White students attending HBCU?
 

what are your thoughts on this?

- marissa

When I went on a tour of the HBCU's as part of a trip for our Common Book...didn't seem to be a big deal. The students that we met seemed to be interested in our experience and what it was like to be a majority turned minority. I think that students should study at the university that fits their needs, HBCU, historically white, Jewish, Catholic, or whatever.

I don't have a problem with it at all. I used to attend an HBCU, and while I was okay with it, alot of people there did not like the idea of, and the non black students that attended.

Kinda weird to me, I always wonder why are they there? Do they have a case of negrophilia or what? But a lot of them (not all) have a fraction of black in their blood and just wanted to see the part of their heritage that they never got to see. I know one girl who fits that category and she's cool. All the rest aren't really White American, they're study abroad students from countries where they have always mixed with darker people, so it's not a big deal.

There were whites that attended my HBCU. Nothing strange - just a good school. And (how can I say this)......the majority of them weren't "wanna be's" or anything like that. They were just themself and didn't try to fit any particular idea as to what was "black".

Granted all the ones I knew are now married to someone black, but that's another thread. lol

Tarry on....

i would still be a 8th year sophomore at an HBCU.

:cool:

OR...they could just be interested in pharmacy, agriculture, architecture or engineering, and their state offers full-tuition scholarships for people from in-state (regardless of race) who want to study those things.

I can only speak for my state, but in certain programs (pharm, forestry, and arch) the white students make up a higher percentage of enrolled students than black students. The programs are, simply, the best in the state, at a smallish school, and not very expensive.

But yeah...it sounds like negrophilia to me. :rolleyes:

While I attended Grambling, I noticed Caucasian students, Latin/Hispanic students and Asian students. They lived in the dorms, ate in the cafe, played sports, went to class, joined frat and sororities, etc..

Sure, at one point I wondered why. But then it occured to me. GSU in particular, is a cheap school that offers 4 year degrees that could get a student a job after graduation. :)

Negrophilia:eek: What about just getting a different cultural experience at an HBCU and taking advantage of what it has to offer!

There was a bit of talk lately about how HBCUs have underperformed lately and the administrations have looked into bringing in white students with better performance and possibly more money to help out.

There was also an article about Russian students at Alcorn State a couple years ago in the New York Times.

Interesting reads.

-Rudey

Many HBCU's are underfunded. Their alumni giving is piss-poor at best. And their infrastructure costs are escalating. Several predominantly majority universities have provided some level of collaborative schooling with HBCU's. However, many of the students do not pursue these programs, actively, depending on what program. Meaning, if there are immediate benefits from the program, they will pursue it. If it takes time to get it off the ground, the build up process is slow.

Interestingly, many foreign professors come to work at these schools to get established in their academic fields. There may be minor teaching loads. However, they get what they need, then leave to a better school. I know of one professor from China that is working at Morehouse School of Medicine and teaching biology at Morehouse College. And once one professor finishes, he or she usually recruits another from their area... That is how education gets perpetuated now at an HBCU.

Some graduates that have higher degrees sometimes come back to an HBCU because of the same job opportunities. However, there is more politics that plays a role in that process than hiring a foreign professor--namely, and unfortunately, the pay... You can pay a foreign professor less than a Ph.D. from the states.

But I think the most damaging aspect of many HBCU's are the infrastructure costs. It costs money to run a college. Most students are on some financial aid. And alumni are not endowing buildings like they could be doing. And the fact that back in the mid-1970's all the HBCU left the NCAA... That hurt them tremendously.

Should formalized integration occur? Maybe. Can it occur without loss of historical perspective? I dunno.

This article just came out in the NY Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/03/ed...pagewanted=all

August 3, 2005
Little-Noticed Crisis at Black Colleges
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
HOUSTON

IN a classroom of white walls and black students, an air-conditioned sanctuary from a sweltering July morning, Devon Moore walked toward the front table with his homework. He had clipped out a newspaper article and now gave a one-sentence synopsis of its subject, safety problems in pickup trucks. He identified a word new to him, "adjacent," and a word that used a prefix or suffix, "faulty." He was less than four weeks from starting his freshman year of college.

