Where are Black Males on Campus?

African-American males are few and far between on college campuses. Among those who do arrive, not many are graduating. That problem was the underlying theme of the John Hope Franklin Symposium conducted recently at Duke University.

Sponsored by the magazine Diverse Issues in Higher Education, the symposium is conducted annually in honor of Franklin, historian and professor emeritus at Duke.

Unfortunately, only cautious and piecemeal solutions were offered to the problem of missing African-American males. Panelists scarcely addressed the two major impediments to better education for these young men — weaknesses in family relationships and weaknesses in public education.

This was surprising because one of the individuals honored at the symposium was Harvard psychiatrist Alvin F. Poussaint. His book, Come On People, written with comedian Bill Cosby, is a call for African-Americans to take greater personal responsibility for their lives and their children’s education.

Although speakers repeatedly urged rescuing boys before they derail from the education track, little was said about the education track itself or why K-12 institutions are ineffective.

Much was said about the problem, however. In his presentation “The Vanishing Male,” Andrew C. Jones, vice chancellor of the Dallas County (Texas) Community College District, reported not only that black males are under-represented in college but that their graduation rates from high school are abysmally low — 41 percent, according to figures in USA Today.

Norman C. Francis, longtime president of Xavier University of Louisiana and an honoree of the symposium, said black males have been ”expelled and shuttled from an early age” and “left to struggle on their own.” Panelists agreed that for youngsters who have the potential to achieve college, intervention by middle school is needed. One method would be to insist that boys learn math and science. If a student doesn’t take algebra by the ninth grade, the student is unlikely to enter college, Poussaint said.

Throughout the country, however, math and science are often poorly taught. Education schools do not teach their graduates to teach math and science, Francis said. “All students are being short-changed,” Poussaint said.

So what is being done, given the low numbers of African-American males in colleges? This is where the surprises came in: not as much as one would expect.

A few panelists described programs designed to correct the imbalance. The African American Male Initiative at the University System of Georgia attempts to increase the number of African-American males in Georgia’s university system and has had success in increasing enrollment and retention over the past few years. It is too soon to assess graduation rates, however.

The Student African American Brotherhood is a nationwide, on-campus organization that aims to support minority students by developing leadership and encouraging positive self-image.

There’s even a Hip-Hop Initiative at North Carolina Central University. Although it includes scholarly study of this kind of music, which has been around for more than 30 years, long enough to have its own interesting history, the program also uses hip hop to reach out to “at risk” males.

But little at this meeting was said about how to correct the problem on a systemic level. The failures of the public education system in the United States seemed obvious from many remarks, such as “teachers want the easy route”; teachers “are not taught how to teach math and science”. Yet no one proposed changes at either the K-12 level or education schools, which produce most public-school teachers.

A member of the audience asked whether vouchers and charter schools have a place in addressing these problems. Only one of four people on the podium responded. Speaking about New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Francis praised charter schools for filling the vacuum left by public schools. He emphasized that public schools were “dysfunctional” even before Katrina. A total of 102 schools had been taken over by Louisiana.

Yet almost in the same breath, Francis defended public schools against vouchers, saying that they might serve as a complement to a public school system, but “if a voucher system starts to erode the public school system, it’s bad.”

A member of the audience asked Poussaint to share the message of his 2007 book, Come On People. Poussaint answered the question by saying that throughout black history there was always a struggle “against the odds” but “we’ve lost some of that struggling against the odds.” People need to be better parents and avoid a “totally victim attitude.”

Certainly an apt comment, yet it was muted, perhaps because Come On People, along with its author, Bill Cosby, has evoked controversy for its explicitness about problems among poor blacks.

Poussaint’s comment came at the end of a session that could have been a ringing endorsement of change on the personal level. But there was no such ringing endorsement, just as there had been no exploration of how to improve public education. Indeed, the entire symposium seemed a little too quiet. No one there, it seemed, was outraged enough to explore change very deeply.

Jane S. Shaw is president of the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.