Preceedings

Infusing the Dialogue:
The State of the African-American
Professoriate 2002
Conference Proceedings

SAAP Committee Members
President Rodney D. Smith, Honorary Member
Professor Henry Vance Davis, Director, Africana Institute
Ms. Venus Hewing, Co-chair
Mr. Daniel Jean, Co-chair
Mr. Joshua Barney, Student
Ms. Magda Berhe, Student
Ms. Eve Block, Student
Ms. Lynn Glanton, Student
Professor Diana Davis
Ms. Jaray Harvey
Professor Arnold Jones
Mr. Kevin McDaniel
Mrs. Asha Mehta
Professor Samuel Pinn
Professor Tilahun Sineshaw

Sponsors
School of Social Science and Human Services
The Office of Affirmative Action
The Schomburg Fund

Special Acknowledgements
Mrs. Diana Alspach
Ms. Christine Baker
Professor Joseph Dallon
Mr. Edouard Eloi
Ms. Bonnie Franklin
Professor Virginia Gonsalves-Domond
Ms. Lavonne Heydel
Ms. Heather Lampert
Brothers Making a Difference
Ebony Women for Social Change
Organization of African Unity
Minority Faculty and Staff Association

1. Africana Institute Mission
   Henry Vance Davis
2. Introduction
   Henry Vance Davis
   
   Part One
3. In Pursuit of Greatness: The Learning Legacy of African Americans Americans
   Kambon Camara
4. The New Challenge of a Black Scholar
   Earnest N. Bracey
   
5. A Critical View of the University in Society
   Rudy Hughes
   
6. Creating Space in a White(ness) Place: Blacks in Africana Studies at
   Predominately White Colleges & Universities
   Lawrence T. Potter, Jr.
   
   Part Two
7. Have we Covered All Our Bases
   Walter Hill Jr.
8. Special Education a New Segregation
   Douglas M. Butler
9. Establishing Equity in the Classroom: Elimination of Biases and Stereotypes
   Charles E. Mitchell

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The Africana Institute
Ramapo College of New Jersey
Director, Henry Vance Davis

Statement of Purpose
Founded by professors Joe Johnson and Samuel Pinn, The Africana Institute is a college-wide initiative intended to support and enhance scholarship, research, and instruction in Africana Studies across the curriculum at Ramapo College of New Jersey and to encourage the relationship of the college to the outside community.

Philosophy
Recognizing the value of multicultural education, the Institute will contribute an Afrocentric perspective of scholarship, teaching, and community service to the college. Dr. M Asante wrote "Afrocentricity proposes a cultural reconstruction that incorporates the African perspective [as experienced by African-Americans] as a part of the entire human transformation (1987)." Consequently, the Institute will contribute to research, teaching, and scholarship from the point of view of those who have lived the American experience as the oppressed of the society, yet have survived by virtue of the strengths of African and African-American traditions.

Activities
The Institute contributes to education in African-American Studies in the State of New Jersey, across the Nation, and the world. It encourages research and publication by students and faculty in matters and issues of interest to African Americans in American society and the Black Diaspora. The Institute serves as a conduit through which faculty, staff, and students consider issues and questions related to curriculum development, alternative perspectives of scholarship, and intercultural and international studies from an African/African-American perspective. It also seeks the integration of the African-American perspective into all aspects of college life and study.

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INTRODUCTION

The material in this publication was gleaned from the 2002 State of the African-American Professoriate Conference held at Ramapo College of New Jersey. The theme of the conference, as implied by the title, was the exploration of higher education and intellectual life from the perspective of those working with issues related to African-Americans.

During the last ten to fifteen years, the corpus of African-American professors working at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU), has been joined by, what we characterize as a critical mass of African-American faculty at predominately white colleges and universities (PWC&U). Consequently, the opening of the millennium after the one before which the great scholar-activist W. E. B. Du Bois declared the century of the problem of the color line, offers an unique opportunity to access black’s status in higher education. Additionally, the Professoriate’s implications for an increasingly multicultural America in this new millennium, make the study of its role more critical than ever.

The Conference Planning Committee therefore recognizes that what happens to African Americans and minorities in our Nation’s colleges and universities does not do so in a vacuum--What happens to one happens to all. The State of the African-American Professoriate is a community issue that touches every stakeholder in the higher education environment: students, parents, staff, administration as well as other minorities and non-minorities.

The view through the prism of the African-American Professoriate then, simply adds range and depth to our understanding of the intellectual society in which we live; consequently, without equivocation, the committee issued an invitation to stakeholders of every hew to participate in an investigation and celebration of a great American tradition, the legacy of the African-American intellectual as reflected in the Status of the African-American Professoriate.

Between April 18th and 20th over five hundred students, faculty, teachers, and community leaders joined faculty from around the country at the Conference. The first day consisted of presentations by undergraduate scholars and the participation of students from area high schools. The second day of the conference, highlighted by a luncheon talk by Dr. Sharon Harley, University of Maryland professor and recipient of a 2002 Woodrow Wilson fellowship, the professionals presented on the range of topics. After convening sessions on the third day of the Conference to address practical application of strategies to problems and issues of the Professoriate, the Conference ended with a speech by Cornel West, then Alphonso Fletcher Jr. University Professor of Harvard University.

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The authors of the articles in "Informing the Dialogue: The State of the African-American Professoriate 2002 Conference Proceedings" represent a range of views on what is important to the African-American Professoriate. These articles may be reduced to two types of offerings: those that constitute essays on the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of the Professoriate and those that reflect on the practical tasks of African-American reality in higher education.

Dr. Kambon Camara, in his article titled "In Pursuit of Greatness: The Learning Legacy of African Americans" addresses the nature of education and philosophical discussion of the kind found in the black intellectual community since W.E. B. Du bois faced off against Booker T. Washington at the turn of the Twentieth century. Camara expounds on the questions of where blacks should be going and what role education will play in their journey in the Twenty-first century. Ultimately, Camara elucidates "a vision for the collective development and liberation(of blacks) and the important role that education has played and must continue to play toward those ends."

Earnest Bracey, in "The New Challenge of a Black Scholar," is concerned with the full inclusion of black scholars in mainstream higher education. Critical to that full inclusion, for Dr. Bracey, is recognizing the value of the new black scholar's role in telling the truth, challenging, and assisting "all American students and academic scholars, while empowering them to embrace other approaches to thinking and learning." Like most of his colleagues at the conference, Dr. Bracey saw value in the growth and development of the black scholar for mainstream education, students, and scholars. He wrote, "The question is, can black scholars and intellectuals create new academic endeavors or disciplines that might add value and insights to black aesthetics and even the canon of western scholarship will be posed?"

Lawarance Potter is perhaps the most provocative of all. In "Creating Space in a White(ness) Place: Blacks in Africana Studies at Predominately White Colleges & Universities" Potter takes in hand what he sees as a system of higher education that excludes and undervalues black studies programs in predominately white colleges and universities. "African Americans in academe are extremely valuable sources, not resources, when considering the knowledge base that has been produced and published over the past two hundred plus years. These scholars, intellectuals, and inventors have provided a long written legacy of the achievements and struggles endured by peoples of African descent. However, there has been much debate within the past thirty-two years on university and college campuses about the importance of creating and maintaining courses, curricula, departments, and tenure-track faculty positions relevant to what has become known as the "black studies" discipline." He maintains the lack of a sizable black presence on PWC&U campuses resulted in a void in leadership for young black intellectuals aspiring to work in higher education. He sounds another common theme at the Conference when he wrote, "Not until recently have there been resources (collections, anthologies, and histories) written and edited by the sources (African Americans in academe) that attempt to provide somewhat of a composite representation of the field including the professors who make-up, shape, and define/redefine the discipline. This paper suggests that the time is right for a reassessment of the field as we greet the new millennium."

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Rudy Hughes, doctoral student, at Michigan State University, completes the first section when he presents a general locus within which to situate the African American higher education experience by undertaking in "A Critical View of the University in Society" a comparative theoretical analysis and discussion of the current place of the American University in contemporary society. The basic viewpoint is that the university no longer serves the needs of a literate democracy but that of the meritocracy now governing the nation. From this perspective, Mr. Hughes asks: When did the process begin? What form, if any, has change taken? Is this "change" really new or only newly discovered?

Presenting a wide-ranging survey of the pertinent literature, Hughes presents what he calls "compelling evidence that for quite some time all has not been well within the spirit of American higher education." He also maintains that the status of American education has profound implications for African-Americans. "This position in itself, may question the validity/viability/health/professional prosperity of the African-American Professoritate in majority institutions."