Devon had passed up a senior-class trip to Atlanta to enroll in the Summer Academy at Texas Southern University here, and at the outset of the eight-week session, he had wondered why. Having graduated from high school, he figured, "I already knew everything there was to learn." That illusion crashed and burned on Day 1, when the math instructor taught a lesson on slope and even gave an overnight assignment.

For some 185 incoming freshmen like him, and indeed for Texas Southern as an institution, the summer courses in reading, writing, and math form one front in a battle to reverse a disturbingly low graduation rate. Of the students who received diplomas last May, only 6 percent had earned their degree in the normal four years, and only 21 percent in six years. Those numbers, incredibly, reflected improvement from prior rates.

In its problem and its challenge, Texas Southern has plenty of company. Nationally, the historically black colleges and universities have a six-year graduation rate of 38 percent, according to The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. That is slightly lower than the figure for black students at all other institutions, and roughly 40 percentage points lower than for blacks at elite schools. The situation amounts to a little-noticed crisis in the very institutions that, for their size, play a disproportionate role in educating African-Americans.

A half-century after Brown v. Board of Education, 40 years after Lyndon Johnson's speech endorsing the concept of affirmative action, and two years after the Supreme Court upheld racial diversity as a factor in admissions, the approximately 80 historically black colleges and universities still enroll more than 10 percent of the African-American students in higher education and award close to 20 percent of degrees.

These black institutions have produced leaders from Thurgood Marshall to Jesse Jackson to Spike Lee. Their step shows, marching bands, and fraternities and sororities have become integral elements of African-American culture. It is a commonplace in black churches and neighborhoods for parents to believe that their children will have better outcomes in black colleges than in mostly white ones, because the black schools provide a more nurturing, supportive environment, free of white presumptions that blacks are intellectual inferiors or expectations they should portray the role of hip-hop gangsta.

But what happens when the truism appears less and less true? What happens when an education emergency is ignored except by those enduring it?

These are precisely the questions Texas Southern has dealt with, particularly since Priscilla D. Slade became president in 1999. The university has its roots in the civil rights struggle, because it was created by the State of Texas in reaction to the lawsuit of a black man who had been denied admission to the state's all-white law schools.

From that rather cynical genesis, Texas Southern has gone on to educate such political figures as the Congressional members Barbara Jordan and Mickey Leland. With about 11,000 students, 85 percent of them black, it teaches five times as many African-Americans as does the flagship campus of the University of Texas in Austin.

What pushed the six-year graduation rate nearly into single digits earlier this decade were factors, both educational and financial, that affect scores of black institutions nationwide. With the desegregation of colleges and universities in the South and the increased recruiting of black students by top universities, what W. E. B. DuBois famously called the "talented tenth" no longer heads to places like Texas Southern by default. In fact, the top 10 percent of graduates from any Texas high school are guaranteed admission to the state university system.

As a result, the students who come to Texas Southern arrive less prepared and sometimes less committed than their forebears. Roughly one-third of them require remedial classes before they can enter college-level courses. More than 100 of the available spaces in the Summer Academy went unclaimed, even though the program charges no tuition and provides a stipend for books that is worth several hundred dollars.

WHY don't they attend? That's the question of the decade," said Dr. Jacqueline Fleming, the director of Texas Southern's academic center. "The single biggest factor is a lack of motivation. Their world is BET, ghetto rap, going to school dressed like you're going to a club. They're here because their grandmother said to be here, or because their parole officer said it was this or jail."

Having taught at Barnard College, Dr. Fleming has seen plenty of anti-intellectualism in more rarefied settings, too. But those students came from families with means and with multigenerational legacies of college education. More than 40 percent of Texas Southern's students represent the first generation in their families to attend college and more than one-quarter have annual household incomes below $20,000.

