Black College Presidents Want In on Completion Agenda

The nation’s historically black colleges and universities need to assume a far more active role in the national push to get more students to complete their degrees, a group of HBCU presidents said Thursday. "We need to be much more aggressive in taking the lead in setting the agenda," Walter Kimbrough, president of Arkansas' Philander Smith College, said at a news conference in Atlanta during a seminar organized by the Southern Education Foundation . "We are going to have to make a break from some of our historical ideology and looking at ourselves in a defensive posture."

Greater participation of HBCUs in the larger public debate will become only more urgent, many speakers noted, because of the shifting demographics of the student body. Kimbrough cited preliminary 2010 U.S. Census data showing that the majority of babies born in the U.S. over the past two years were not white. "By 2019 there’s not going to be one racial majority in this country," said Kimbrough. And, several speakers said, with nearly one in five black college students attending an HBCU, these institutions have a lot to contribute to conversations about how these students can succeed in higher education. But, even amid consensus that HBCUs need to increase their expectations of students and welcome the push for accountability, several speakers lamented the funding environment. "You have these two trains running," said David Wilson, president of Morgan State University, in Maryland. "You have the college completion goal, and we’re not investing in the students we need to achieve that goal."

That trend is holding true in higher education more broadly, said Carlton Brown, president of Clark Atlanta University. "We want to regain a position from which we have fallen, but we haven’t addressed how we got there in the first place," said Brown, who added that a college education had been slowly redefined over time as an individual benefit rather than a broader societal one. "When you redefine it to an individual benefit, the real consequence is an erosion of national capacity," Brown continued. "How we got to this position was through an investment of the government and private entities. How we lost it was a disinvestment of government and private entities."

The press conference, which included six HBCU presidents, covered wide ground. Several discussed the importance of connecting more to each other, to other private and public colleges, to K-12 education and to the wider public. Others talked about the need to advocate for continued support for Pell Grants (some presidents said that 70 percent of students at their colleges were Pell-eligible), and about the communal and historical value of their institutions.

Times Higher Education - Inside Higher Ed: Sex, booze and dorms

When it comes to gender and life in university halls of residence, the hot topic in recent years has been gender-neutral housing, in which students share not only buildings or floors, but also sleeping quarters and bathrooms. But the president of the Catholic University of America went in the opposite direction when he announced on Monday in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that next year, the institution will begin phasing out its co-educational dormitories.

In making his case, President John Garvey notes the university’s moral obligations and also cites research showing that students who live in single-sex housing arrangements are less likely to engage in risky behaviour such as binge drinking and casual sex. He also writes that these behaviours have negative impacts on mental health and academic performance. The transition will affect incoming classes only, so current Catholic students will not have to move into single-sex housing.

Quoting Aristotle, Garvey says that virtue “makes us aim at the right mark, and practical wisdom makes us take the right means”.

“If he is right, then colleges and universities should concern themselves with virtue as well as intellect,” Garvey said. Hence, single-sex housing.

Even though officials from the Association of College and University Housing Officers - International could not recall another institution that has returned from co-ed housing back to single-sex dorms, and 90 per cent of colleges have co-ed dorms, they said that it makes sense that a Roman Catholic University would revert to single-sex housing because such decisions typically reflect an institution’s philosophy. “Introducing a co-ed facility was pretty darned dramatic for that particular campus,” said Jill Eckardt, director of housing at Florida Atlantic University and president of the ACUHOI. “When you think about the Roman Catholic Church, you know, they’re not for premarital sex and hooking up. That’s not part of their doctrine. Not everybody who goes to Catholic is Catholic, but that is part of their mission and vision.”

In an interview on Tuesday, Garvey said that the real reason for the change was moral, not statistical; the research was simply another reason to do it. The announcement also wound up being the culmination of a year of meetings, events and performances exploring intellect, virtue and Catholic identity. “This conversation about life in residence halls and about drinking and sex and so on was all part of that,” he said. “In my thinking about it, it’s got a lot more to do with my wife’s and my being the parents of five children whom we’ve sent to college…and seeing the kind of life” that students lead.