A Way Out of No Way (An HBCU Shout-Out)

This should be a good week for us, the often-weary academics soldiering in the HBCU cause. At least the regiment posted at Spelman College. US News & World Report just ranked us the #1 HBCU in the United States. There are numbers to back this up, and stories too.

We graduate 77% of our students, an accomplishment that can go under-appreciated until you see that according to the economic profile of our students a significantly higher number of them should be dropping out for financial reasons. Long before I became a faculty member there, I thought that Spelman represented the genius creed of black history — finding a way out of no way. Pulling up to campus in the mornings I see my students hustle toward class, the small grounds crew trimming, planting and raking and my colleagues hunched over trying to maintain control of their  armloads of term papers, I’m reminded of one thing: statistical drop-out projections are one thing; force of will and quiet determination are something else entirely.

People were thrilled but not surprised in 2004 when our students challenged Nelly and took the lead in protesting the carnal reduction of black women in music videos. We are an institution that nurtures outspoken, well-informed black women and sends them to shape the world. If you already know this then there is no need to describe the congratulatory glint of eye, the particular lilt when older black folk learn that I’m a Spelman professor and echo the name back to me: Spelman, you say? Truth told, I doubled up this week because Howard University, my own alma mater was ranked #2. These are the kinds of things that warrant the easy pride of superior performance.

But not quite. Not this week.

We among the HBCUs find ourselves assaulted from multiple quarters these days. The economy is brutalizing our students — I’m told Spelman lost 200 to financial obstacles just during the Christmas break. Our neighbors at Clark Atlanta are being forced to shed 70 faculty positions and those with jobs at other schools are being forced to add to their already heavy workloads. This is a hemorrhage of hope. And there are other concerns.

Being the #1 HBCU is something like winning the World Series in the Negro Leagues — an outstanding accomplishment that a misinformed world will somehow deems lesser because of the adjective preceding the word college. I recall conversations with academic peers, some of whom I love like play-cousins who nonetheless assure me I have many “other options” and ask “So why are you still at Spelman?” Unaware that the answer is because people ask me questions like that one. Asking why I’m holding it down for the black college set is like asking why all the black people didn’t move out of Harlem as soon as segregation was outlawed. For what it matters, Spelman is routinely ranked in the top 50 colleges in the United States. Period. No race or gender specific terms. We swim in the deep waters too.

In 2007 Roland Fryer an assistant professor of economics at Harvard published a study arguing that HBCU graduates earn significantly less income than their black counterparts who attended white institutions. The study was quickly challenged by a number of black economists who questioned Fryer’s methodology and the obvious implication that black students are now better off at majority institutions. In December a Georgia legislator proposed closing the state-run HBCUs and merging them with the existing system. The idea won’t pass in the Georgia Legislature but it was a sharp reminder that there are those (many) who doubt our continued relevance. The income numbers remain the subject of debate but we could ask ourselves how many white schools are the subject of comparative lifetime earnings studies when students are applying. I’ll care about this when economists confront the incoming class at Northwestern and tell them all to transfer to the University of Chicago.

I could make a defense of our cause and run down the names that have come from our halls — Martin Luther King, Toni Morrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, Oprah Winfrey — but I won’t turn this post into a index. Instead I’ll tell you this: if you ask me what I got from my years at Howard University my answer would require an encyclopedia –  not a W4.

The short version answer to the question would be the fact that I’m writing this post; the fact that you’re reading it. This is no hyperbolic claim, not a bumper-sticker if-you-can-read-this-thank-a-teacher shout out, but actual truth. I blew onto Howard’s yard in 1987, outsized and insecure, my demeanor a laughable attempt to make the words “New York” function as an adjective. I was the first of my clan to set foot on a university campus, my head  was full of doubts that I was qualified as that nebulous thing known as “college material.” My old man finished three grades worth of book-learning in a stoplight town called Hazelhurst, Ga and my mother completed high school, but only after abandoning her native Alabama for Chicago. I was so shook by the alien prospect of higher education that I froze during my first in-class essay for freshman English , convinced that I was not capable of writing a reasonable sentence — and certainly not a college-worthy one. I turned in a blank page.

My professor took pity on me and encouraged me to come to his office and try again. This time I turned in a semi-coherent offering. He gave it a B — a grade I was certain was so undeserved that it should qualify as philanthropy. But I grew into myself over the next 14 weeks. I turned in the first weekly essay and recieved an A — as I did for the second and the third. By the end of the month students were requesting that I proof-read their papers before they turned them in. I ended the semester amazed that I’d earned 14 consecutive A’s.  I came into that class a knot of insecurity. I left it a writer.

This is what doesn’t show up on indexes and charts. We make less money than our counterparts at white institutions; we often work with fewer resources but we have a deeper investment in the individual development of any given student than you will find in any hall on any manicured yard in any ultra-endowed institution in this country. Maybe I would’ve come into my own as a writer at my local SUNY school. Maybe not. But what is clear to me now is that what happened in that classroom was part of long, unbroken tradition of black people reaching back for our own.

This is not simply about faculty. Our students leave our campuses with a tight-knit extended network of black peers that is clearly the most valuable asset they’ll gain from the experience. Last week I went online and bought two tickets to New In Town, a film I had absolutely no intention of going to see. Why? Because it was written by a fellow Howard grad. When it was released I received a flurry of emails from other Howard grads reminding me that it had been written by one of our own and that we needed to show our support. I have no memory of him, wouldn’t recognize him on the street if I saw him. But that’s beside the point.

From my current vantage point on  the other side of the desk, I know exactly what that professor saw in the glaze-eyed young man who handed him a blank page in 1987 because I’ve seen the same look in other students’ eyes, opened my own office, told them to give it another shot.

Last year I did a book signing at Howard University. By a stroke of coincidence — or maybe something else — I the event was held in a room directly across from Locke Hall, 116, the room where I’d handed in a blank page to my professor nineteen years earlier. I gave him a mental shout-out while I was autographing books. He didn’t make something out of nothing, but he certainly helped me become more than I ever thought I could be.