Thousands of PWIs (predominantly white institutions) across the United States have made themselves enticing to marginalized students, but have failed to create inclusive, safe, and accepting spaces for them. Davarian Baldwin’s, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: how Universities are Plundering our Cities, beautifully depicts the impacts of “univerCities” as an ivory tower–a metaphorical location– where primarily privileged people are cut off from the rest of the world, enjoying their own life’s pursuits and how students, residents, and activists of the community rise up to meet the institutions. Andrew Rossi’s film, The Ivory Tower, conducts a rich cost-benefit analysis of HEIs (higher education institutions) and concludes that numerous HEI professors and faculty members disseminate information on such niche subject matter in coursework, often disconnected from students’ life experiences, notably the experiences of underserved students, such as low-income students, Black and Brown students, queer students, students with disabilities, and/or students with ACEs (adverse childhood experiences). The ivory tower’s pedagogy, or method of teaching in the higher education classroom, is deeply embedded in what Paulo Friere has denoted, in Chapter 2 of his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the “narrative” aspects of education in the conventional western classroom under the “banking model of education.” In the model, the teacher or educator is a “narrating subject depositing information” into the students’ minds, with their students as passive agents. The students’ life experiences become disconnected from their instructor’s “narration” because they absorb information without its full context. Not only does it exclude context, but it lacks space for student creativity and expression, and it discourages questions and the production of knowledge, which emerges from constant questioning. The “banking model of education” grants the teacher all knowledge and assumes that the powerless (students) are ignorant, which highlights the crux of the issue in western HEIs.
Scholar bell hooks, in Teaching a Community Pedagogy of Hope, discusses the problematic ways in which higher education transformed its banking pedagogy to invoke more radical and “liberating” ideas in incrementally problematic ways. As white and cis-gendered men have dominated and continue to dominate the academic sphere, they have championed gender equality over racial equality in their analysis. To avoid being replaced in academia, they had to (at least) adopt a gender/feminist lens. In turn, this created a binary between “feminist studies” professors and “Black studies” professors, with an alternative of “cultural studies” professors thrown into the mix. “Cultural studies” professors are established by and comprised of white, cis-gendered male professors, who “recognized” and “incorporated” race and gender into their curriculum, yet primarily fear those who “question,” as Friere’s model indicates. These “liberating” ideals have infiltrated HEIs, starting in the latter half of the 20th century, and persisting across colleges and universities today, including HBCUs (historically Black colleges and universities). Not only do they exist pervasively within PWIs, but they have infiltrated HBCUs across the United States.
At their inception, HBCUs were established to develop spaces for Black intellectualism and to center students who have been excluded from white academic spaces– academic spaces that are upheld by an economic ecosystem of racial capitalism. Students at universities are privileged consumers investing in a commodity of education, an exclusive commodity that Black people have historically and continuously been denied. As a hub of intellectual, scholarly, and academic pursuits, universities and colleges have the assets to build certain structures. Universities have also accumulated a social responsibility to not only their students, but to their surrounding community; Baldwin has effectively concluded that they have largely failed to fulfill their social responsibility to the community.
Moreover, Friere’s “banking model of education” has permeated not just HEIs, but all aspects of western education (specifically in the U.S.), resulting in the “liberal” state of affairs that bell hooks exhibits. It is clear that there has been an infiltration of white supremacy deeply laced into the infrastructure and pedagogy of HBCUs, resulting in a manifestation of white supremacy within these spaces. This cycle of white supremacy is reinforced within PWIs and has resulted in prevalent discourse across academic and social circles regarding the notion of whether Black students are better off attending HBCUs versus PWIs. According to an NPR interview with Dillard University president, Walter Kimbrough, Black students are in search of safe learning environments due to abundant incidence and coverage of the recruitment of white supremacy on college campuses, hate crimes against Black students, among other instances of racial aggression. While HBCUs haven’t been recognized for the same more blatant forms of racism that happen at PWIs, students at HBCUs are not liberated from the dominance of white ideologies that invade academic and social spheres altogether. Research traffic has overlooked the impact of HBCUs as HEIs that perpetuate white ideologies (Feagin 2010, 189). To understand this, it is integral to note the mere control white people have over systems of power, specifically over educational systems of power. Ultimately, the incidence of white control across educational systems of power has resulted in Black Americans internalizing hegemonic methodologies–even at HBCUs.