Addressing more concrete aspects of the Professoriate, Walter Hill in "Have We Covered All of Our Bases: Black Scholars and African-American Historical Research at the National Archives" considers the fundamental importance of archival research. He highlighted the extensive information about the black American experience in the records of the National Archives and Records Administration, (NARA). "When the founding fathers compromised the maintenance and protection of slavery in the United States Constitution, they set in motion the government’s endless documentation of race in American society." The results for black scholars, says Hill, is that "NARA contains the largest archival holdings relative to African-American life, history, and culture in the world." Dr. Hill challenged black scholars to use this resource as the "interaction of government and African Americans and the routine business of the government became the recorded documentation of the inherent problems of diversity, inequities, and limited opportunity for African Americans. " Ultimately, Hill poses the provocative question: How well prepared is the African-American Professoriate for the scholarly work required of an informed and committed African-American intelligentsia ?

In "Eliminating Racism in Mathematics Education, Where Do We Go From Here?" Dr. Charles E. Mitchell synthesizes previous research efforts identifying the major sources of bias faced by some minority populations and provides suggestions as to how mathematics educators, both individually and collectively, can offer a more equitable classroom environment for all students, given their diverse realities. Research findings and data summaries based upon surveys of minority students are presented to suggest that many subtle forms of racism continue to exist in mathematics classrooms and the larger higher education community at large. Strategies to make educators more aware of the existence of the various subtle forms of biases in the classroom are among Mitchell’s major themes.

Douglas M. Butler, author of "Special Education--A New Segregation" maintains that special education, i.e., "specifically designed instruction that meets the unusual needs of exceptional students," is being misused. Dr. Butler’s research concludes that many of the students identified and subsequently placed into the classes for special needs students are not only students with mild conditions but also are minority and are often African-American males. Many of these according to Butler are "underachievers who could more appropriately be served in the general classroom." Butler explores effective pre-referral activities which when considered could reduce the numbers of inappropriate referrals and placements into special education.

The authors included in Infusing the Dialogue: The State of the African-American Professoriate 2002 Conference Proceedings clearly demonstrate that the status of the African-American Professoriate has many facets. These Proceedings are the beginning of a discussion that will continue and broaden. The recent experience of the keynote speaker for the 2002 conference, Dr. Cornel West, at Harvard University exposed just the tip of a complex yet humongous and dense iceberg that will play a critical role in higher education in the Twenty-first century. The authors’ contributions to understanding and exposing said iceberg are greatly appreciated.

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In Pursuit of Greatness:
The Learning Legacy of African Americans
Kambon Camara

During the early decades of the twentieth century W.E.B. Dubois and Booker T. Washington engaged, in a sense, a debate about what the nature of education for African Americans should be. Their views were radically different philosophically and each pointed to a very different vision about how African people and people of European descent would coexist. Dubois (1903) wanted to see an America with social equity and where the talented tenth would provide the leadership of the black masses into an integrated society where individuals would be rewarded according to his or her own merits. Booker T. Washington, on the other hand, advocated training African Americans in skills and trades that would be useful to whites in the changing economy of the south. In his famous "cast down your buckets where you are" speech, Washington (1895) declared that in matters of mutual economic progress we can be as united as the fist but in matters of purely social and personal affairs we can be as separate as the fingers of the open hand." I believe that both perspectives offer much to consider even today, especially today. What is ironic and perhaps even tragic is the fact that very few if any philosophical discussions are taking place today about where we should be going as a people and what role education will play in facilitating our journey.

A third voice, the honorable Marcus Garvey (1920) blended ideas of Dubois and Washington in an overall philosophy of Pan Africanism, an African centered vision with powerful implications for our collective self-actualization and liberation. In terms of their respective legacies, W.E.B. Dubois demonstrated not only academic and intellectual excellence but also scholarly integrity undergirded by a profound sense of social responsibility. We may count among his intellectual heirs Harold Cruise, Andrew Billingsly, Robert Staples, Joseph White, Pearl Cleage, Wade Nobles, Bobby Wright, Marimba Ani, Asa Hilliard, Lerone Bennett Jr., John Henrik Clarke, Cornell West, Naim Akbar and others.

Booker T. Washington established awareness of our possibilities in the areas of science and technology and the concrete manifestation of these possibilities at Tuskegee University. The honorable Marcus Garvey not only created a unifying vision for African people globally, but also boldly declared that we have a right and responsibility to own and benefit from our collective resources. I suppose that a central and relevant question to this discussion is who owns our intellectual resources, who should benefit from them, and how might the structure within the academy be modified to enable this orientation?

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What I would like to explore a bit is a vision for our collective development and liberation and the important role that education has played and must continue to play toward those ends. Where does the African-American professoriate fit into the equation?

When considering the challenges confronting African Americans in the area of educational development, we must weed through the demoralizing discussions about lowered institutional standards, remedial programs, underqualification due to affirmative action, and a host of other unflattering statistics that have somehow been radicalized. My intention here is not to rationalize, affirm, or deny any of the above mentioned issues, but to suggest that more often than not these types of discussions fail to contribute much to our understanding of the true nature of the problems and challenges associated with the learning needs of African Americans. We are presently losing a tremendous amount of human resources and talent due to what must be viewed as a serious crisis of culture. The cultural milieu in which we live is insensitive and unresponsive to the overt and covert forces of white supremacy, i.e. racism.

I would submit that the existential tensions and struggles of the African-American professoriate are subsequent to, and very much related with, this intractable crisis of culture. I believe that the African-American professoriate should be considered a central component of Dr. Dubois’s talented tenth. I must therefore digress for a moment to state an obvious but often overlooked fact, i.e. African-American professors are part and parcel to the African-American community and as such are obligated to and affected by our collective struggle for freedom and against oppression.

For the African-American professoriate in white or Eurocentric institutions (unfortunately all American colleges and universities including the historically black institutions are Eurocentric) a truly dichotomous challenge must be faced and overcome. The first challenge is to master the relevant information and competencies of one’s discipline and to demonstrate excellence in academic and scholarly renderings. The second, and I think more important to our collective health, is to find relevant and useful ways to apply one’s knowledge to the needs of our communities.

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In many ways the crisis involves a choice between relevance and irrelevance, individualism vs. social responsibility, mental bondage and intellectual and spiritual freedom. I happen to believe that the relationship between African Americans and European Americans can best be understood in terms of a colonial analogy. To check the soundness of this analogy, ask yourself two questions: (1) who benefits most from our resources, talents and efforts, both historically and contemporarily and (2) who makes the decisions, which ultimately determine our collective condition. Recognizing the striking similarities in social and political structures, historian Lerone Bennett Jr. (1975) states "In America, as in the countries of Asia, Africa, and South America, Europeans created a colonial system that perpetuated the political, economic, and cultural exploitation of non-Europeans and although the system created in America has its own weight and density, it is clearly a variation on the universal theme of (European) dominance and non-European subordination. . . . In America . . . the colonial system elaborated the same mechanisms to attain the same ends."

Psychiatrist, Franz Fanon (1982), further delineates the role and function of educators within this type of system and notes that, "In the colonies it is the policeman and soldier who are the official, instituted go-between, the spokesmen of the settler and his role of oppression. In capitalist societies the education system, whether lay or clerical, etc."

It is therefore my contention that the state of the African-American professoriate must be examined in a broader context that takes into account the enduring needs and interests of the African-American community as well as the broader society. The struggle must be for space and latitude to do the work that needs to be done. Given the existing canon within the academy this will be difficult but necessary. Not only have most of the world and its resources been colonized, information about the world has also been colonized; therefore, even in academe, much about our experiences does not show up on the radar screen.

Western cosmologies including those of Europe and North America and their resulting paradigms do not recognize the legitimacy of the African-American experience. The novelist, Ralph Ellison (1995) observed from his vantage point as an African American, that implicitly he was, to whites, invisible. By extension, the significance of our collective experience is also invisible. Life magazine’s (2000) one hundred millennium events fail to acknowledge the enslavement of African people or the slave trade as important events of the millennium; ignoring the fact that European and U.S. economies were essentially built from wealth gained as a result of these fiendish enterprises. Historian, Dr. John Henrik Clarke (1992) stated that, "African people have been written out of the respectful commentary of world history." The veracity of these observations places a formidable challenge before African-American educators of all levels whether we are teaching grade school or graduate school. There is a significant disconnect between our collective experiences and what is considered legitimate knowledge.

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We must engage this challenge on many fronts. There has been and continues to be a struggle over content, i.e. what is studied and what is taught. There is also the political struggle over legitimacy and cultural space for full, healthy intellectual development, and of equal importance, the imperative to maintain an organic sense of community with corresponding responsibilities.

Often it is certainly true that the forces of white supremacy pushed blacks into various patterns of existence, many of which are ultimately nonproductive, irrelevant, and sometimes self-destructive. These patterns, however, are not inevitable or unavoidable. This I believe is where self-examination becomes critical; self-examination helps clarify crucial relationships and establishes again where fundamental loyalties should be, what constitutes community, who our enemies are and what ideas, forces, and values militate against our best interest. We must also define what the imperatives of these crucial relationships are.

