Working in a high position at a place like Dartmouth College, you tend to forget about racism. You try to do your job. You earn the respect of the campus establishment and become a leader in the community. You include a number of whites among your close friends, skiing buddies, and tennis partners.
“You get to feel quite comfortable,” says Samuel W. Smith, a member of the class of 1949 who returned to Dartmouth 10 years ago as assistant director of admissions. But every so often, he says, something happens to remind him that blacks are still aliens on white campuses.
Like when his children come home from school and complain of being called “nigger” by the children of his colleagues.
Or when, as happened as recently as a month ago, he is working in his garden and two maintenance men from the college drive by and suggest loudly that he might be happier in Africa.
“We will always be called ‘nigger,’” Mr. Smith says. “We will until the day we die. You can expect that. But it’s most shocking in a setting like this, where you really don’t expect it.”
Among faculty members and administrators, of course, such name-calling is taboo.
Any hint of racial animosity in the cordial atmosphere of the academic community is rarely discussed nowadays, and certainly not between blacks and whites. Unlike students, who told The Chronicle last spring that racial tension (the kind that surfaces in fights on the football field and in dormitory graffiti) is still a fact of life on many of the nation’s campuses, most academics say that they themselves have no problems.
Faculty members and administrators at large and small colleges around the country said in interviews over the past several months that they had not been aware of any burning race-related issues among their colleagues for several years. Some said it was not considered “gentlemanly” to bring up the subject of race relations among scholars.
Such relations have come a long way from the “direct action” faculty confrontations of the late 1960’s — a time when black instructors at least one large California college dramatized the need for a black-studies program by setting fire to a trash can during a faculty senate meeting.
Today, however, blacks and other minority-group members at all levels — from college presidents to part-time instructions — insist that their presence on the campuses has less of an impact than it did in the early days of the civil-rights movement.
Now, they say, their white colleagues listen patiently to their concerns — and then ignore them. It is a situation that has led to a fear — some would say a paranoia — among the members of minority groups about their status and future in the university.
“We’ve come a long way,” says Mr. Smith of Dartmouth, “but it’s a constant battle to prevent a dropping-back to the status quo — which for some people would mean the fewer of us, the better.”
The common complaint among minority-group academics is that the old war against “overt racism” is spreading along new fronts, reflecting a growing trend across the country toward fiscal and racial conservatism. Now, they talk about struggling against such barriers as “unconscious racism,” “subtle patterns of discrimination,” “entrenched tokenism,” “the erosion of support for minority concerns,” and just plain apathy.
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The barriers, they say, are still keeping significant numbers of minority-group members out of the mainstream of academe, and are making it difficult for those who do get in to do their jobs.
Black educators, particularly, seem to be resigned to an atmosphere of professional and social isolation on white campuses.
“They tend to stay away from me, and I don’t bother them,” says a black professor about white professors at the University of Chicago. “I’m doing my own thing here, and I’m happy doing it. In that sense, I’m enjoying the isolation.”
At the same time, many say they feel pressured to “prove” themselves to the white faculty — to overcome, in the words of one, an “affirmative-action image.”
By far the major concern among young black and other minority-group faculty members on white campuses today is whether they can hold onto their jobs. The central issue is tenure.
Some have become discouraged by the pressures of working in white institutions and voluntarily have gone to black colleges, or left higher education altogether. But many are part of what James E. Blackwell, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, calls a “whole generation of young minority faculty members who are moving from institution to institution because they did not get tenure at the institution where they were originally hired.”
Some argue that it is not a racial issue, basically, but a matter of economics. Many blacks were hired when universities were expanding and anticipating more students, the argument goes, and it’s an unfortunate happenstance that now, when many of those same people are becoming eligible for tenure, students are disappearing, the job market is getting tighter, and tenure slots are not opening as fast as they used to. Therefore lots of young professors, black and white, are not getting promoted.
Jordan E. Kurland, who monitors tenure complaints at the American Association of University Professors, says minority groups are not “overrepresented” among some 1,000 complaints of unfair tenure decisions his organization handles each year. Only about 40 of the complaints are based on discrimination charges, he said, and “the overwhelming majority of those are from women.”
But many blacks who have been denied tenure argue that they are victims of a complex set of racial biases that are nearly impossible to prove in a discrimination hearing.
Occasionally, someone like Harry Edwards at the University of California at Berkeley will fight a negative tenure decision and win.
Berkeley’s sociology department declared that Mr. Edwards was “not qualified” for promotion last year. However, the outspoken Mr. Edwards, who organized a protest by black athletes at the summer Olympics of 1968, challenged the decision on the basis of his record as one of Berkeley’s most popular teachers and a long list of publications on the sociology of sport, a field of study which he has pioneered.