The economic impact hobbles black colleges and institutions themselves. For in higher education, the prevailing rule of fund-raising is that the rich get richer. Texas Southern has an endowment of $6 million; across town, Rice University has $3 billion. The best endowed historically black institution, Howard University in Washington, ranks 132nd in the nation with $371 million, according to a survey by the National Association of College and University Business Officers.

The interest from a large endowment means money for scholarships, research grants and support services, among other things, and all are vital for institutions dealing primarily with students from the working class or below. The gap between the money available from federal Pell grants and even the modest costs here - about $7,200 yearly for tuition, room and board for Texas residents - has widened substantially over the past decade. Classes compete with jobs for priority. Dr. Bobbie Henderson, director of a center providing social services to students and their families, recently had to find housing for a dean's list student, already working at McDonald's, who had been reduced to living with her 16-month-old daughter in a car.

Against these obstacles, President Slade has undertaken a variety of efforts, from a partnership with a nearby high school to the Summer Academy to on-campus day care for students' children to several fund-raising drives. The radio and television host Tavis Smiley has given $1 million of a projected $10 million over 10 years to the journalism school, which now bears his name. Former President George H. W. Bush, a Houston resident, leads a capital campaign with a goal of $50 million. Some $15 million has already come in, and a new science building is under construction.

Without an array of wealthy alumni, Dr. Slade has turned to corporate leaders and private philanthropists in the city in a separate attempt to build up the paltry endowment. "This is my hit list," she said in her office in late July, brandishing a roster of prominent people to call. A professor of accounting and dean of the business school before being named president, she makes her sales pitch based not on pity or compassion but on bottom-line competitiveness.

"You live in the city of Houston," she said, recalling a recent appeal to an executive. "You have a business in the city of Houston. I'd venture that 10 percent of the people who work for you went to Texas Southern. We prepare individuals to work for you. You should want them to be as well prepared as possible. And you know who educates the largest number of those students."

-Rudey

This is not true.

Re: White students attending HBCU?
 

I don't see a problem with it, but I guess that is because I attend one. When I was looking for scholarships during my senior year of high school, I found that UTEP is a HBCU. Its hard to really see that when you are at the campus, beacuse the majority of the students are still Latino/Hispanic (mainly mexican).

negrophilia? What the hell type of word is that?

What divisions are the HBCU schools in when they chose not to integrate in the 1970's?

The SWAC?

Some of the schools did integrate, like Tennessee State, but that was made manditory in the 1990's to keep their accreditation...

Show me your proof?

-philia as an appendix generally means that someone has a love for/appreciation of a particular thing. In this case, someone with negrophilia would have a love for/appreciation of black people/black culture.

A good friend of mine runs a blog called Negrophile. :)

I'm with you, I was like wtf?? You might as well say coloreditis or something like that. I'm definately not feelin that word.

We had a number of whites at my school, a lot of them in the Education dept with me. I actually got along with them a lot better than some of the negroes I had to deal with (this is mainly because they were older and more mature).

Also, they can get a minority scholarship at an HBCU.

But, on the negrophilia thing, so if a black student goes to, say, Harvard, or Yale or something, does that make them a caucasiphiliac? No. A school is just a school. Who cares if its an HBCU or a PWI??? Just get your degree and get a job!

Why would it be strange? Is being around black folks so unheard of that these whites that go to an HBCU are some strange species that needs to be discussed and investigated?

*Not mad, I just don't see the relevance of the discussion*

We always had one student a year at Fisk (Fisk is tiny so had it been ten we would have fallen out) that was there on a transfer basis. They were just ours for a year then someone else came in. They were always cool, had a good time and felt all depressed when they had to leave because we are small family there as a result of its size. We didn't fund them because well we just didn't. Our last president was actively recruiting students that were not Black. That, amongst other things I think, is what got her "fired." I don't think the majority of students would mind a smallish number of non Black students but as a whole most students are concerned with losing that Black piece and it becoming a historical moniker. Alumni giving is actually up for us and now that I got a grown up job they will be getting an annual check from me as well.