The Harvard University professor and chairperson of African-American Studies Department, Dr. Henry Louis Gates, commented that he actually has more in common with his white colleagues than with ordinary blacks in urban America. The obvious oversight on Dr. Gates’ part was his failure to recognize that the reason for the existence of the African-American Studies Department at Harvard has to do with the presence of African people in urban and rural America, Africa, and throughout the Diaspora. Otherwise, what would they study? He also commented that while he had been in Africa many times, his home is Harvard Square. I would say that if that is true, he is historically and culturally an orphan. Even though Dr. Gates seems to have missed his own obvious connection to the African world, Harvard University did not.

In writing the introduction to the reprint edition of Professor George M. James’s, "Stolen Legacy," Dr. Asa Hilliard (1988) states the following, "mental bondage is invisible violence. Formal physical slavery has ended in the United States. Mental slavery continues to this present day. This slavery affects the minds of all the people and, in one way, it is worse than physical slavery alone. That is, the person who is in mental bondage will be "self-contained," not only will that person fail to challenge beliefs and patterns of thoughts that control him, he will defend and protect those beliefs and patterns of thought virtually with his last dying effort." Dr. Gates is, as many of us are, a product of this mental bondage. Those of us who see ourselves as beneficiaries and exponents of the prevailing cultural values are less inclined to "look this gift horse in the mouth," to look more closely at what it may be costing us. In the end, embracing this system of ideas, values, and priorities will cost us our very souls.

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I would further suggest that we have an obligation to pursue knowledge beyond what may be considered within the parameters of Western scholarship. Some, including Na’im Akbar have referred to this narrow construction of knowledge as training. The intent here is not to devalue Western-based knowledge, but to acknowledge its inadequacies and limitations. Here the concept of training is used to draw an important distinction between the knowledge of the oppressor and the essential depth and breadth of knowledge required for people situated as we are. So in what sense can Western-based knowledge be considered training? It can be considered training in the sense that information and skills are conveyed without a meaningful social and cultural content or context. In some ways, academic training of this type can be compared to the training of animals in that it is provided with the expectation that the trained will serve the interests and needs of the trainer. If the skills are applied in the manner prescribed by the trainer, the trained has little likelihood of independent survival and even less chance of impacting the collective survival and well being of his species. Animals trained for the circus eventually become incapable of survival in their own natural habitat.

True knowledge comes from self-awareness and a clear sense of identity, direction, and purpose. No educational experience is complete without theses essential elements. If in all of our learning we are ill prepared to transform ourselves as a people into a functional effective community we are a miseducated people.

Education may serve one of two important purposes. It may domesticate or it may liberate. It may domesticate by creating a conforming, compliant individual or group to serve an already existing order; or it may liberate by creating a significant transformation or interpretation of information sufficient to inspire a new vision with an enhanced sense of purpose. It is for us, the culturally, spiritually, socially, and economically oppressed to define our purposes for learning and how we need to use our knowledge and to what ends.

Dr. Wade Nobles (1980) provides a clear and compelling perspective on the role and value of culture in the educational process, he states, "In terms of education, African-centered education utilizes African and African-American cultural precepts, processes, laws, and experiences to solve, guide, and understand human functioning relative to the educational process. In essence, Afrocentricity represents the fact that as human beings, people of African ancestry have the right and responsibility to "center" themselves in their own subjective possibilities and potential and through the recentering process reproduce and refine the best of themselves."

He further states that, "African-centered multicultural education is driven by truth, respect for knowledge, desire to learn and a passion for excellence. In regards to ‘centric’ education, the importance of culture is not simply relegated or minimized to the task of being sensitive to cultural differences of superficially appreciating or exploring the common ground of different people. As the foundation for multicultural education, culture as both the process and the subject of education, will serve as the medium and mechanism for teaching, learning and counseling and educational management/administration."

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The effects of the Eurocentric (Western) education include a limited cosmology (worldview) and grossly incomplete, and often distorted, representation of reality. For African Americans, this type of educational malpractice leads to a diminished sense of self and a devaluation of one’s actual experiences. The thought patterns likely to result from this type of indoctrination are self-depreciating. Self-depreciating thoughts often lead to self-depreciating behaviors. Dr. Carter G. Woodson (1998) described the psychological effects of this process in his important work, The Miseducation of the Negro, "If you can control a man’s thinking, you don’t have to worry about his actions. If you can determine what a man thinks you do not have worry about what he will do. If you can make a man believe that he is inferior, you don’t have to compel him to seek an inferior status, he will do so without being told and if you can make a man believe that he is justly an outcast, you don’t have to order him to the back door, he will go to the back door on his own and if there is no back door, the very nature of the man will demand that you build one."

In the final analysis, we must recognize that no real progress can be made until we rediscover what we used to know and that is that the creator, the divine, is the ultimate source of abundant life, and that there are universal or spiritual laws that govern all of life. To step outside of alignment with these laws creates consequences, which will have deleterious effects. In our striving for freedom and opportunity we must start with liberation for our souls and seek the path of enlightenment and a commitment to serve the highest good. If we fail to incorporate these ideals as a basis for our striving, all of our accomplishments on the scales of eternity will not balance the weight of two dead flies.

Our quest for educational excellence must resist the lure of an amoral system, which shamelessly shuns all decent and reasonable concerns for what is right, fair, and true in favor of power and greed. It is important that we opt not to become willing pawns in this wicked and cruel system. Social activist Luscious Walker declared in 1969 that the logic of white supremacy is intellectually and morally bankrupt. This criticism extends to educational institutions, which reflect this worldview. Referring to this phenomenon, J. Raymond Johnson remarked that Harvard had ruined more Negroes than bad whisky. This reality, I believe poses challenges for all of us on intellectual, moral, and spiritual levels. Like all human beings we have needs that are essential to our physical and material survival, i.e. jobs, food, housing, to care for our responsibilities, etc. We also have psychological needs to feel competent and valued. We must pursue these needs with a sense of balance.

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As an African-centered Pan Africanist, I embrace the assertions of the honorable Marcus Garvey (1920) who proclaimed, "one people, one aim and one destiny." As a realist, I believe that several points need to be made. First, depending upon the degree of unity of purpose informing our collective aim, our collective destiny will be either cultural and eventually physical annihilation or liberation and cultural empowerment. Second, unity of purpose is essential. Third, while it is generally true that we will either stand together or hang separately, we do, however, face different circumstances and therefore different life choices and options. In this regard, we must realize that we are as much indentured by our preferences and appetites as we are by the coercive forces of white supremacy. We must therefore, reevaluate our obsessions for external acceptance and approval, material acquisitions (conspicuous consumption), the latest modern conveniences, and our reckless pursuit of the almighty dollar. Doctors John Hope, Samuel Archer, and Charles Huber remind us that "education is not for private profit alone but is for liberation and preparation for an initiation into a life of service to the community." According to historian, Lerone Bennett Jr. (1975) "it [education] is organic in the sense that it must grow out of and feed back into the deepest current of the community." Lerone Bennett Jr. further observes that "somewhere between the lynching and the late-model cars many of us have lost our way."

In the last analysis, education is about cultivating and fulfilling that which is within. The word educere, meaning to bring out that which is within, leads us to the point that challenges us to rediscover the great gifts given to us by the creator and to give thanks and honor to the divine source of our creation by cultivating and applying our gifts in ways that are respectful to and inspired by the wisdom and guidance of our ancestors. This will provide a solid foundation for future generations to build upon.

Ultimately, the responsibility of the African-American professoriate is to continue to strive for the fulfillment of what Dr. Bruce Hare calls, "the universal mission of the university" to create an academic climate and community where all people can find themselves on the map of human geography.

In conclusion, we must remember that knowledge is power and that true knowledge begins with self-awareness. Education is not, as Carter G. Woodson reminds us, an exercise whereby we study what others have done and then seek to imitate them. It is liberation and the creation of circumstances, which allow for the fullest expression of our African souls. On an individual level it requires a deep commitment to engage the challenges and obstacles within each of us and around each of us to reach the summit of our greatest possibilities. On a cultural level, we must be guided by the wisdom of the late Mzee Julius Nyere, president of Tanzania who said that the level of development of a people will determine its progress and possibilities of any society or nation.

"Our values must be in spiritual alignment, cultural integrity, academic excellence, and personal and social responsibility. Though the valleys may be deep and the mountains high, the sun rises before us bringing us ultimately into the light."

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Bibliography

1. Akbar, N. (1987) From Miseducation to Education. Tallahassee: MIND Productions.

2. Bennett, L. (1975) The Challenge of Blackness. Chicago: Johnson Publishers.

3. ----------- (1975) The Shaping of Black America. Chicago: Johnson Publishers.

4. Clarke, J. H. (1992) Notes for an African World Revolution. Trenton: African World Press.

5. Dubois, W.E.B. (1903) The Negro Church. Atlanta, Ga. The Atlanta University Press.

6. ---------------(1903) The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: Penguin Books.

7. ---------------(1903) "On Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others," in The souls of Black Folk. Chicago: Penguin Books.

