Prestigious Colleges Ignore the Inadequate Intellectual Achievement of Black Students

By Professor Phillip Richards, Associate Professor of English, Colgate University
Published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 13, 2002

WHEN I CAME TO TEACH at Colgate University, in 1988, the white proprietor of a local store pointed to the hill on which the college sits and told me, "There is no room for you there." He meant that it was unlikely that I, a black person, would stay at that very conservative institution located in an isolated section of central New York. Over the years in Hamilton, a tiny town of a little more than 2,000 people, the storekeeper had seen a number of black professors and administrators go almost as quickly as they had come, along with countless cycles of black students who rarely returned with their white classmates for reunions.

His comment was telling, because it would never have been made on the campus itself. At Colgate—like other small, competitive liberal-arts colleges with overwhelmingly white, suburban cultures--the truth of its racial exclusivity, so basic to its social life, is rarely mentioned overtly. Yet colleges like mine seem to reproduce the inequalities of American society in ways that they can't avoid, despite their best intentions. Perhaps it's time to stop pretending otherwise and deceiving minority applicants into thinking that they will achieve the same academic and social success as their white counterparts—or even be held to similar standards.

Last fall, an unexpected incident shattered that pretense at Colgate. That the incident received significant public interest, including extensive national media coverage, has reinforced my belief that it raised issues of concern far beyond the walls of my college. It also suggests that what occurred is relevant to many other institutions.

The uproar began when Barry Shain, a tenured white political scientist at Colgate, wrote in an e-mail message to a female black student that minority students were often seduced into unchallenging courses where liberal professors, who were "sensitive" to their needs, gave them inflated grades. That practice, Shain continued, harmed black students, who were generally less well prepared academically than their white peers. He further complained that a growing number of courses encouraged students to examine their feelings as a way to explore racial issues. The message was widely disseminated to other students without his knowledge.

The specific charges in Shain's message created less of a stir than his breach of the university's racial etiquette. He had publicly exposed the tacit assumption that black students hold a subordinate academic status at Colgate. The violation of that silent code predictably upset many black students, who resented the attack on their academic credentials. The claim that liberal professors gave them inflated grades distressed them much less than the implication that their teachers saw them as academically inferior.

At a campus meeting about the incident, black students broke down and cried. During a college- wide panel discussion on diversity, a male black student, incoherent with rage, publicly denounced Shain. Angry black students began a sit-in in the main administration building.

Some black students told me that the incident had intensified the academic and social anxieties that they had already experienced at Colgate. They observed that few, if any, Colgate faculty members had stood up to contest Shain's assertion that black students were less well prepared and educated than their white counterparts. The most thoughtful black students remarked, however, that Shain had simply aired a long-hidden truth about life at the college, that they were just being confronted with the reality of their stigma as black students at Colgate and in a predominantly white society.

Unfortunately, I had to agree with them. As one of the only tenured black professors who has lived in Hamilton and taught at Colgate for more than a few years, I have found that it is difficult to avoid the fact of African-American marginality at Colgate, where the tone is set by an upper-class white culture. A little less than 4 percent of the student body is African-American. And although the college doesn't keep records on the socioeconomic status of its students as a whole, my perception and the broad consensus of other professors with whom I've spoken are that the majority of black students are lower-middle-class and lower-class students.

The black students whom I encounter tend to arrive less well prepared than their classmates, and only a few go on to perform at the level of the best white and Asian students. Although the black students have ranked highly in their secondary-school classes, they now must measure themselves against students from the top 10 percent of the nation's most competitive schools. With the exception of a few high-performers—often women from the West Indies or Africa—most black students do not achieve academic distinction. That experience is clearly not unusual. The U.S. Department of Education recently released a report documenting that black students arrive on campuses with less preparation for college-level work than other groups, and that almost half of black undergraduates get C's or lower.

Over the years, colleagues have often told me that they have acquired a different set of academic expectations, whatever their formal evaluations, for disadvantaged minority students. That academic stigma, which marks black Colgate students, is no doubt related to what appears to be their inadequate performance in the classroom. I myself noticed that high-performing West Indian women in my literature classes had dropped out of the pre-med program. Like many faculty members at the college, including other minority professors, I too have casually assumed that black students do poorly or fail in the sciences or in any subject that demands high levels of analytic thought, like foreign languages. The assumption of that inadequacy may create a self-fulfilling prophecy, leading to slackened standards and lowered demands for minority-student achievement.