Mr. Edwards was eventually granted tenure by Chancellor Albert H. Bowker, after the professor had taken his fight to the public and enlisted the support of fellow faculty members.
More often, the attitude of black faculty members will be like that of Jomills H. Braddock, who quietly began looking for another job after he was denied tenure last winter by the sociology department at the University of Maryland at College Park.
“It just isn’t worth fighting,” says Mr. Braddock. “When you try to fight an institution like this, you almost always lose more than you gain.”
Nonetheless, Mr. Braddock and six other black instructions and staff members at Maryland who were denied tenure, fired, or demoted during the 1977-78 school year claimed in a letter to Acting Gov. Blair Lee that their problems were very much race-related.
The system has built-in barriers for blacks who follow the rules of survival in the predominantly white university and devote most of their time to research and publishing, Mr. Braddock says.
Most black scholars are concentrated in the social sciences and humanities, he says, and their research “traditionally, either directly or indirectly, involves matters of race.” But race relations by itself is generally not considered a legitimate field of research among white scholars, he says, and so the black researchers generally find themselves ranked low, professionally.
Julius Debro, a black criminologist who was also denied tenure at Maryland, adds:
“It’s very difficult for black scholars to publish as much as white scholars because of the different kinds of expectations placed on blacks in the academic system. Black scholars are expected to handle all black problems in the department. There is seldom more than one black in the department. That means if there are any problems related to blacks, you become the instant expert.
“If there are [black] students in your department, they tend to gravitate toward you. You become the counselor for all black students in your department, in addition to your regular load.
“You’re expected to attend all black events on campus. You are also expected to serve on more than your share of committees. And you are also expected to give service to civic organizations in the community outside the campus.
“To succeed, you have to be what I call a ‘supernigger.’ You wind up constantly trying to prove yourself and constantly trying to sell yourself to white folk.”
At the same time, “it’s very difficult to say no” to black students who ask for help, Mr. Debro says. “Most black scholars are first-generation scholars, and they are not too far removed from poverty themselves. And they understand what the struggle is all about.”
Adds Mr. Braddock: “Most black faculty are cognizant on some level at least of the fact that in predominantly white institutions of higher education, black students are, in large measure, their raison d’être.
“Recognizing this, we often find many black faculty becoming most immersed in [the affairs of black students], which ultimately, of course, will contribute very little to their professional recognition and advancement.”
The dilemma for black faculty members is that, if they try to think of themselves as “just another professor who happens to be black,” they are likely to come under criticism from black students and lose the basis of support that brought many of them to the campus in the first place, Mr. Braddock says. On the other hand, if they identify themselves primarily with black concerns, they tend to be isolated form the mainstream of the academic community.
Some institutions have acknowledged that minority-group faculty members do have extra responsibilities and have introduced compensatory programs, such as Berkeley’s Faculty Development Awards. Michael I. Heyman, the Berkeley vice-chancellor who oversees the university’s affirmative-action efforts, says the program, which amounts to a year-long research grant, is aimed at helping minority-group members and women “who are in terribly vulnerable positions in terms of being put upon by all sorts of special-interest demands.”
At the same time, some minority-group educators argue that they may be devoting too much time to minority students.
Albert H. Berrian, president of the Institute for Services to Education and former associate commissioner for higher education in New York, argues that black professors “know when they come in that, if they don’t publish and they don’t meet the criteria, they will not be promoted. Some of them elect to set up a different reward system for themselves, but it doesn’t work.”
One black math professor adds that he feels he has been “bearing other people’s responsibility” over the years by giving help to black students who are not in his classes.
“Because I’m willing to work with the black students,” he says, “many other faculty members don’t feel the necessity to make any special effort on behalf of those students.”
Closely tied to the tenure issue is the feeling of professional isolation among minority educators on predominantly white campuses, especially among young black faculty members.
Part of that feeling, some say, is due to the fact that many of them are “ghetto-ized” in ethnic-studies departments. Even in other departments, some say they feel isolated because their ranks are so thin.
They feel that loneliness most acutely when they try to convince other faculty members of the need to recruit more minority-group students into disciplines where such students are not normally found, says Ray Collins, chairman of the botany department at Berkeley and the other black professor in the biological sciences there.
Four years ago, when he tried to persuade his department to set aside a “special admit” slot for minority students, Mr. Collins says he felt “more tension and frustration, perhaps, than I have felt at any other time in my life.” His colleagues rejected the idea, he says, because he was the only person arguing in favor of it.