8. Ellison, R. (1995) Invisible Man, 2nd ed.. New York: Vintage International.

9. Garvey, M.M. (1920) Address at the National Convention of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. New York, NY.

10. James, G.M. (1988) Stolen Legacy. San Francisco: Julian Richardson Assoc.

11. Life magazine. (2000) Life 100 Millennium Events. http//:www.life.com./life/millennium/events/ 100.html

12. Noble, W. (1980) African-centered Curriculum. McClymonds International Science, Cultural and Technology High School. Oakland, CA.

13. Walter, L. (1969) Keynote Address. National Association of Settlements. St. Paul, MN.

14. Washington, B. T. (1901) Up from Slavery. New York, NY.

15. -------------------(1895) Atlanta Compromise Address at Cotton States Exposition. Atlanta, GA

16. Woodson, C.G. (1998) The Miseducation of the Negro. Trenton: African World Press.

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The New Challenge of the Black Scholar
By Earnest N. Bracey

As a young, neophyte undergraduate, my intellectual appetite was whetted not only by good books and the proverbial classics, but also by the first-rate black scholars and intellectuals who I had the privilege of learning from and being acquainted with for four productive years at a small, predominantly black university in Mississippi. That wonderful school setting provided me with the intellectual freedom and academic or educational wherewithal to compete successfully later with students who graduated from more prestigious and elite white colleges and universities.

Appropriately enough, that educational foundation also allowed me to compete in my professional life, particularly when I decided to undertake my graduate studies and take a terminal Ph.D. degree. To say the least, I was well prepared, despite the sometimes frustrating educational obstacles and circumstances I had to endure in getting a higher education. That is to say, unfortunately, I was never perceived as an intellectual equal by many of the white professors with whom I came in contact. The State of the African-American Professoriate Conference keynote speaker, professor Cornel West aptly voiced a similar concern and dilemma when he wrote:

It is much more difficult for black students, especially graduate students, to be taken seriously as potential scholars and intellectuals owing to the managerial ethos of our universities and colleges (in which less time is spent with students) and to the vulgar (racist) perceptions fueled by affirmative action programs which pollute many black student-white professor relations. (1993, p. 69)

Moreover, it must be made abundantly clear that the black scholar or student does not exist in educational isolation from the dominant culture or white academic world. This is particularly important to understand given how hard it is for black scholars to demonstrate (in some profound way) their abilities and effectiveness as legitimate scholars with divergent views and political stances. Surely, it is the black scholar’s obligation to supply all Americans--or the broad public--with thoughtful explanations of black life, aesthetics, and rigorous scholarship. However, black scholars must apply their (brand of) wisdom appropriately to contemporary issues that seem ever changing or dynamic. Furthermore, according to sociologist Nathan Hare, writing in the December 1969 issue of The Black Scholar,

"The black scholar can no longer afford to ape the allegedly value free approach of white scholarship. He must reject absolutely the notion that it is not professional ever to become emotional, that it is somehow improper to be bitter as a black man, that emotion and reason are mutually exclusive." (1969, p. 61)

Hare, of course, was correct back then about black intellectuals becoming free of their white academic critics, counterparts and detractors. Further, the black scholar today must provide a keen interest in exploring not only traditional approaches and new theories and ideas about what constitutes the core curriculum, a controversial subject, or what should be taught, but they must also insist on imparting knowledge about the lives and aesthetics of blacks throughout the Diasporic world. This in essence means black scholars must use a solid, interdisciplinary approach and all the academic trappings or various means of legitimate scholarship at their disposal when it comes to educational productivity, creativity, and scholarly publishing or whatever academic endeavors in which they are involved.

The question again is whether black academics must ape their white colleagues when it comes to imparting specific knowledge about a subject. And there are, to be sure, subspecialties that the black scholar must also focus on, as many are sometimes taught completely different ways of thinking and learning about a particular topic.

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THE WORK OF BLACK SCHOLARS

In years past, the problem for black scholars was not so much a conscious decision to embrace a discipline of black scholarship that would be acceptable to the dominant culture--such as Black Studies, Pan Africanism, or Black History--but this educational myopia or intellectual retrenchment was the only academic game in town at one point in our society (for black scholars). Therefore, confronting miseducation and intellectual bias from white scholars, of course, was a challenge to black scholars everywhere. The gradual movement, of course, from unflattering comments and open criticism, mistrust, ridicule, and even skepticism by white scholars has been a long road to tread for the black scholar, particularly when it comes to writing about a discipline for a scholarly journal and actually publishing. Nevertheless, black scholars, I believe, have finally conquered that academic hurdle instead of being dismissed or ruthlessly suppressed. Black, Hip-Hop intellectual, and professor of communications, Michael Eric Dyson explains it this way:

We were subtly but insistently implored to employ the jargon of our disciplines, thereby Black scholars--though this is true for other scholars as well, just not with the same implication about presence or lack of intelligence--are often put in a "damned if you do, damned if you don’t" bind. On the one hand, we were told for years that our work was worthless, that it lacked the rigor and language by which serious scholarly work is known. Showing our mastery of that plot of intellectual ground we were taught to plow. Then we were told that if our scholarly writings were too jargon-filled they were obtuse and meaningless.

We were told that if we couldn’t write in ways that made sense to a broad public our work was of no use. This is good to remember now that critics are taking black public intellectuals to task for our work. Back when scholars like Oliver Cox and W.E.B. Du Bois were doing just what it is alleged we often don’t do--careful, serious, deeply thoughtful work--they were ignored or dismissed. (Dyson, 1996, p. 64)

A prime example of this almost total lack of attention paid to the works of many black scholars of which Professor Dyson speaks is the relative dismissal by white scholars of well-respected black historian Lerone Bennett’s book, Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream, published by Johnson Publishing Company in 2000. The provocative and discomfiting book argues that "Abraham Lincoln was a racist who kept more blacks in bondage than he ever emancipated." (White, 2000, p. 76). Journalist Jack E. White also writes that Bennett’s Forced into Glory is "one of the most important reassessments of Lincoln, or any other white figure of similar stature, by a black author." However, Bennett’s book has not gotten "the kind of attention that nonfiction works by white authors have received." (2000, p. 76). And unfortunately, this ignoring of black scholars’ work will, perhaps, continue, or be a point of contention for the near future.

All in all, however, these things do not change the fact that black scholars are establishing an inordinately large amount of important scholarship, plangent and philosophical insights and scholarly writings that will have a lasting impression and impact on our culture and higher education system. W.E.B. Du Bois’s large body of work, for instance, will stand the test of time as a monument to black intellectualism and black aesthetics. Furthermore, many educational officials cogently argue that the quality of black scholars and professors will have the greatest or most impact on black students’ achievement, and that is a feat in itself.

In a powerful way, their concerted efforts and work, although not always popular with white academics and higher education officials, has helped black scholars to define themselves in the tough and competitive academic world. Indeed, we must understand that "the United States was a segregated society well up through the 1950s, a place where discourse on race (and black scholarship) was marked by stereotypes and assumptions that bore little resemblance to the lived experience of its black [educated] population." (Naison, 1996, p. 132) This racist frame of thinking and action was especially true about the black scholar in academe. However, in recent years, many black scholars’ views have been remarkably consistent and coherent regarding their status and place in the academy, especially their intellectual pursuits of knowledge, and pedagogy.

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WHAT THE BLACK SCHOLAR MUST DO

Moreover, unassailable professionalism in the academy is obviously a double-edged sword, given that some black scholars are not having academic success. The volume of black scholarship has been beyond anybody’s expectations recently; however, many hard-working black scholars have not reached the academic superstar status--like Afrocentrist, Molefi Kete Asante; Philosopher, Cornel West; Henry Louis Gates, or Bell Hooks--and they are still under-appreciated. One thing is certain: black scholars of any background can no longer sit on the sidelines of the academy jealously looking in or excluding themselves from the educational and academic sun, expecting something to happen in their favor. They must make things happen in their professional life. Curiously, and to put it bluntly, many black scholars have not entered the mainstream of the higher educational and intellectual spectrum and perhaps never will. That is, there are black scholars who will never have parity or achieve full inclusion in the academy or mainstream media for various reasons. Equally important, it must be understood that the brilliant works of many of these black scholars may not change anyone’s adverse way of thinking about their scholarship, and newly created diverse, multicultural, or revised core curriculums, with black nationalistic kinds of disciplines, such as Afrocentrism or Pan Africanism....

Nonetheless, the black scholar must balance traditional black teachings with contemporary educational challenges, especially in relation to the canon of white scholarship. They must also speak to the passions and struggles of African Americans everywhere, not just in a specific urban or geographical area, which might lead to insights that can be rigorously verified. Toward this end, one must recognize that the heart of the black scholar’s work, in the ultimate analysis, should be to tell the truth, to challenge and assist all students, concerned individuals, or independent scholars, while empowering them to look at other avenues (novel ways) or unique approaches to thinking and learning new and exciting things, without grasping at straws to make a certain point. Essentially this means that the black scholar must be able to explain and have a better understanding of why such educational complexities and exigencies exist in the first place.

