By Theodore Cross

Note: In 1994 Theodore Cross provided a history of American higher education and its treatment of African Americans. This essay offers further details on why he established The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education.

In economic matters, our country was founded on the theory that the pressures of competition rather than public law were best suited to provide for the fair treat­ment and even-handed judgments about the abilities and qualifications or our citizens. In higher education, too, it was believed that fair treatment in the admission of students and scholars would be protected, in considerable part, by the rewards and penalties inher­ent in a system of open competition.

In the most specific terms, the theory was as follows: If, because of some unfavorable class prejudgment or racial stereotype, a college or university consistently rejected quali­fied students or scholars, the forces of full-blooded competition would soon set the matter right. This was so because the rejected student or teacher would be free to seek and win a position in a second institution where a more rational view of the applicant’s competence and qualifications would prevail. Having made a wiser choice, the second institution would gain in educa­tional prestige and strength by sturdily ignoring group stig­mas or stereotypes and accepting the talents of an able per­son even though he or she belonged to an outcast group. The first institution, in turn, if it persisted in its prejudicial ways, would gradually lose academic prestige and eventual­ly suffer deterioration in the intellectual quality of both its faculty and student body. In a classic example of the correc­tive power of competition in higher education, the anti- Semitism in faculty appointments that once prevailed at Harvard delivered a number of extraordinarily distinguished Jewish scholars into the welcoming arms of MIT.

The philosophers of free markets called this effective though invisible form of regulation “claw back.” And so long as “claw back” was properly functioning, it was believed that academic decisions based on class stereotypes or race would provide their own punishment. The cherished system of educational selection on the sole basis of merit and qualifications would be triumphant and there would be no need for government intervention to punish institutions that displayed unwarranted prejudgments or bigotry.

But it was clear from the beginning that the forces of free markets as a guardian of the educational aspirations of out­cast people would be successful only so long as the market was “unfettered.”

By this it was meant that the competing institutions could not be allowed – either through the forces of law, group boycott, or other collusive behavior – to suspend the forces of competition’s “claw back” by agreeing not to compete for the qualifications of particular categories of unwanted people.

But as to African Americans in the United States, the rules of fair treatment protected by competition never came to pass. Driven by strong prevailing shared val­ues about the genetic and biological inferiority of the Negro, virtually all institutions of higher learning in the United States adopted a universal rule of racial exclusion. As to professors and students alike, the rule was: “No blacks need apply.”

As was their duty, the powers who controlled admissions to higher education celebrated scholarly ability, they hon­ored academic ambition, and they cherished intelligence and learning in their student applicants – but not in black people. It followed that a highly gifted black student or pro­fessor could not punish rejection by a racist institution by going elsewhere because there was no “elsewhere.” As Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois discovered on many occasions, it was most impertinent to even raise the question. The end result was that through a racial boycott of Negroes in higher education the corrective powers of Adam Smith’s marketplace were totally suspended.

Almost all white institutions of higher education joined the campus boycott against Negroes. With only minor exceptions, even such liberal and prestigious institutions as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Duke, and the University of Chicago subscribed to the rule of exclusion. After the Civil War, for a period of almost a hundred years, distinguished black academics such as Carter G. Woodson, Rayford Logan, and John Hope Frank­lin were not acceptable as scholars in any of America’s great research institutions. There was no black faculty member of Harvard College until the appointment of Ralph Bunche in 1950. From the earliest years of the Republic until the late 1960s there was only a trickle of black students – maybe one or two a year – admitted to our leading institutions of higher education. Since all state and federal government shared the same racial views as society as a whole, there was no legislative or judicial body – or indeed any rebellious educational institution – that was prepared to break the grip of race on college admissions or faculty selections.

In the middle to latter part of the 20th century, the boycott of blacks in higher education came to be viewed as intol­erable social policy. It was time to open a few loopholes to satisfy the national conscience. The change, however, were essentially cosmetic. For almost a century, the princi­pal loophole in the racial boycott was the private black col­leges and the segregated, state-operated black colleges in the southern states. These institutions, known as HBCUs, were funded – often generously – by whites. But under prevailing racial stereotypes, whites admired blacks for their brawn rather than their brains. In consequence, the level of instruction was limited. In many cases though not always, higher education for Negroes was limited to trade and so-called industrial schools. Essentially from the founding of the Republic until the mid-1960s, institutions of higher education and liberal studies made race or color a qualification for membership in the intellectual community.

