Liberal or Professional Education?: The Missions of Public Black Colleges and Universities and Their Impact on the Future of African Americans

Abstract

The following article considers the missions of public Black colleges and universities, asking whether or not these missions are focused on liberal arts or professional education, or perhaps a hybrid of these foci. More importantly, we will explore the long term impact of these institutional missions on African Americans. Our discussion and examination will be contextualized using historic arguments put forth by African American leaders Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. These arguments, although often simplified, are highly complex and can offer insight into the purpose of education at public Black colleges and universities in the current day.

Keywords:

• African American
• Black colleges
• HBCUs
• mission
• public higher education

Notes

Only three Black colleges were established prior to the Civil War: Lincoln and Cheyney in Pennsylvania and Wilberforce in Ohio. The rest were created after the Civil War.

Discussion in this article will not pertain to a set canon or a great books curriculum. Meira Levinson, The Demands of Liberal Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); D. G. Mulcahy, The Educated Person: Toward a New Paradigm for Liberal Education (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008); James O. Freedman, Idealism and Liberal Education (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); Diana Glyer and David L. Weeks, eds., The Liberal Arts in Higher Education: Challenging Assumptions, Exploring Possibilities (New York: University Press of America, 1998); James O. Freedman, Liberal Education and the Public Interest (Cedar Rapids: University of Iowa Press, 2003); Barry Smith, eds., Liberal Education in a Knowledge Society (New York: Open Court, 2002); Judith Summerfield and Crys Benedicks, eds., Reclaiming the Public University: Conversations on General and Liberal Education (New York: Peter Lang, 2007); W. B. Carnochan, Battleground of the Curriculum: Liberal Education (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1994); Henry H. Crimmel, Liberal Arts College and the Ideal of Liberal Education (New York: University Press of America, 1993); Charles W. Anderson, Prescribing the Life of the Mind (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993); Ralph C. Hancock, ed., America, the West, and Liberal Education (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999).

Joan N. Burstyn, Preparation for Life? Paradox of Education in the Late Twentieth Century (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1986); Howard Gordon, The History and Growth of Vocational Education in America (New York: Allyn & Bacon, 1998).

Nicholas H. Farnham and Adam Yarmolinsky, eds., Rethinking Liberal Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Martha C. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).

Thurgood Marshall College Fund Demographic Report (New York: Thurgood Marshall College Fund, 2009). See also Marybeth Gasman, Minority Serving Institutions: Pathways to Successfully Educating Students of Color (Indianapolis: Lumina Foundation for Education, 2008).

John R. Thelin, A History of American Higher Education (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Derrick P. Alridge, “Conceptualizing a Du Boisian Philosophy of Education: Toward a Model of African American Education,” Educational Theory 49, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 359–380.

See Alridge, “Conceptualizing a Du Boisian Philosophy of Education”; Michael Bieze, Booker T. Washington and the Art of Self-Representation (New York: Peter Lang, 2008).

Bieze, Booker T. Washington and the Art of Self-Representation.

Ibid., Alridge, “Conceptualizing a Du Boisian Philosophy of Education.”

Bieze, Booker T. Washington and the Art of Self-Representation, 16.

Ibid.

Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery (New York: Penguin, 1986); Michael Bieze and Marybeth Gasman, Reading Booker T. Washington (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming); Bieze, Booker T. Washington and the Art of Self-Representation; Louis Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975); Louis Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Cary D. Wintz, ed., African-American Political Thought, 1890–1930: Washington, Du Bois, Garvey, and Randolph (New York: Sharpe, 1995); Raymond W. Smock, ed., Booker T. Washington in Perspective (Oxford: University of Mississippi Press, 1989); Jacqueline M. Moore, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Struggle for Racial Uplift (New York: Scholarly Resources, 2003); Michael Rudolph West, The Education of Booker T. Washington: American Democracy and the Idea of Race Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964); Houston Baker, Turning South Again: Re-Thinking Modernism/Re-Reading Booker T. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001); Rebecca Carroll, Uncle Tom or New Negro? African Americans Reflect on Booker T. Washington and Up From Slavery 100 Years Later (New York: Broadway Books, 2006).

Alridge, “Conceptualizing a Du Boisian Philosophy of Education”; James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in South, 1865–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).

Booker T. Washington, “A Speech at the Memorial Service,” in Bieze and Gasman, Reading Booker T. Washington.

Bieze and Gasman, Reading Booker T. Washington, 131.

Booker T. Washington, “Problems in Education,” in ibid.

W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940), 70.

Alridge, “Conceptualizing a Du Boisian Philosophy of Education.”.

W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Hampton Idea,” in The Education of Black People: Ten Critiques, 1906–1960, ed. Herbert Aptheker (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), 5. See also Marybeth Gasman, “W. E. B. Du Bois and Charles S. Johnson: Differing Views on the Role of Philanthropy in Higher Education,” History of Education Quarterly 42, no. 4 (2002): 493–516.

Alan Colon, “Black Studies and Historically Black Colleges and Universities: Towards a New Synthesis,” In Delores Aldridge and Carmen Young, eds., Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2003), 38.

Du Bois, “The Hampton Idea”; Wintz, African-American Political Thought; Moore, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Struggle for Racial Uplift; Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915.