Nor must black scholars wear their political and ideological heart on their sleeve to gain some kind of leverage over others. In other words, the black scholar must show an even greater foresight, compassion, and originality in his or her profession, as well as a great suppleness of mind when it comes to competing or participating in academics. Intellectual consistency is also especially important. West explains that "the major obstacle confronting black intellectuals" and the black scholar is:

The inability to transmit and sustain the requisite institutional mechanisms for the persistence of a discernible intellectual tradition. The racism of American society, the relative lack of black community support, and hence the dangling status of black intellectuals have prevented the creation of a rich heritage of intellectual exchange, intercourse, and dialogue. There indeed have been grand black intellectual achievements, but such achievements do not substitute for tradition. (West, 1993, p. 72)

Furthermore, those black scholars who make academic and political arguments based on conventional wisdom or traditional liberalism or liberal ideas will be summarily ignored by influential liberals and conservatives who can quite possibly make a difference in their lives. Therefore, black scholars today must also involve themselves in the politics of the day to challenge the likes of such moderate-liberals as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and black conservatives, such as economist Thomas Sowell, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, writer Shelby Steele, or California Board of Regent Ward Connerly, who mistakenly believes that this country is now colorblind and "true equality" exist in all aspects of American life.

By challenging such misguided white liberals and right-wing black conservatives, one can gain different perspectives on current "hot-button" and cultural issues and intractable American social problems. Indeed, how can black scholars provide a practical understanding of their particular field of study or academic discipline that will be of interest to other intellectuals in American society? No less important, as the eminent black scholar, Nathan Hare has written:

The black scholar must [still] look beneath the surface of things and, wherever necessary and appropriate, take a stand against the bias of white scholarship. He must be an iconoclast, rallying to the call to arms of all the black intelligentsia, to destroy obsolescent norms and values and create new ones to take their place. (1969, p. 61)

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CONCLUSIONS

What is clear is that the black scholar must stay true to himself, regardless of his academic acceptance or non-acceptance by white academic scholars or colleagues. They must also be accurate, consistent, and pragmatic in their scholarship and quest for knowledge; and make important decisions about scientific inquiry and insightful analyses with reasonable certainty about complex outcomes and methodology, especially concerning specific or black nationalistic disciplines. Perhaps most important, the black scholar must avoid at all cost the arrant nonsense of pseudo black and white scholarship. More than anything else, the most obvious subject for debate for black scholars is what discipline they will eventually master and teach. At the same time, we must ask: can black scholars and intellectuals create new academic endeavors or disciplines that might add value and insights to black aesthetics and even the canon of Western scholarship?

If one considers, for example, multiculturalism, black feminist studies, and other black nationalist fields of study like Afrocentricity, as opposed to Eurocentric scholarship, one can clearly ascertain that this is the kind of bold inquiry Professor Hare had in mind in 1969 when he wrote:

The black scholar must develop new and appropriate norms and values, new institutional structures, and in order to be effective in this regard, he must also develop and be guided by a new ideology. Out of this new ideology will evolve new methodology, though in some regards it will subsume and overlap existing norms of scholarly endeavor. (1969, p. 62)

The black scholar must also note or recognize who they have become (or where they come from) at the beginning of the new millennium or next century. Indeed, what will be the collective influence or impact of the black scholar? Should the black scholar discard the concept of race altogether for a color-blind scholarship, if possible, based on pure scientific inquiry and logic, or continue to embrace racial scholarship that interdicts the forces of racism and white supremacy? This is to say, must black educators and scholars challenge the dominance of Eurocentric values in education? Moreover, should the black scholar continue to use racial propaganda to ensure his or her voice is heard in America? Or can the black intellectual work together collaboratively with white scholars and others to develop solutions to our educational questions and problems of the day by crossing the ideological and racial divide?

Further, and to an unprecedented degree, the black scholars must assist and support each other, without petty jealousies, whenever conceivably possible. This also means, ironically, that they must have a willingness to look at things objectively, as well as provide exclusively young black scholars with mentorship and a means to an end, filling them with promise and hope, so that they might grow as legitimate scholars and intellectuals, which is where it gets complicated. In the end, and through it all, one must finally understand that "the way in which one becomes a black intellectual [or scholar] is highly problematic" (West, 1993, p.68). This is so, according to West, because:

The traditional roads others travel to become intellectuals in American society have only recently been opened to black people--and remain quite difficult. The main avenues [however] are the academy or the literate subcultures of art, culture, and politics. (1993, 68)

Even more important, black scholars must empower themselves by thinking rigorously about big ideas and issues in order to effectively speak and write about hard truths. They must also be able to share these thoughts and important things by getting published and recognized. In this way, the black scholar will contribute to his teaching and education profession, providing the crucial information necessary to decide on any issue, and establishing a sort of pedagogical tradition. A final point worth considering: the black scholar or black practitioners of (new) higher educational disciplines must study systematically the ways of black people in the Diaspora and strike a balance between their own interests, pedagogy, scholarship, and professional life. And given these things, the black scholar will give us a greater understanding of our academic world and society.

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Bibliography

1. Hare, Nathan. (1969 December) "The Challenge of a Black Scholar." Black Scholar.

2. Naison, Mark D. (1996) The Significance of the Personal for the Professional. (----).

3. Paul A. Cimbala and Robert F. Himmelberg, editors. (1996) Historians and Race: Autobiography and the Writing of History. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

4. West, Cornel. (1993) Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America. New York: Routledge.

5. White, Jack E. (2000 May) "Was Lincoln a Racist?" Time.

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Creating Space in a White(ness) Place:
Blacks in Africana Studies at Predominantly White Colleges & Universities
Dr. Lawrence T. Potter, Jr.

"Black people have opened with, when they have not overcome, slavery, racism, economic exploitation, political oppression, and a host of other afflictions in the United States and the thirteen colonies of British North America that preceded its formation. At present African Americans confront the grave problems of black-on-black crime, drugs, unemployment, underemployment, and perhaps most serious of all, the disorganization of black families," writes Rhett Jones. I would amplify the fact that all African Americans, not just the poor and uneducated, face these challenges.

Given the history associated with the Africanist presence in the United States there should be no question about a black person's ability to survive, cope, and overcome. Needless to say, with each step toward advancement for African Americans in this great free white place, we continue to find systematic, problematic, and paradigmatic shifts that prevent many of us from creating space for recognition and self-identification (which is a major problem). Many people of African descent want to be recognized and identified as an existing entity without shrewd disregard from whites or blacks--for that matter. Predominately White Colleges & Universities (PWC&U) provide an excellent laboratory in which to study this phenomenon. This paper then, will focus on the challenges facing black scholars at predominantly white colleges and universities. More specifically, my curiosity about the origins and uses of this carefully observed and carefully invented, Africanist presence in a white place (mainly white institutions) has led to this formal study of what is now termed whiteness.

From the literary vantage point, Toni Morrison has masterfully uncovered the schemes and manufactured representations of Eurocentric whiteness as it relates to defining blackness in American literature or what she calls American Africanism. Likewise, I am concerned with uncovering the engineered and damaging effects created by the presence of whiteness in its physical absence on blackness or Black Studies in the academy. However, for the purpose of my talk, Black Studies will refer to a combination of any of the following: Africana, Afro-American, or Diaspora Studies.

Many scholars still have significant difficulty defining Afro-American Studies. Whether or not it is a separate and distinct discipline remains, among many, a matter of some controversy. Some argue that it is in fact a discipline although it did not actually approach that stage until the 1980s. Everything prior to that may be referred to as pre-paradigmatic.

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According to Nikongo BaNikongo, of Howard University, in an edited collection of essays titled Leading Issues in African-American Studies (1997):

To the extent that it has achieved institutional acceptance with its separate programs, departments and granting of advance degrees, it warrants now going beyond the semantic and treating Afro-American Studies as a field in and of itself. But what is it? History asks what happened in the past? Political Science asks, what are the dimensions of power? Economics asks, what are the modes of production, distribution and consumption? Sociology asks, what are the structures and organization and functioning of individuals, groups and society. What does Afro-American Studies ask?(5)

While this is an important question to answer, I think that BaNikongo has forgotten to pose the most critical question: If each of these subject fields--history, political science, economics, and sociology--asks specific questions which yield exact answers, then what regards have the Africanist presence been given in these disciples and their canons? I would argue an emphatic none, prior to the scholarship of black scholars (or scholars) who found legitimacy in lifting the shadows of ignorance by recognizing and identifying the fact that there were truths that had been distorted by Eurocentric writers of "history, political science, economics, and sociology." Even if the subject of African peoples were considered, Europeans had/have an "entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people" (Morrison, 7). As a disabling virus within historical and literacy discourse, the Africanist presence has become, in the Eurocentric tradition that American education favors, both a way of talking about and a way of policing matters of class, sexual license, repression, formations and exercises of power, and meditations on ethics and accountability (Morrison, 7). Thus, through American Eurocentrism, just as Morrison notes with her American Africanism, it is made possible for whiteness to be present (through discourse) in subjects that historically disregard the Africanists’ presence. Hence, the answer to BaNikongo’s question: What does Afro-American Studies ask?