After World War II the economic benefits of the G.I. Bill of Rights broadly expanded the pool of college applicants and began to erode the rules of class and race. In the early 1950s, black protests, the modern civil rights movement, and the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education focused new national attention on racial seg­regation and inequalities in higher education. The power sustaining a system of educational segregation and exclu­sion began to erode as fewer and fewer thoughtful Ameri­cans believed the myth that God or nature ordained Negroes to be unequal. To most people, it now became clear that the codes of racial exclusion violated fundamental American principles of equal opportunity. The broad freedoms that this country guaranteed all its citizens now required government to restrain the rules of race.

Beginning in 1964, Congress and the president delivered themselves a whole series of laws and executive orders that made it an offense to deny admission to higher education on the basis of race. The racial boycott of blacks was broken by the force of law. Color-free evaluations of students and scholars were now assured in theory and in law, though not always in fact.

But a society which had been racist for 250 years could not readily escape its past. After centuries of exclusion, the damage to the education aspirations and potential of Afri­can Americans could not be magically repaired by the sim­ple suspension of the educational boycott. After a long pre­vailing system of suppression, most black scholars – however gifted – usually lacked the standard background and educational credentials to teach at America’s most selective institutions. Also, college-bound black students rarely had sufficient educational preparation to compete on the same playing field as whites.

In an effort to deal with centuries of educational impoverishment and disadvantage, the liberal forces controlling government in the 1960s and 1970s countenanced, encour­aged, and sometimes enforced policies of so-called affirmative action or reverse discrimination. Today, however, par­ticularly on issues of race, the political pendulum has swung to the right. Whites, and in many cases blacks, are turning away from government solutions to the advancement of African Americans in our colleges and universities. And the forces of black confrontation and protest are no longer effective in winning a greater presence for them in our col­leges and universities.

Just as the pressures of government regulation began to withdraw and the forces of black protest began to wane, the regulatory powers of the free market began to swing into place. Quite suddenly in fact – particularly in recent years – higher education delivered itself a near miracle. Almost everywhere colleges and universities began to recognize that ethnic diversity of faculties and student bodies was good for the educational process. The now much maligned forces of political correctness stigmatized institutions that showed racial intolerance or disinterest in the pursuit of racial diversity. A greater African-American presence on campus is spurred, too, by lingering fears that students may return to barricades of institutions that displayed “racial insensitivity.”

In consequence, university deans, presidents, and admis­sions officers, today, are literally ripping apart the entire nation looking for black academics and students. A number of black scholars are entering tenure-track positions and many are climbing to the very top of the academic heap. At long last, the vaunted system of social justice achieved through competition now casts its cool eye on employment, admissions, and other practices of public and private institu­tions of higher education. Above all, no college or universi­ty wants a reputation for intolerance.

But competition as a regulator of fair treatment is effective only if performance of the competing players is spread out for public view. If the percentage of blacks in the entering freshman class at one of America’s most distinguished uni­versities is six points lower than its peer institutions, there is no institutional incentive to remove the embarrassment of it being considered a laggard unless the statistics showing success are widely publicized. If, as our journal also shows, certain colleges and universities are much more successful than others in attaining a high yield in college acceptances from minority communities or a high graduation rate for African-American students, once more, the forces of com­petition do not work their magic unless comparative statis­tics are supplied and published.

The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education provides many other examples where major institutions have leapt ahead of their peers in black scholarship awards, tenurings, post-grad­uate degrees, administrative hirings and in conferring other positions of academic power and authority on African Amer­icans. But once more, the corrective remedial forces of the competitive awakening do not persuade other institutions to compete unless all these differences are widely publicized.

In culling out and publishing a wide-ranging collection of racial statistics in higher education, we do not in any way see racism lurking under every set of differing figures. Our purpose is simply to show major racial imbalances and leave competitive markets and other non-legislative forces to operate on the information provided.

Reprinted by permission of The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education:  Winter 1993/94; No. 2; pp. 6-8.