Colleagues have told me of the exceptional accomplishments of individual minority students whom sympathetic and demanding teachers have taken by the hand and pushed to the heights that Colgate expects of its best students. Those students are exceptions, however, in an excellent liberal-arts college where white students routinely tell me of the impact of remarkable faculty members on their intellectual lives. The black students don't discuss teachers who stimulate them intellectually as much as those who give them the attention and help they need to compete respectably at the college.

The double standard leaves its mark on black students long after graduation. Whenever I read the alumni magazine, for example, I notice the dearth of black students who announce their entrance into high-level positions in law, medicine, finance, corporate life, advertising, education, and publishing—positions to which many white Colgate students aspire and in which they often succeed.

Colgate's separate tracks of expectation, performance, and success for black students have been the most disheartening aspect of my experience here—especially as those disparities have persisted over the years. Although every professor I know has observed it, the institution has done little to deal openly with the problem within the faculty as a whole. Public discussion focuses on multiculturalism and diversity—not the problem of inadequate black intellectual achievement at a prestigious academic institution.

The silence surrounding such a serious problem is, in and of itself, important. My college, like others of its type, prides itself for educating students in an environment that promotes excellent teaching, individual attention, and high student motivation and accomplishment. The visible disparity between the performance of black and white students calls many of those values into question. What does the sustained failure of black students in the sciences say about the quality of teaching and the individual attention that black students are receiving? What does it say about the institution's commitment to intellectual excellence? It is far easier for the faculty and administration to brand black students with a silent stigma.

Most upper-class white students come to Colgate expecting to gain the social and academic skills they need to move into the same upper-middle-class or upper-class world as their parents—which they usually do. But can, or will, the academic culture of the college—with its economic, social, and academic divisions—educate and socialize black students for the elite levels of American life in the same way?

That is, in fact, the most important question that Shain's allegations raise concerning Colgate's commitment to the fullest education of its black students. Simply asking that question comes as a great shock to black students as well as white faculty members and administrators, who appear to optimistically assume the necessary connection between a Colgate education and social mobility, especially for poor and working-class students. And it doesn't have easy answers.

The unspoken factors that encourage a two-tiered racial system at Colgate and similar institutions will not soon disappear. My college is an oasis of genteel upper-class values in an increasingly democratic multicultural world. At the heart of this retreat are not only classes and courses but the intimate extracurricular sphere of campus life: the exclusive fraternities, sororities, and other clubs and organizations in which important information is shared, professional connections are forged, and socialization for the upper-class life of corporate America is carried out. That social life is ruthlessly segregated, and its dominance only further distances disadvantaged black students from the college's centers of life. In a system of seven fraternities, four sororities, and more than 900 students, there are only four black members: three black men and one black woman. No black Greek organizations exist.

At the very least, colleges like Colgate should no longer recruit black students without alerting them to the nature of life in an academically competitive, rigorously white upper-class environment. Black students should understand such institutions' academic and social milieu from the beginning. High-school students who tour the campuses should not be sold a bill goods: that they will live in a world of close social and intellectual relation between students of different classes and racial backgrounds.

That's not to say that such relation can't develop, but few should come here expecting them. Visiting days, in which minority applicants are exposed to at representative sampling of minority students, should be either stopped or balanced with true accounts of interactions between the races. Black students, like their white counterparts, should be aware of the day-to-day realities of the still segregated racial life at colleges like Colgate.

Those colleges may also be able to solve some of the problem by recruiting black students who have already succeeded in an integrated social and academic world at prep schools or elite suburban high schools. At such schools, the colleges would recruit students whose parents are committed to placing their children in the still dominantly white world of America's corporate, professional, and educational elite. Those students would be either prepared for the academic rigors or ready to benefit from the relatively minimal remediation that colleges like Colgate can offer. I suspect that student organizations would welcome such black students, eager to make their way in literary, journalistic, theatrical, entrepreneurial, or political extracurricular activities.

Black students who immerse themselves in that culture would gain both the intellectual and the interpersonal skills that white students traditionally bring to their professional lives. In short, black students would enjoy the success that colleges like Colgate offer their white students- and they would feel - and be - an integral part of those institutions.

Students & Alumni for Colgate, Inc.
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