Afro-American Studies asks how to redress the shortcomings of the Eurocentric perspective by constructing a distinct, Africanist canon--not one that is oppositional per se. Morrison’s approach to understanding the Africanist presence in American literature, I would argue, is the same as understanding the Africanist presence in American history, culture, and her institutions; specifically, the ‘white place’ (academic institutions) where Afro-American Studies has garnered limited acceptance. Toni Morrison writes in Black Matters (chapter 1):

In the absence of real knowledge or open-minded inquiry about Africans and African Americans, under the pressures of ideological and imperialistic rationales of subjugation, an American brand of the Africanist [my change; originally Africanism] emerged: strongly urged, thoroughly serviceable, companionably ego-reinforcing, and pervasive. For excellent reasons of state--because European sources of cultural hegemony were dispersed but not yet valorized in the new country--the process of organizing American coherence through a distancing of Africa became the operative mode of a new cultural hegemony.

These remarks should not be interpreted as simply an effort to move the gaze of Afro-American Studies to a different site. I do not want to alter one hierarchy in order to institute another. It is true that I do not want to encourage those totalizing approaches to African-American scholarship, which have no drive other than the exchange of dominations--dominant Eurocentric scholarship replaced by dominant Afrocentric scholarship (8).

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From Morrison’s creative observations, I articulate my strong advocacy of Afro-American Studies to construct a distinct Africanist canon--none oppositional--largely because of the issue of domination associated with whiteness.

When we consider the fields of Africana, Afro-American, and Diaspora Studies at present, we are faced with the problem of divisiveness. This proves to be the greatest challenge for black professors in such disciplines at predominately white colleges and universities. Who or what school of thought should dominate the focus of Black Studies programs and departments? In an April 14, 2002 article printed in the New York Times, "Out of Africa and Back," Robert Boynton poses these questions: Should Black Studies be a department or a program? Should it emanate from a global or an American perspective? (36).

All of the above questions have become central to black professors at predominantly white colleges and universities. Whether one considers these questions to formulate cultural debates in more settled fields in the academic universe or to defined ideas for the future of the Black Studies discipline, we should not allow the hidden whiteness to destroy our missions of providing an objective assessment of the major contributions made to this global world by peoples of African descent. When I speak about this hidden whiteness, I am referring to the limitations or restrictions that seem to be self-imposed by many of our own administrators and peers for the sake of maintaining the status quo; or the master-slave relationship that was often predicated on domination. The idea of domination will continue to stifle any Black Studies program at white colleges and universities as long as black scholars allow the oppositional racial politics (meaning whiteness) to define the functions and existence of our scholarship and being. In utilizing the master-slave relationship to analyze the academy, it is important that one understands the idea of control (through language). Who defines what, when, how, and why? When defining the what, when, how, and why, an identity is created. In the case of master-slave relationships, the master often defined the slave: what they did, when they did it, how they did it, and why they did it. This mentality has been reinforced for centuries as it relates to white-black relations, not only in the Unites States, but abroad as well. To be defined by someone other than self renders the problem of having no true self-consciousness. W.E.B. Du Bois notes this idea very early in the twentieth century when he writes: "one has no true self-consciousness when he sees himself through the eyes of others and measures his soul by the tape of a world who look on in amused contempt and pity" (Souls of Black Folk, 9). Toni Morrison, in the novel Beloved (1988), writes that, "Definitions belong to the defined, not the definers." As mentioned above, in defining, an identity is created. But for Black Studies, identity is a major area of contention.

While it is clear that cultural boundaries persist between the dominant society and the Afro-community, a healthy debate rages on as to whether an attempt ought to be made at continually narrowing the divide. The debate centers on the question of name identification. Thus, BaNikongo claims:

The pan-academic approach to Afro-American Studies is not very popular. It is more likely to find greater emphasis on one end of the spectrum than the other. If the academic fields of inclusion present some controversy, so too does its geographic scope. Here again much depends on and differs from place to place. Many schools confine their interests to the life experiences of African peoples in the United States; these schools are more like to call their departments Afro-American Studies. Many others broaden the geographic scope to include the investigation of African peoples wherever they are found; these schools are more likely to refer to their departments as Africana Studies or Africana & Afro-American Studies" (Leading Issues in African-American Studies, 5).

Even if this debate is the case, the decision of naming (or nomo) that is a significant African cultural practice, should be determined by the faculty members who constitute the program or department and not the usual white administrators. Furthermore, the direction and focus of the discipline should follow the same protocol. Yet, this is generally not the case for black professors at white colleges and universities.

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Whether it is a process of avoiding the paternalistic/misogynistic patterns of the Eurocentric ways of domination (one school of thought over another), black scholars need to leave the divisive methods outside the struggle of Black Studies reformation. "It is not hardly surprising the controversy abounds among most every aspect of Afro-American Studies," says BaNikongo. "But what is Afrocentricity anyway?" he asks (6). Later he writes, "The best known and perhaps the most prolific writer on the subject matter probably provides the best answer when he says, ‘the Afrocentrist will not question the idea of the centrality of African ideals and values but will argue over what constitutes those ideals and values’"(6). However, I think that BaNikongo should not allow bias into his understanding of Afrocentricity and refer to Molefi Asante's 1980 book of the same title for answering this question: "Afrocentricity is interpretation and analysis from the perspective of an African people as subjects rather than as objects on the fringes of the European experience."

As a concept or ideology, Afrocentricity has a legitimate space in the white place. But its space should not be deemed as the definitive perspective. This should be welcomed without resentment, even though it constructs a distinct, oppositional canon. If this were the sole paradigm for all Black Studies programs, Afrocentricism becomes blackness just as Eurocentrism becomes whiteness. In power relations, the concept of Afrocentricity is limited to the theoretical ability to critique whiteness; privileging one thought--process over the other. Yet, Afrocentricity in the practical sense becomes limited, too, in its ability to reach the black masses because of the imperialist Eurocentric value system that continues to plague the Afro-community on the one hand. On the other hand, there are black scholars who do not defend or buy into this liberal point of view as a result of their conservatism. In addition, there may be other Black African Diaspora (Caribbean, Latin American) cultural implications that may well challenge this viewpoint as a result of cultural imperialism influenced by Eurocentric colonization. Essentially, then, there is no universal systematic, symbolic, and/or paradigmatic approach to Black Studies.

Given individual scholars, like William Julius Wilson, who advance fictional rhetoric like we are living in a period of a "declining significance of race," it has become very clear to me that black scholars at white colleges and universities have yet another challenge: to make public that race has become metaphorical--a way referring to and disguising forces, events, classes, and expressions of social decay and economic division far more threatening to the body politic than biological race ever was (Morrison, 63). Morrison writes in Playing in the Dark

Expensively kept, economically unsound, a spurious and useless political asset in election campaigns, racism is as healthy today as it was during the Enlightenment. It seems that it has a utility far beyond economy, beyond the sequestering of classes from one another, and has assumed a metaphorical life so completely embedded in daily discourse that it is perhaps more necessary and more on display than ever before (63).

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Like Morrison, I am prepared to be corrected on this point insofar as it misrepresents the shelf life of racism in social and political behavior, i.e. a shelf life that has underscored the inception of Afro-American Studies. But I remain convinced that the metaphorical and metaphysical uses of race occupy definitive places in the ‘white place.’ Black professors often seek to create space.

It was articulated by Gerald Early in the same April 14, 2002 New York Times, in an article titled "A Place of Our Own," that the "black scholar is locked in the prison house of identity--isolated within the white university, apart from the black one," In trying to evaluate Early's comment, I have come to disagree with his understanding of the black scholar of today. Early is accurate in suggesting that the "black scholar is locked in the prison house of identity." But what is more critical is the fact that we are not only isolated by the university, but the whiteness embodied by the universe we live in; and set not apart from the black one, but set up to be a part of the American (or Eurocentric) black one. All this goes to support my earlier argument about the divisiveness that exists within our own communities. If we are able to pull together as a collective, while respecting differences, Black Studies would embody and personify the Africanist presence with regard to the African Diaspora and beyond as suggested by Princeton's Nell Irvin Painter. Black professors must continue to be strident in their efforts at understanding the polemics of whiteness. For we do not "generally control foundations, research universities, major academic presses and journals—all the things that make the scholar’s life rewarding," according to Gerald Early. We must continue to build character in our selves, our scholarship, and through our service to humanity with a steadfast conviction and without compromising or questioning our legitimacy.

