Color of Our Classroom, the Color of Our Future, The

Academe, Nov/Dec 2006 by Hubbard, Dolan

Historically black colleges are key to producing African American faculty.

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 (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 UBCU' 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 mid1970s, and I was one of three black students in the PhD program at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign 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 youwithout coming to grips with a system that does not promote their success.