“It’s no longer a question of discrimination,” he says. “The argument is always based on the need to protect academic standards.”
Now that he is chairman of the department, Mr. Collins says, “I can get them to cooperate if I press the issue, but it’s not like having the position of support from shared convictions.”
William J. Wilson, chairman of the sociology department at the University of Chicago, suggests that some of the isolation felt by young black professors is due to their own feelings of insecurity.
“It’s largely a matter of self-esteem and confidence,” he says. “If you think that you’re marginal, whether you’re willing to admit it or not, and if you feel that you’re not measuring up or you feel that your colleagues don’t have a great deal of respect for you, then it’s bound to wear on you and create that problem of isolation.”
Mr. Wilson adds:
“A lot of it probably has to do with the changing image of blacks in institutions of higher learning. Whereas in the past you were viewed as outstanding to really be there — that in spite of discrimination … you were making it.
“Now there is the feeling that if you’re a student or on the faculty, you’re here because of affirmative action; you’re here because they lowered their standards.”
Many minority educators fall victim to “some subtle patterns of racism to which you have to be attuned in order to understand,” says Mr. Blackwell of the University of Massachusetts.
“I’m not comfortable with this individual or where he has published” is a phrase that is often used by white committee members when turning down minority-group candidates for tenure or hiring, Mr. Blackwell says. What that phrase really means, he says, “is eliminating those who are not like ‘us.’ It won’t be stated as forthrightly as that, but that’s generally the underlying meaning.”
Another explanation of why blacks are being denied tenure is the “affirmative-action backlash” theory, described by one black administrator as “a question of whites reclaiming their jobs that went over to blacks a few years ago.”
“In a tight job market,” the administrator adds, “there is a tendency among ethnic groups in power to take care of the members of their own group.”
At least one white educator agrees in part with that theory. He is Lawrence Salomon, who lost his job in the African-studies department at the New Paltz campus of the State University of New York when the department was dissolved during the retrenchments of 1976. Although he had tenure and an impressive record of research in his field, Mr. Salomon says, he was not rehired in the newly formed black-studies department, which to date has been staffed only by blacks.
“It was clearly a case of racism,” Mr. Salomon says. “I don’t believe that any black professor [with a similar background] would be retrenched from any university in this country.”
The A.A.U.P. has seen significant upsurge in the number of so-called “reverse discrimination” cases involving tenure and hiring, according to Jordan Kurland. Now, he says, “for every minority who complains, someone from the majority group complains that he lost out because of affirmative action.”
Occasionally, say the members of minority groups, they are confronted directly by colleagues who show a distaste for affirmative action. A black professor at Harvard, for example, recalls how he was stunned at a cocktail reception at that university when, in the middle of a conversation about the need for more blacks in academe, a white professor shouted from across the room:
“One more word out of you on blacks, and I’ll come over there and kick your black ass.”
There is a consensus among minority-group educators on campuses across the country that those in ethnic-studies programs are now the most unwelcomed. After watching their programs slowly decline in popularity among students since the late 1960’s, the professors — especially those in black studies, where the programs are most numerous — are finding that the rest of the university does not want them.
While a handful of black-studies programs have managed to hold on to student support and win some measure of academic respect, most are still struggling to prove their worth. Even faculty members in solidly supported programs say they are usually regarded with skepticism by the members of other departments.
“No one has challenged the validity of our courses,” says a poet who teaches Afro-American literature at a New England university, but the feeling that black studies is less than a legitimate part of the university is often expressed by “a remark here, a remark there … a raised eyebrow … or even a silence.”
As an example of their stepchild status, many faculty members in black and ethnic studies point to the fact that their jobs are often dependent on joint appointments with “legitimate” departments.
The problem, now that interest in black studies is declining and the programs are losing their financing, according to Mr. Kurland of the A.A.U.P., is that the survival of black professors in joint-appointment positions is becoming more dependent upon their contributions to other departments.
Most members of other departments have looked at blacks as “courtesy appointments,” Mr. Kurland says, “and for the most part they have not been very interested in the blacks’ contributions to those departments.”
Other departments “were eager to cooperate before,” he says. “But now they are saying, ‘He just doesn’t fit into a slot as a full-time member of our department.’”
Under the threat of impending cutbacks in funds, many black-studies programs are breaking old ties with other “fringe” programs and are turning to already established departments for support. That often causes a rift between old allies.