With the white place we must continue to create space. We no longer need to embrace the idea articulated in the 1960s and 1970s of moving from margin to center or only existing from an African-center. But we must continue to work from within, although many times we are without (resources and support). Black scholars at predominantly white colleges and universities must embrace the Afrocentric debate, issues of identity, the causes of "underclassness" and remain rooted. These are but a few issues making for lively debate in the discipline of Afro-American Studies today. However, we cannot continue to be divisive by ostracizing our own. Black Studies is a global culture--inclusive by nature--to reflect the world of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and politics. For Black Studies, black professors have a new intellectual mission: the African Diaspora.

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Bibliography

1. BaNikongo, Nikongo. (1997) "The Scope of Contending Issue." Leading Issues in African-American Studies. North Carolina: Carolina Academic Press.

2. Buynton, Robert S. (2002 April) "Out of Africa and Back." The New York Times, 14: 36-38

3. DuBois, W.E.B. (1996) The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Norton Books.

4. Early, Gerard. (2002 April) "A Place of Our Own." The New York Times. 14: 34-40.

5. Jones, Rhett S. (1994) "The End of Africanity? The Bi-racial Assault on Blackness." Western Journal of Black Studies. 18,4 Winter: 201-210.

6. Morrison, Toni. (1992) Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard UP.

7. ---Beloved. (1988) New York: Random House.

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A Critical View of the University in Society
Rudy Hughes

The ancient quest for knowledge has usually been perceived as an equally ancient quest for truth (McCloskey, 1998). Initially, knowledge and truth stood priceless. Kelly (1940) tells us that as constructive forces of society the colleges –-an engine of that dual quest-- are called to be partly responsible for maintaining a democratic balance between the privileges and services of the few, the rights and duties of many. Once knowledge and the materialistic fruits thereof became "co modified" by capitalism, the institutions producing knowledge and that product called truth also went up for sale, or so it seems. When did this process begin? What form, if any, has change taken? Is this "change" really new or only newly discovered?

This paper speaks to the perceived changes in the university and college mission and vision; those institutions that historically served the needs of a literate democracy. The presentation will point to the sociological intersections of McCloskey (1998), Mills (2000), Soley (1995) and others. An attempt will be made to follow the path pointed to by Mills (2000, pg. 77):"…a re-statement of the issue…may reveal an inconsistency of values held…in order to act, the interested must get straight what it is they value most."

STRUCTURE, EFFECTS, AND ISSUES

How does the structure of the university and its location in the economy affect the kinds of knowledge that is produced there? To answer this we must address concepts of physical location, governance, finance, and the ultimate intent of the institution.

The college and university have always been important components of the national fabric. The impact has not been limited only to those who have attended. Cohen (1998) tells us that the existence of the institutions had social meanings for local communities. Initially, colleges served as symbols of community pride; an institution distinguished a civilized community from an unlettered backwater settlement in the wilderness. Towns vied with each other to become the site of new institutions. Land developers donated property to colleges in the center of their tracts, assuming that the worth of the surrounding property would increase.

The surrounding communities, Cohen also states, influenced institutions. Cohen tells us that from 1870-1944, the period that he calls the University Transformation Era--the ostensible mission of the universities--the quest for knowledge and academic excellence--was always subordinate to the institution’s adherence to popular values. They could not stray too far from community mores lest they lost their local support.

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Kelly (1940) states that as constructive forces of a democratic society colleges are called to balance privileges with services and "rights" with "duties" of all the members of the population. Has this held true? Have colleges and universities always sought to maintain this balance? Are they doing so today? Or have other mechanisms always been in place or recently developed?

Brubacher (1997) tells us that the desire of important religious denominations (such as the Anglican and Calvinist Churches) for a literate, college-trained clergy was probably the single most important factor explaining the founding of colonial colleges. The principal agencies of administration, he continues, were a president and board of control. Brubacher, supported by Cohen, adds that during the colonial period of 1636-1789 boards of overseers that were made up of clergymen or local magistrates governed the colleges. Additionally during the period of 1790-1869 "boosterism" was important because in the United States anyone with enough capital or enthusiasm could become a college founder, says Cohen. The only teachers represented in the governing body were the president, and even they served at the pleasure of the board.

Cohen tells us that the president increasingly came to be a representative of the trustees, less a member of the faculty. Many presidents continued teaching, but more devoted their time to fundraising and community relations. Brubacher and Cohen note that the composition of governing boards shifted as successful businessmen, those having social or political connections or access to wealthy donors, or being popular community figures, were appointed in greater numbers. Brubacher tells us that from the 1890s to the 1920s the inclination of businessmen on governing boards was to treat institutions of higher learning like business corporations.

A change toward secular administration was also on the way. Brubacher points out that while 90% of the college presidents in 1860 were trained for the ministry, only 12% had such training by 1933. Soley (1995) informs that corporate executives became the largest single group represented on governing boards of colleges and universities; and that these trustees were and are still often hostile to intellectualism. Martin (1997) tells us that at almost every American college or university founded prior to 1950, the first chief academic officer was the president. Institutional governance structures shifted notably in the direction of administrative hierarchies and bureaucratic management systems.

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In 1870, soon after the end of the Civil War, says Martin (1997), Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard, appointed the institution’s--and American higher education’s--first dean to relieve him of some portion of the college’s administration. From the 1880s through the 1950s, the bureaucratic titles of academic dean, vice president for academic affairs, academic vice president, dean of faculty or provost gained prominence on campuses nationally. Immediate academic responsibility no longer rested with the president. University presidents, like corporate CEOs, says Soley, were now in the revenue production and research & development business, no longer in the business of educating students.

FINANCE

The president was thereby freed from the classroom or curriculum concerns and could spend his time searching for financial support. Cohen, supported by Brubacher tells us that as far back as the colonial period colleges depended on sponsoring church groups, private voluntary contributions, public and governmental subsidies, subscribers and combinations of funds coming from various other sources. Mills (1959), supported by Cohen, points to the change in "status" of presidents from lofty academician to pragmatic manager. Career educators move from the academic to the bureaucrat: relational interest groups change from social reformers to corporate decision-makers; and problems change from those of choice to those of the new donors/clients. Institutional emphasis, asserts Cohen, takes new directions. Influence, once locally driven, begins to reflect that of the new donors. Mills offers that the new uses of social science in support of industry and/or the military offer gratifying financial, material, status and ego-fulfilling opportunities to usually underpaid, unknown educators. It was during this earliest time of president-as-educator versus president-as-chief executive/financial officer, that the question of the "direction" and "intent" of American higher education arises.

Why so much concern? What’s wrong? What direction has American higher education taken? Hoffman (2000), supported by Cohen and Sperber, states that faculty priorities over the last several decades have changed. By the early 1900s, faculty no longer devoted the majority of their time to teaching and related activities such as academic advising and mentoring; instead their primary focus increasingly was research, scholarship and professional service. Industrialists drove post-Civil War support, from 1870 through WWII. Cold-War-era support, from 1945-75, was driven by military expenditures. The military-industrial complex, and higher education institutions became symbiotic. The college had shifted, stresses Cohen, from pure research to applied research. Through their developing weaponry they were parties to mass destruction. Additionally, Sperber (2000) states that the corporate university exhibited similar characteristics across the nation: they had large and influential collegiate subcultures, flourishing intercollegiate athletic departments, well-earned reputations as party schools, and administrators who emphasized research and graduate programs over undergraduate education. Instead of building an equitable society, they enhanced the reproduction of the pre-existing social structure.

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Mills and Soley agree and point out that to practice abstracted empiricism requires a well-funded research institution. The costs of research done at universities, however, are not all picked up by corporate dollars, government grants, or foundation monies. They also come from tuition-paying students, who have been forced to subsidize projects that benefit donor/client corporations. High research costs, which arise from the need for expensive, state-of-the art research laboratories, have caused tuition to skyrocket. As university budgets tightened, administrators realized that the way to lower the course load for research faculty, and still gain maximum dollars for their teaching, was to adjunct out the class or assign a professor one huge lecture class per year assisted by underpaid, benefit-less graduate teaching assistants.

The most alarming signals of contemporary change occurred before the public. Soley states:

• During the 1980s, colleges and universities hired more none-teaching staff than professors.
• Eamon M. Kelly, president of Tulane University in New Orleans since 1981, spent most of his adult life working for the Ford Foundation and the federal government before being named university executive vice president, and eventually president.
• Roland W. Schmitt, president of Renselaer Polytechnic Institute between 1988 and 1993, was previously an executive with General Electric for 35 years.
• In 1993, Michigan State University president John DiBaggio was selected as president of Tufts University because of his proven fund-raising abilities.
• In 1993, Michigan State University hired Peter McPherson as president. McPherson was previously group executive vice president of Bank of America. He was special assistant to President Ford, administrator for the Agency for International Development, and Deputy Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration before joining the Bank of America.
• In April 1994 Oklahoma Senator David Boren abdicated his post on the Senate Finance and Agricultural, Nutrition and Forestry committees to accept a position as president of the University of Oklahoma.
  