I'm glad to see that I am not alone.

I used to wonder why I would see white teachers coming to my school to teach. The school where I was teaching is 99% black with about 85% on free/reduced lunch. I started talking to them and realized that it was for OPPORTUNITY. that's all. It was a job experience that they were after. Nothing more. Often to get into certain programs or have student loans reduced, etc. they have to teach in the lowest performing schools for the benefits.

I know that they ended up enjoying their experience cause some of them have been there for some years!

this was a topic that came up in my diversity issues in counseling class this summer but seeing as it was an all white class, i just wanted some other opinions.

thanks to all who have shared!

- marissa

Can you give us a little more background on your class other than the ethnicity of the class?

Such as, was the discussion revolved around the "superior" level of education that one would get if they attended a PWI vs. HBCU, etc.? Or since there was an end to affirmative action programs in many states, the are more folks trying to prove that HBCU's have "reverse racism" or what?

I guess I would need to more to give my answer to this question. How come would this question even be asked in the setting you described?

Do any of us who have attended and graduated from a HBCU have a problem with non-Af Am's attending them and "taking" away slots from those that these education is "intended" for? If this is your question, then here is my answer:

No. I do not HAVE a problem with someone who is not Af. Am. attending Spelman College. I know plenty of folks who were not Af. Am. or they were biracial, multi-racial, multi-ethnic that attended and graduated from Spelman College. There is some history to that I cannot go into and if you do a search on GC, there is discussion about that in the NPHC rooms.

Are these non-Af. Am.s or caucasians taking slots away from those the education intended for?

Given the article that Rudey posted, mostly likely NOT. Any person that does not need financial aid to attend the school is one less person that is taking a slot away from someone else. Not to say the academic selection process is lessened, just to say that the resources are not as depleted as large university systems are.

However, the academic teaching systems--such as having the newest and latest computer techonology systems in the libraries--at these schools may not be the best that money can buy like huge universities have... And yeah, I said it. Like Spelman has a wireless node on it's campus that isn't bootlegged--right... Like they would even allow computers in some of those dorms outside of LLC's... Like "Club Woodruff" (the library) has internet access that is ISDN and is on more that 5 computers--TOTAL--that doesn't require your blood and first born be given away to use...

Besides, many of the areas that HBCU's are located in are is impoverished areas of town. And due to the 1980's drug and gang violence, they areas fell in disrepair. Some have never come out from under it.

So how, does one MAKE a way for these schools? I dunno. But when I attended my 15 year reunion this year, I had classmates bitchin' about a capital campaign and why is Spelman begging for $$$...

I have always wanted to attend a HBCU because even though the highschool I attended was about 50/50 black/white... I went to a small college that was mostly white.

I want to expierence being the 'minority'.

Besides, the women of the Eta Delta chapter of TAU BETA SIGMA at Howard are the coolest people you'll ever meet!

This is FYI...
While an undergraduate, many non-Af Ams were entering the school's nursing program. Many Af Am students who had been there since day 1 (orientation class, lyceums, etc) were placed on lists. After many students, parents, etc. brought attention to this matter (not because of race), the nursing dean (non-Af Am/majority) along with the administration had to establish measures where transfer students had to take "x" number of hours BEFORE they could submit any paperwork to be considered for the nursing program.

It's the similar practice with our GLOs. One cannot attend School A during the Fall semester, then transfer to School B in the Spring and expect to submit any paperwork. No, you are integrated into that school culture, FIRST.

Like someone has alread said, you are eligible for minority scholarships @ HBCUs. Too bad, it isn't as easy on the flip side.