Moreover, the history of HBCUs reflects the United States’ failure to attain racial justice in academic and social realms. White supremacist ideas that became laced into these spheres prohibited Black people from succeeding as intellectuals, barred from reaping the benefits of any form of higher education as most HBCUs were established post-Civil War by missionaries. Northern missionaries collaborated with the Freedmen’s Bureau to create Black colleges with the intent to free Black people by providing them with primary and secondary education. The establishment and philanthropic funding of these institutions was produced by northern industrialist white men–its initial pedagogy entrenched in Christian values and moral character (Albritton 2013; Gasman 2010; Wilcox et al. 2014; Cantey et al. 2011).
The goal of these institutions at their origin was to prepare their students for labor-based work. Leading philosophers of the moment like Booker T. Washington advocated the vocational model for Black folks, emphasizing the need for them to develop useful skills in the labor force that would help industries immediately. Washington argued that with hard work and determination in the industrial sector, Black people would eventually gain the acceptance of their dominant counterparts and of the system. Washington’s theory emerged into a pedagogy of upward social mobility across HBCUs like Morehouse College, Tuskegee University, and Spelman College in the early 20th century to present an identity that would appear “respectable” to white folks (Albritton 2013; Cantey et al. 2013). These universities offered several classes on manners and industrial labor work. The institutionalization of such a theory reifies white supremacy that has been upheld throughout U.S. history. Under Plessy v. Ferguson, slavery was justified by white men to ‘improve the lives of uncivilized Africans who were intellectually inferior.’ This frame persists in HBCUs today where the inferiority of Black students has become laced into the education system through these practices (Feagin 2010).
Black students and faculty resisted this hegemony across Black colleges and demanded agency over their HEIs and more Black people were hired as faculty (deans, administrators, professors, etc) at HBCUs. This more radical shift paralleled a shift to a liberal arts pedagogical approach–one more closely associated with thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois countered Washington’s theory of industrializing students at Black colleges and adopted a holistic curriculum of courses (Albritton 2013; Gasman 2010; Cantey et al. 2013). In the 1960s, HBCUs emerge as epicenters of student activism and resistance. At this moment, HBCUs acted as spaces of validation of Black students’ identities and dares them to use their knowledge to call for justice in the Black community, which still holds true for Black students at HBCUs today. At HBCUs in the south, college campuses were sometimes the only safe space for Black folks to safely radically organize with allied white folks (Mbajekwe 2006).
While understanding the crucial role these institutions play, how do we sustain the strengths of the institutions while adapting to the hegemonic curriculums that have permeated higher education? HBCUs are challenged with centering Black liberation for their student population, while also preparing their students to live in a society that has been designed to favor whiteness. Although Black Americans will never have full and open access to white spheres of power, HBCUs have certainly accrued politics of respectability. However, it is no question that a radical call-to-action is necessary in order to completely restructure the system that dominates HBCUs. There should not be educators at HBCUs that cannot connect course material to the students’ life experiences, as Paulo Friere asserts. As a white student about to finish my undergraduate education at a PWI, I acknowledge that there is a lot of information I don’t know and haven’t experienced with regard to the racism that happens within the confines of HBCUs campuses, and there is information regarding the personal experiences of Black students that I do not and will not ever understand– both of which speak to my role as a scholar and activist interested in educational reform for oppressed peoples. However, it is imperative to grow aware of the notion that racism doesn’t only seep through predominantly white spaces.
References
Albritton, Travis. 2013. “Educating Our Own: The Historical Legacy of HBCUs and Their Relevance for Educating a New Generation of Leaders” Urban Rev 44 (3): 311-331.
Arroyo and Gasman. 2014. “An HBCU-Based Educational Approach for Black College Student Success: Toward a Framework with Implications for All Institutions” American Journal of Education, 121(1): 57-85.
Cantey, Nia, Bland, Robert, Mack, LaKerri, and Danielle Joy-Davis. 2013. “Historically Black
Feagin, Joe R. 2010. The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter- Framing, second edition. New York, NY: Routledge.
Gasman, Marybeth. 2010. Unearthing Promise and Potential: Our Nation’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities. San Franscisco, CA: Jossey- Bass.
Mbajekwe, Carolyn. 2006. The Future of Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Jefferson,
Washington, Amanda and Marybeth Gasman. 2016. “Why Enrollment is Increasing at HBCUs,” The Hill, August 22.
Washington, Booker T. 1906. “Tuskegee: A retrospect and Prospect”. North American Review, 182(593): 513–523.
Wilcox, Clyde, Wells, Jovita, Hadda, Georges, and Judith Wilcox. 2014. “The Changing Democratic Functions of Historically Black Colleges and Universities” New Political Science 3 (4): 556-572.