  What were the reasons for this change of focus from education to the bottom line? First, says Sperber, came the realization that colleges and universities are business enterprises competing for a limited clientele: the students. When the last of the baby boomers passed through higher education in the 1970s, the number of college students dropped quickly from over 3 million in 1978 to less than 2.5 million in 1993. Tuition dollars were lacking. Next, Sperber continues, another source of their financial problems were the drastic cuts in public and private funding to higher education during the final three decades of the twentieth century. Sperber, Soley and Cohen stress that federal aid shifted from grants to loans. Grants from philanthropic foundations and corporations moved from general to those given for specific purposes. With the decline of general funding, universities began looking to the private sector and well-funded Pentagon programs for money, says Soley.
  
  Martin (1997) points to other external forces for change. In 1992, for the first time in more than twenty years, total state support for higher education declined over the previous year. In addition, during the period from 1992 to 1994, corporate philanthropic support went to elementary and secondary school systems and special interest groups, instead of colleges and universities.

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For solutions to decreasing revenue, Sperber’s research points to the aggressive marketing practices of collegiate institutions, designed to maximize revenue. Many emphasized their big-time college sports programs and party atmosphere. Some administrator’s admit there has been a change in focus. Sperber quotes an administrator at a Sunbelt university:

We certainly can’t give our students a quality degree--not with class size growing geometrically and our 30-to-1 faculty/student ratio--but at least we can encourage students to have fun, and root for our teams while they’re here….

Football Saturdays are great here and so are winter basketball nights. In our Admissions Office literature, we’ve stopped saying that we provide a good education--our lawyers warned us that we could get sued for misrepresentation--but we sure promote our college sports team.

Has the "general welfare" always been the "intent" of American higher education? Leaman (1999) in his work on the meritocratic design of intelligence quotient (I.Q.) and scholastic aptitude tests (S.A.T.) speaks of the philosophical roots of a leading contemporary educational administrator. James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard in the late 1930s, had a letter written by Thomas Jefferson to John Adams in 1813. Conant took parts of the letter as a centerpiece of his educational and administrative philosophy. Jefferson wrote to Adams:

I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents…. The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and the government of society…. that form of government is the best which provides the most effectually for a pure selection of these natural aristae into the offices of government.

The SAT, according to Leaman, and argumentatively in the eyes of Conant, finally made it possible to create the natural aristocracy. The idea of a nation being ruled by an elite whose members were selected early in life, without reference to their station of birth and then elaborately trained by educators for positions of governance that they would hold for their adult lives but couldn’t hand down automatically to their children actually predates both Conant and Jefferson. In The Republic, Plato proposed a system in which society would be run by a class of state-selected and educated guardians. Confucian China had the Mandarin system that selected future high officials by examination and then trained them in a special national school.

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Society, says Kaplan (1997) now identifies a cognitive elite during the elementary and secondary school years using a variety of education tests. Standardized testing has become the new tracking! The most cognitively able of this group are also educated at a handful of the country’s most selective colleges and universities. Members of this group are in the top 5-10% of measured cognitive ability and, by virtue of their selective education, they enter cognitively demanding and economically rewarding professions.

Kaplan and Leaman both point to a new segregation of the classes; those with the ability and/or early opportunity to become familiar with the new technology versus those who do not. The brightest students would be sent on to college at public expense. Some portion of the rest might go to two-year junior colleges. Conant, however, insisted that the country should not expand educational opportunity, except for members of a tiny cohort of intellectually gifted. Indeed, the college population ought to be reduced: "There are too many rather than too few students attending the universities of this country," said Conant. "At the very least," he continued, "we should weed out "perhaps one-half" of the people in college, and put "others of more talent in their place." Sperber believes that making the undergraduate "Honor’s College" and/or "Honor’s Program" at many colleges, available to a small percentage of the general student body, answers the needs for the elite.

The debate continues with McCloskey, Mills, and Soley. Mills establishes a critical viewpoint when he states: "The sociological imagination and classic social analysis enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene….its meaning for the inner life, historical social structures, urgent public issues and the external career of a variety of individuals." Soley shares this criticality, stating that corporate funding reduced the independence of university researchers, undermining the credibility of research results. McClosky, however, criticizes nothing; and offers no alternatives. Her stance is that rhetoric is persuasive and social, that the rhetorical character of science makes it social. All knowledge has been built up communally, through free social exchange.

Mills sees American power as being "anti-social". There is no cooperative exchange or conversation between classes (General elections would only be seen as an exercise of the middle class). Notions of progress, he contends, are usually congenial to those who are rising in the scale of income and position; those connected with the top levels of society with no concern for those living at the bottom of society.

The American university system, says Mills, seldom if ever provides political education; it seldom teaches how to gauge what is going on in the general struggle for power in modern society. Why, questions Soley, does Boston University have forty-four externally funded endowed professorships? Who do the professors associate with, Thank, and owe allegiance to? Probably the financiers, not the students! Most social scientists/educators have had little or no sustained contacts with sections of the general, affected, or impacted community. Yet, from a critical, economic, college student versus non-student viewpoint, the students (with whom the educator supposedly has regular interaction) are part of the privileged segment of society: they are in the system.

For McCloskey the point of rhetorical analysis is merely to read with understanding. The conversation leads to standards of persuasiveness. Rhetoric does not deal with truth directly; it deals with conversation. It is a literary way of examining conversation; writing with intent, the intent to persuade. Yet, that benign viewpoint, says Soley, will leave unaddressed the industrial practice of co-opting critical faculty members, hiring them as consultants. The experts now work for the enemy! Mills stresses that abstract empiricism has come to represent "bureaucratic" development and amoral, unfettered domination.

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There are some points of agreement. McCloskey sees economics as a historical rather than a predictive science; economic activities must be measured to be proved. Mills and Soley, supported by Cohen, Kaplan, Sperber and others present compelling historical evidence that, for quite some time, all has not been well within the spirit of American higher education. What is wrong with education, suggests Mills, is what is wrong with American social structures: the social structure of the United States is not altogether democratic. It is democratic mainly in form and in the rhetoric of expectation. In substance and in practice it is very often non-democratic.

SUMMARY

Soley (1995) sees this change as new, something contemporary. Mills (2000) sees the college-presidential role as an evolution of social proportions. However, the roots of change began as soon as the institutions accepted and/or sought financial support from outside the church! In America, exclusive of the Church, there stood only the secular state and secular financial capitalist financiers capable of offering large and dependable sums of aid. Once the secular aid began to flow, the "intent" of the institutions switched from the general welfare to the specific welfare of a secular economy. The trustees, interested in maintaining the operations of the institution for cash flow purposes, if not the dividends on their investments, had to remake the president from an educator administrator to a bureaucratic entrepreneur; someone who would be associated with money and the moneyed with little conscience, only purpose. Cohen states that the major contribution of the universities was that they began to produce scientific research of a quality and variety that by the 1940s was preeminent in the world. From the Civil War to WWII, principal funding was from industrial sources. The Cold War period, from 1945 to 1975, saw funding directed, in large part, away from the Pentagon budgets.

CONCLUSIONS

Soley sees the corporate assault on universities as being part of a deliberate corporate campaign to reintroduce power on campuses after the student unrest and social activism of the 1960s had largely discredited corporate sponsorship. Cohen sees major change beginning after the Civil War. Hoffman saw change during the early 1900s. Eisenhower recognized change in the 1950s, warning of the economic and political freedom threatening dangers of the "military-industrial complex" in his 1961 farewell address (Mills, 1956) (Eisenhower, 1961). This change is not new; only newly discovered.

The United States, says Kaplan, is no longer democratic. The new reality is a version of a meritocracy, in which a large but elite minority dominates economic and social decision-making. Members of the elite are highly educated, having been recruited from a variety of social classes and ethnic groups through the sorting mechanism of standardized testing and education. The essential problem is neither the undermining of undergraduate education by research or athletics, rather it is the building of an intellectual aristocracy, allowing for the development of a meritocracy in the quest for money and power. The corporate nature of the university places the intellectual student leaders at the top, being prepared for leadership; others are prepared for labor and employment. Both social stratification and the constant new product-development needs of the market economy are reinforced. Society will remain stratified; no longer by royal-versus-common blood; nor by race, but by the new meritocratic differences between the intellectual/technologically elite, and everyone else.

The effect of this new "integration of intellectuals" has been to siphon off intellectual talent from lower economic classes and ethnic groups, Kaplan continues. Continuance of this practice paints a bleak picture of a new have and have-not, worthy and unworthy society. Our current locales of poverty and enclaves of residential and commercial affluence may model the future structure of urban America. The urban doughnut--a circle of technology and commerce, downtown affluence, residential privilege and gentrification, surrounded by borders of poverty plus un and underemployment, again surrounded by gated suburban and affluent rural communities, with speckles of rural poverty doting the landscape--will become the co