At Berkeley, for example, one of the country’s first coalition of “Third World” studies programs fell apart when the Afro-American-studies program withdrew from the department of ethnic studies. The Afro-American-studies faculty saw the switch to the social-science division of the College of Letters and Sciences as a move toward “academic legitimacy.”
However, it ended all hope of forming a proposed Third World college at the university and left “a lot of tension and hostility,” one faculty member said, towards Afro-American, Native Americans, and Chicano studies.
Some educators are advocating changes in black-studies courses that will make the more acceptable.
Nathan Hare, who helped pioneer black- studies programs in 1968, has suggested:
“Black studies could become less bold and more conventional in a desperate effort to trim off the divergent and to gain acceptance — just as the diet of a dying or otherwise unhealthy person is likely to become more restricted and less saturated with the spice and variety of more succulent gourmet fare in a last-ditch effort to live.”
Some argue that the problems of black studies, the failure to get tenure, and the “lack of commitment” on predominantly white campuses has resulted in a “slippage” in the number of black faculty members at those institutions. The statistics contradict those claims, however, showing that the number of blacks and other minority-group educators increased between 1973 and 1976.
An estimated 15,000 blacks held full-time faculty position in 1973, with about a third believed to be working on historically black campuses. By the end of 1976, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of black full-time faculty members had risen to 19,500, about 4 percent of the total.
Still, many blacks on white campuses insist that their ranks are shrinking. A close look at most university affirmative-action figures, they charge, might show increases in the over-all number of minority-group members and women, but not in the number of blacks.
Some examples:
- A drive to recruit black professors to the University of Massachusetts in Boston, launched in 1970, substantially increased their numbers over a five-year period, according to Mr. Blackwell, one of seven tenured black professors at the university. “But then the commitment seemed to have stopped,” he says. “The commitment to get them here was not the same commitment to keep them here, and so we’ve experienced a tremendous amount of slippage of our black faculty.”
- At Dartmouth, the number of minority-group professors in the arts and sciences between 1971 and 1975 grew by 400 percent (from 4 to 20). Since then, the number has grown to 24. However, says C. Dwight Lahr, chairman of the faculty’s black caucus, only one black faculty member, an assistant football coach, has been hired during the past two years.
- Berkeley’s affirmative-action figures show that the number of minority-group faculty members rose from 74 to 110 between 1973 and 1977. But William A. Shack, an anthropology professor who serves as the faculty assistant to the vice-chancellor for affirmative action, notes that it has been three years since a black person was hired in any department other than Afro-American studies.
Administrators often claim that because of low “availability pools” in many fields, qualified blacks are hard to find.
The black professor or administrator is “still in great demand,” said one affirmative-action officer, “but now he is expected to compete on even terms with his competitors.” Blacks are in such demand, says Robert L. Gluckstern, chancellor of the University of Maryland at College Park, that “as soon as we hire one who is any good, they try to steal him away from us.”
As an example of the frustrations of trying to hire qualified black professors, Mr. Gluckstern said he had recently offered a high-ranking administrative job to a black person at a yearly salary that was “several thousand dollars higher” than he would have offered to a white for the same position. However, the black applicant went to another institution that offered him even more money.
Some institutions, however, are making no effort to attract either black students or educators, according to some reports. Samuel Allen, who teaches Afro-American literature at Boston University, complains that “there is a little evidence of a vigorous affirmative-action program” on his campus, citing as an example the absence of black professors in the music department, “in which there are areas where the only real competence would come from a black professor.”
The department’s failure to put an emphasis on traditionally black music has caused at least on one black music major to leave the university, Mr. Allen says.
No matter what they are paid or what their position is, some black educators say they feel they will never be accepted as “members of the club.”
Frequently, members of minority groups talk about being “excluded” from the mainstream of academic life, and often, even when holding high administrative positions, feel they are denied a chance to become a central part of the university structure.
But many admit that at least part of the isolation is self-imposed.
“I look to a different set of colleagues for approval or disapproval,” says Edgar G. Epps, a professor of urban education and the only black in his department at the University of Chicago. Mr. Epps says his real peers are other black professors in related fields, who have formed a network and are in “constant communication.”
Many formal organizations of black professors in the same field have sprung up either as black caucuses within larger professional organizations or as separate groups, some of them carryovers from the days of segregation, when black scholars were not permitted to joint white colleges or their professional groups.
Black professors say they gain comfort from such groups. They liken it to the feeling of camaraderie that black students feel in black student unions. Usually it is in those groups, rather than within their department, that black scholars exchange information on research and embark on collaborative projects. Often, says Mr. Braddock, young black professors will hesitate to go to white colleagues for help in solving scholarly problems, “because it is too much in keeping with the old stereotypes for black to go meekly with their hands out to the whites, asking for aid and assistance.”