Alridge, “Conceptualizing a Du Boisian Philosophy of Education,” 369.

Marybeth Gasman, Envisioning Black Colleges: A History of the United Negro College Fund (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Shaun R. Harper and Marybeth Gasman, “How Black Male Students Experience the Politics of Historically Black Colleges,” Negro Educational Review 59, no. 1/2 (Summer 2008), 336–351.

See R. Grann Lloyd, “Economics Curricula in Black Colleges and Universities,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 30, no. 4 (October 1971): 365–375; Clinton B. Jones, “Criminal Justice Education in Predominantly Black Colleges,” Journal of Negro Education 49, no. 1 (Winter 1980): 31–40; V. V. Oak, “Evaluation of Business Curricula in Negro Colleges,” Journal of Negro Education 7, no. 1 (January 1938): 19–31; A. J. Scavella, “On the Mathematics Curriculum in Black Colleges,” American Mathematical Monthly 77, no. 3 (March 1970): 297–298; Edward K. Weaver, “Development of Science Curricula in Negro Schools,” Journal of Negro Education 25, no. 2 (Spring 1956): 118–129.

E. P. Davis, “The Negro Liberal Arts College,” Journal of Negro Education 2, no. 3 (July 1933): 299–311, at 299.

Ibid., 302.

John W. Davis, “The Negro Land-Grant College,” Journal of Negro Education 2, no. 3 (July 1933): 312–328, at 314. See also Robert L. Jenkins, “The Black Land-Grant Colleges in Their Formative Years, 1890–1920,” Agricultural History 65, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 63–72.

Ibid., 317.

James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South.

Davis, “The Negro Land-Grant College,” 328.

Walter G. Daniel and Robert P. Daniel, “The Curriculum of the Negro College,” Journal of Educational Sociology 19, no. 8 (April 1946): 496–502, at 498.

Charles C. Verharen, “A Core Curriculum at Historically Black Colleges and Universities: An Immodest Proposal,” Journal of Negro Education 62, no. 2 (1993): 200–201.

Ibid., 201.

Gregory N. Price, “Black Colleges and Universities: The Road to Philistia?” Negro Educational Review 16, nos. 1–2 (January–April 1998): 9–21, at 9.

Ibid., 18.

Ibid., 20.

Ibid., 19.

Ibid.

Thurgood Marshall College Fund Demographic Report. See also Gasman, Minority Serving Institutions.

The quoted text is from a post by Darryl L. Peterkin, April 25, 2007. It can be found on the website of the Teagle Foundation, http://www.teaglefoundation.org

Price, “Black Colleges and Universities.”

Verharen, “A Core Curriculum,” 193.

Price, “Black Colleges and Universities.”

Christopher C. Morphew and Matthew Hartley, “Mission Statements: A Thematic Analysis of Rhetoric Across Institutional Type,” Journal of Higher Education 77, no. 3 (May–June 2006), 456–471.

Ibid., 457.

Ibid., 468.

Morphew and Hartley, “Mission Statements”; Peter Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (New York: Harper & Row, 1973); Matt Hartley, A Call to Purpose: Mission-Centered Change at Three Liberal Arts Colleges (New York: Routledge, 2002); George Keller, Academic Strategy: The Management Revolution in American Higher Education (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).

Verharen, “A Core Curriculum,” 197.

Davis, “The Negro Liberal Arts College.”

Davis, “The Negro Land-Grant College,” 317.

Daniel and Daniel, “The Curriculum of the Negro College.”

Verharen, “A Core Curriculum.”

Price, “Black Colleges and Universities.”

Johnetta C. Brazell, “Bricks Without Straw: Missionary-Sponsored Black Higher Education in the Post-Emancipation Era,” Journal of Higher Education 63, no. 1 (1993): 26–49.

Bieze, Booker T. Washington and the Art of Self-Representation.

For an in-depth discussion of the conservative, controlling environment at some Black colleges, see Harper and Gasman, “How Black Male Students Experience the Politics of Historically Black Colleges.”

Carter G. Woodson, The Miseducation of the Negro (New York: African World Press, 1990 [1933]). Woodson was a professor at Howard University.

Morphew and Hartley, “Mission Statements,” 464.

Verharen, “A Core Curriculum.”

Meredith Curtin and Marybeth Gasman, “Historically Black College MBA Programs: Prestige, Rankings, and the Meaning of Success,” Journal of Education for Business 79, no. 2 (2004): 79–84.

Alridge, “Conceptualizing a Du Boisian Philosophy of Education,” 370.

Marybeth Gasman, “W. E. B. Du Bois and Charles S. Johnson: Differing Views on the Role of Philanthropy in Higher Education,” History of Education Quarterly 42, no. 4 (2002): 493–516.

Curtin and Gasman, “Historically Black College MBA Programs.”

Nicholas H. Farnham and Adam Yarmolinsky, eds., Rethinking Liberal Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 1.

Verharen, “A Core Curriculum,” 200.

Colon, “Black Studies and Historically Black Colleges and Universities,” 304.

Verharen, “A Core Curriculum,” 197.

Alain L. Locke, The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); Verharen, “A Core Curriculum.”