflect the cumulative inferiority of segregated education and the inevitable pathology of a racist-segregated society which inflicts upon lower-status human beings a debilitating, humanly-destructive form of public education, both in the South and in the North. (Clark, 1967, p. 199)

Adding more to the relevance of context, the historical overview in the 2010 Association for the Study of Higher Education report on the influences of curriculum development by institutional funding sources showed:

The organization making the most significant contribution to African-American higher education was the General Education Board, a collection of white philanthropists created by John D. Rockefeller, Sr., but led by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Over the first half of the twentieth century, the board gave roughly $63 million to black higher education, a remarkable figure but only a fraction of what it provided to white colleges and universities (Anderson, 1988). Despite their personal agendas, the funding structure that these industrial giants created was designed, in part, to control black education in ways that would benefit the industrial philanthropists by producing graduates skilled in the trades that served the industrialists’ enterprises. (Gasman, Wagner, Ransom, & Bowman, 2010, p. 8)

In short, the examples above speak clearly to the broader philosophical question regarding what is the function of Black higher education, and its complement too often unrecognized outside of the discourses of the Academy: do you know the conditions of your condition?

RACE, EDUCATION, AND THEIR CONTEMPORARY RELEVANCE

The implications of race in America, HBCUs notwithstanding, have profound impact on not only promulgating a comprehensive grasp of the history of oppression, but also of the present conditions of Black Americans (DoS) today (e.g., Killough, Killough, Walker, & Williams (2017)). In other words, recognition, if not reconciliations, must be addressed on the race, education, and relevance issue with respects to the underlying conditions of the DoS in the United States. Below lists a few examples.

Despite having more than 90 percent of its younger African-Americans (ages 25–29) graduating from high school, compared with just over half in 1968, and the share of younger African-Americans with a college degree more than doubled, African-Americans in many key indicators of a community-efficacy to sustain its own survival are worse off today than before the Civil Rights movement:

(1) Seven and a half percent of African-Americans were unemployed in 2017, compared with 6.7 percent in 1968, still now as then roughly twice the white unemployment rate (Jones, Schmitt, & Wilson, 2018, Economic Policy Institute).

(2) The rate of homeownership for African-Americans, one of the most important mechanisms for working and middle clas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Bringing the “Othered” Back In: Building the Case for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at HBCUs
• A Balancing Act: Being First Still, and Faculty at an HBCU
• Serving Students, Faculty, and Notice: Student Cooperation, Faculty Collaboration, and Institutional Counter-narration at a Southern flagship HBCU
• The Contemporary Role of the HBCU in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Absence of Ongoing Historical Relevance
• Just Let Us Be Great! Mentoring Students at an HBCU
• White Faces in Black Spaces: Examining Faculty–Student Engagement for White Doctoral Student Success at Historically Black Colleges and Universities
• Religious Minority Students at HBCUs
• Thursdays at Five Thirty-five
• The Role of HBCUs in Tackling Issues of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
• Challenging Cultural Norms at HBCUs: How Perceptions Impact LGBTQ Students’ Experiences
• Afrocentric Worldview, Hetero-Normative Ethos and Black LGBTQ Intellectuals Matriculating through Afrocentric Psychology Programs at Historically Black Colleges/Universities (HBCUs)
• Providing Support for non-Black Students and Faculty at HBCUs: A Promising Approach for Senior Academic and Student Affairs Officers (SASAOs)
• Envisioning Equity: Women at the Helm of HBCU Leadership
• Bad Board Behaviors: Undermining Growth and Development at Historically Black Colleges and Universities
• What’s Next?
• Epilogue
• Index