Sending the Wrong Message About Historically Black Colleges

I work at a HBCU. The reason why some emphasize sports and marching band is that the academics can suck big time so what is there to boast about? The place I work is “if you are breathing not only will we admit you, we will do our level best to pass you on whether or not you learned anything”. Our president even commented last year that we need to do something about the students who view financial aid as an “alternative income stream” and aren’t otherwise interested in college. In order to boast about academics (at HBCU’s or otherwise as there are plenty of non-HBCU’s in the same boat) there needs to be academic standards for admission, for passing a class and for continued performance overall. Students who don’t perform need assistance and if they still don’t perform they need flunked out not passed on with a C.

By the way, annon1234 tangentially raises a good point, and one I should point out is not at all limited to HBCU’s. It is the whole practice today of lack of standards and passing students through just to get their money. I do believe it is common in HBCU’s to pass students through and graduate ones who should not be graduated, maybe that is part of the reason many minorities support these schools, just to get more minority college grads out there, even ones who could not have graduated from a school with real standards. I would add however that the same “pass everyone” practice is going on in pretty much all for-profits, and also at a lot of small private schools that are feeling the financial pinch.

The issue for me is the tarring of all HBCUs with the same brush. Not all are failing, nor are all falling into the “pass them through” mentality cited in comparing them to For Profits. I work in a Community College where admission standards are open, but academic standards are adhered to. The low quality HBCUs, and many other non-HBCUs who are failing to meet their mission, are hurting all of HE by credentialing students who don’t meet standards, assuming that the standards are appropriately high.I am re-reading “The Higher Education in America” by R. M. Hutchins, and while I do not share his elitist views, I do find great merit in his definitions of an educated person. We’ll never reach consensus about that definition, but we need to have some greater consistency around credentials. A BA ought to mean something, regardless of where it is earned.

There are ways to have open admissions and still have a good academic reputation. One is to have a selective admission honors college or similar internal structure that students can apply for. Another is to avoid a climate of everyone passes (something that characterizes expensive private institutions as well as HBCUs). Schools that call faculty on the carpet (whether explicitly or implicitly) for not passing enough students are already in trouble. A third way is to have a few programs that are truly noteworthy (and not noteworthy just because you say they are), which means they get some extra attention and resources. None of these are necessarily easy to implement (including changing a culture where the expectation is that everyone passes), but long term viability requires instutional evolution that arguably enhances academic reputation.

The word that the “H” in HBCU stands for says it all. It’s a hedge that tries to say, “They’ve been de facto ‘black’ schools for a long time, so let’s thow in the word ‘historically’ to more or less keep them that way.” HBCUs are products of a de jure racially segregated world of public higher education that no longer exists,* and they simply ought to drop the designation and, from here on out, function as public colleges, period. Either that or, say, the Universities of Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Georgia, etc., ought to designate themselves officially, “Historically White Universities.”* Especially when race in America is no longer strictly a (pardon the pun) black and white affair.