I haven't matriculated on a HBCU campus in years (almost 10 :o ) so, it would not surprise me what I would see in the classrooms. I was pleasantly surprised when I learned we had a soccer team. :D :cool:

paraphrased for space -


not a prob - i didn't even think 'bout the overall lack of info in my first post.

basically the class was a graduate course on multicultural/diverse issues in counseling. in general, an attempt to provide information about relevant issues for different groups (including ethnicity, immigration, sexual diversity, etc.)

ultimately we discussed a variety of topics, not all obviously related to counseling. and part of this had to do with the idea that the class isn't all about counseling but also acknowledging our own biases as future counselors.

one of the topics that got brought up was the concept of reverse racism in regards to scholarships and HBCU's, etc. additionally, my professor brought up the material rudy discussed and the info about minority scholarships for white students also.

honestly, i knew that HBCU's existed and some (no where near enough) of the history behind their creation just from outside readings. however, i wasn't really AWARE of them (if that makes any sense). my professor went to a HBCU and was able to share her insights. but, given my own ignorance and the lack of knowledge in the class as a whole, i thought it might be interesting to get other opinions rather than let the conversation drop.

just having a general knowledge of schools like spelman and howard, i can completely understand how students of any ethnicity would want to attend these schools. despite the differences in technology, i still think of these schools as providing a qualitatively different education that i wouldn't be able to find somewhere else. hell, sophocles was a infinitely smarter than i'll ever aspire to be, and he didn't have the internet or computers...

however, understanding some of the history involved, i was wondering how connected white students felt to the university community and history. and likewise, how black students at the school felt about white students or students of other ethnicities attending ('spots' or no spots).

hope this makes some sense...

Re: White students attending HBCU?
 

Not a problem. Although, while I was at my HBCU alma mater, there weren't any. Now I've learned that there are or have been other races there since I've graduated.

Given today's "youth" and the society we live in, I think that many have removed themselves (unconsciously) from the historical aspect of HBCUs. Many/Some/Most of OUR youth have removed themselves, rather are removed from the struggle that I (someone in my age range or older) heard about from our parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc. growing up.

Therefore, I don't see that there would be any negative reaction to the sight of non-Af Ams on a HBCU campus...not in 2005.

I cannot speak about the connection whites have at a HBCU. I guess they become exposed to the history, culture, seek the education and ultimately move on. :confused: That connection is individualized. You would have to speak to someone white for their own experience. I guess it's safe to say, you make your own collegiate experience regardless of the university/college.

First i wanted to address the Negrophilia term:eek: that was used. Many AA's/Black Americans are offended by the root word used in that term (negro). If you were to use the word negro alone they would probably give a very negative and aggressive reaction to this word being used, so coupling it with any other word does not make it sound any better to many AA's.

Next thing is I'm not sure if many of you know that some non-AA student go to HBCU's because they provide minority scholarships for these students who are minorities in the HBCU setting. I say get as much free money as you can especially when it's coming from a great school. You killed 2 birds with 1 stone, great source of education and free money:D

Many HBCU's are just as good as any other school, so they can feel that they are going to a well established school that is going to further their academic and professional careers.;)

Why can't these students have the same reasons for going to an HBCU that they would have for going to a traditional university?:confused:

I spent 3 years teaching at an HBCU, and that particular school started recruiting heavily to white males who were baseball players and white females who were either softball or volleyball players and offered them athletic scholarships. For most of these students, they were recruited from the local community colleges, or were picked up at a college recruitment night. Even though these students were in the minority, most adapted very easily to campus, made friends, and joined organziations. They didn't see it as a racial issue; they were excited to have found a school who picked them up and offered to pay for their education--which they might not have gotten as a transfer student to a larger university.

When I was considering going back for my Ph.D, several of my colleagues encouraged me to look at enrolling in an HBCU because of the likelihood of more financial aid, etc. I've seen several professionals who went to an HBCU as a minority and got very large scholarship packages, etc. There was one case at a school in Alabama where a young man who was white got a full scholarship to an HBCU, and eventually ended up as SGA president as well.