Because of their low numbers and broadening interests, some black faculty members say they seldom meet professionally on their campuses. Most black faculty caucuses, like black student unions, were organized around a cause in the late 1960’s and are now described as ineffectual.
In some areas, however, the perceived mood of conservatism around the country has persuaded black faculty members to reorganize in an attempt to bring group pressure on their campuses to prevent the erosion of previous gains for black students and faculty members.
The black caucus at Dartmouth, after several years of dormancy, is now engaged in a lively campaign, so far without success, to convince the New Hampshire Commission on Postsecondary Education to adopt an affirmative-action plan that penalizes departments that fail to prove that they have searched for minority-group candidates in the hiring process.
A group of black faculty members at the University of Chicago met recently with Hanna H. Gray, the new president, “to outline a number of concerns,” including, according to one participant, the need for a stronger affirmative-action program for students and faculty members.
Black administrators frequently talk of being in the loneliest and most frustrating position on white campuses because, they say, they are often given high-sounding titles with little or no power. Clifford D. Harper, now dean of the predominantly black Fisk University, said he had left his position as dean of academic programs at Southern Illinois University last year partly because “I simply got tired of making decisions about black students with white folks looking over my shoulder.”
Those who reach prestigious positions in the university structure often find, as Kenneth S. Washington, president of the City College of San Francisco, put it, “grave resistance to turning over the decision-making process to minorities.”
Mr. Washington is among several black leaders of major colleges who have encountered efforts by their faculties to have them removed. The academic senate at the college cast what was, in effect, a vote of no confidence in Mr. Washington last March, recommending by a 2-to-1 margin that his contract not be renewed. The board of governors sided with Mr. Washington, however, voting in June to renew his contract for two years and concurring in several of his decisions that were unpopular with faculty members.
At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Paul L. Puryear, in a move he called “blatantly racist,” was forced to step down by Chancellor Randolph W. Bromery, who is also black, following a battle between Mr. Puryear and nine of the university’s 10 academic deans. The fight came to a head last January, when the deans formally asked Mr. Puryear for his resignation. Mr. Puryear responded the next day by asking for the resignation of six of the nine deans.
Chancellor Bromery sided with the deans, saying he had “complete confidence in their administrative performance and academic leadership,” and demoted Mr. Puryear from the provost to full professor in the black-studies department.
While white faculty members and deans said the conflict was a result of Mr. Puryear’s “heavy-handed” administrative style and policies, he charged that it had been caused by “an element of racists who just didn’t want to yield to the authority of a black person who was sitting in what was generally regarded as the ‘white chair.’”
O. Clayton Johnson, assistant chancellor for educational services at the University of Wisconsin at Parkside, is another black administrator who says he feels powerless.
“I don’t think people want blacks to do these jobs when they give them to them,” Mr. Johnson says. “They want you to come in and be nice and shuffle along and get your little money and keep quiet.”
“They have a lot of different kinds of relationships which you are not a part of,” he said. “A group of them belong to the Congregational Church. Some of them went to high school together. They have these cliques that you won’t get into. The cliques are constantly communicating what you are attempting to do to each other. They can put up barriers, and they can go around you.
“A black man appointed to a position just to serve black students would occupy a more powerful position than I do. The black students could be politicized and could become a rallying group, which they are always careful of dealing with.
“But what can a black administrator do who has eight or ten white directors working for him? Nothing. You’re like a man out there by yourself. And you’re always walking a balance between what the administration wants and what you think is right.”
More than the professional barriers, Mr. Johnson adds, “very often it is the small things that go on in faculty life that build up so much that you just become hostile.”
An example he says, is knowing that a group of faculty wives are throwing a reception for a new vice-chancellor and remembering that your wife was snubbed by the same group when you arrived on campus.
One couple at another Midwestern university — a Navajo woman and a black man — “got invited out to dinner practically every weekend because the liberal element of the university community thought this was really groovy, having a Navajo Indian married to a black man, both of them working professionally in the university,” but, a friend says, that’s just another form of racial bias that minorities are trying to overcome on white campuses:
“If they stare at you like some kind of an oddity, or invite you to cocktail parties because they want something interesting to display — either way, you’re still different.”
Lorenzo (Renny) Middleton Jr., a veteran of the U.S. Air Force, served as assistant editor of The Chronicle for four years before becoming public-relations director at the Tuskegee Institute. Old-timers here remember his remarkable talent and potential. He died following a car accident in 1982, when he was 35.
