Access to higher education

Academe, Jul/Aug 1998 by Schrecker, Ellen

COLLEGE PROFESSORS ARE NOW THE GUARDIANS OF THE AMERIcan dream. In the good old days, it was assumed that all an ambitious young man from the lower classes had to do to get ahead was work hard, practice thrift, and go to church on Sunday. Now, however, that dream requires a B.A., and those who seek it are a far more diverse group than the young white males from farms and small towns who populated Horatio Alger's America a hundred years ago.

But it has not been easy for students from racial minorities or working-class backgrounds to gain that coveted degree. And as many politicians and other champions of privatization turn against public higher education, these students may well lose their hard-won access to social mobility, while the institutions they can no longer attend will become more homogeneous and less representative of the increasingly multiethnic, multicultural world of the twenty-first century.

Because the factors that limit access to higher education and reduce diversity affect professors as well as students, Academe decided to look at the economic, racial, and cultural barriers that make it so hard for America's colleges and universities to deliver on the American dream or, as Mary Burgan notes, to "do the right thing by those who have been denied access." None of our authors offer panaceas. They seek to alert us to the issues and suggest some tentative solutions.

They do not, however, speak with dispassion. Some of these people have been on the front lines of the bruising educational struggles in California and New York City. They are too embattled to be cool. Others, who are reflecting on their experiences as African American scholars on predominantly white campuses, are equally distressed. Their disappointment with what they perceive as some of their colleagues' less than wholehearted support for affirmative action on the faculty level may seem provocative to those of us from more traditional backgrounds, but their voices need to be heard. If we are ever to emerge from this nation's racial impasse, we must learn to deal with the pain it has caused-in the academic community as elsewhere.

Academe would like these articles to spark an extended conversation about these and other aspects of affirmative action and access to higher education. That conversation will, I hope, deal with the financial issues that Thomas Mortenson and Ruth Flower address, as well as touch on the suggestions of C. Aisha Blackshire-Belay and Jonathan Alger for ways to promote diversity and ensure that academics of color get the same advantages that their colleagues from other backgrounds have long enjoyed.

Educationally, diversity brings the real world into the classroom. It extends academic freedom by broadening the range of ideas acceptable on the nation's campuses. As Daniel Pollitt and Jordan Kurland remind us in their survey of the AAUP's earliest cases, that range was once much narrower. But even today, as the unprecedented libel suit against Kate Bronfenbrenner reveals, professors whose work offends a powerful corporation may still find themselves in trouble. Plus ca change . . .

-ELLEN SCHRECKER