Self-assessment and self-criticism are necessary steps for institutional growth and development. HBCUs need to create structures through which such assessment and criticism can be done. I suggest creating a clearing house that would serve as a source and repository for data that could be used to describe and evaluate HBCUs and make recommendations for improvement. The recommendations would be based on ideas generated by conferences and symposia sponsored by the clearing house. The clearing house would be designed by HBCU personnel and stakeholders and used by them for self-criticism and advancement. After due deliberations, those working under the aegis of the clearing house could develop hypothetical models of effective HBCUs and use the models as tools to describe and evaluate existing institutions.
The clearing house would hold regularly scheduled conferences where participants present papers on their research and conduct round tables on the state of HBCUs. Deliberations at the conferences would identify best practices, delineate ongoing and emerging problems facing the colleges and universities, and provide a forum for debating proposed solutions. The clearing house and the conferences, above all, would create a sense of community and confidence among HBCU faculty and staff and encourage them to take the lead in developing plans for continued growth and development. One key to such a plan would include recruitment of young African American Ph.D. and attracting a representative share of high achieving students.
How to attract and retain young African American professors is a critical issue. Given the fact that the more prestigious flagship American universities actively recruit among the relatively limited pool of African American Ph.D., HBCUs must develop a special strategy to attract its fair share. To do so, they must develop recruiting packages that include competitive salaries and working conditions featuring reduced teaching loads and greater research opportunities. I believe that there are bright committed young scholars who would be willing to consider careers at HBCUs and work on problems especially critical to Black life and culture if they could be assured of adequate funding and a supportive and rewarding intellectual environment. Rather than being part of a Black dream team at traditionally white universities, being part of a pioneering research center at, say, Howard, the Atlanta University Center, or the Southern University System may have special appeal to young race conscious scholars. A center focusing on the education of Black youth may be an ideal place to start.
I suggest this because the achievement gap between African American and other students continues to be a universally recognized problem. Fifty years after the Brown decision the gap remains in spite of reams of studies and scores of public policy initiatives. This is so in spite of the progress that Blacks have made in infiltrating the education bureaucracies at the local, state, and national levels. There are more than 1800 African American school board members and according to the Alliance of Black School Educators there are more than 250 African American School superintendents including 133 of them who head urban school districts. One in four African American students studies in districts with a Black superintendent. Thus, as a nation, African Americans are clearly in a position to impact the quality of education made available to our youth. We need only put a system in place for doing so and HBCUs are ideally situated to play a lead role in such an endeavor. An HBCU or a consortium of HBCUs could make transforming the education of Black youth a top priority. Working in tandem with political forces, the universities could establish a research center and policy institute dedicated to transforming the education of Black youth. That would be in keeping with the Du Boisian dual mission of the Black college and it could become the sorely needed beacon to show us the way to the next stage.
What we need are enlightened leadership and a commitment to transformation and relevance.
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I have suggested something very similar for the self-critical analysis of HBCUs. In addition to the proposal described here I also suggest that HBCUs explore: how they might serve the growing hispanic college-aged population, competition from for-private institutions (University of Phoenix now graduates the most black bachelor degree holders with post-bac rates rising), and how technology can be used to share and leverage resources.
Private industry, for instance, has utilized sharepoint web-based training, certification and 360 degree performance reviews for years. Many of the administrative and faculty issues relate to preparedness, support and accountability -- all three could be addressed in a cost-effective manner using this technology.
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