A Study of Personnel Programs in Eleven Accredited Negro Colleges

Abstract

Guidance, some form or other, has always accompanied educational processes college, whether planned for or not. For many reasons the school is the ideal and psychological setting which advisement should be given. Because their aims and even more justifiable functions of schools are now under fire for political, economic, and philosophical reasons, the prevalence of so much indecision and instability in the temples is discouraging. The writer's purpose is not to discuss or attack the presence or lack of a satisfying educational philosophy the Negro college. His intention is to say that since college and some form of guidance are inseparable, there ought be promoted a more efficient, living organization of such services and ideals as accompany any guidance system, no matter how abbreviated or protracted. In the early college program religious and personal guidance occupied a position commensurate with the program's academic attributes. Changing interests and social forces have dictated administrational and personnel divergences so that the causes of a lack of interest educational individualization are obscure. Whatever those causes, they are based on our failing to change the emphasis and direction of our reactions to the changing features and conditions of the world which we now live. Perpetually changing conditions demand a dynamic philosophy of adjustment. Whether the organism is human or institutional makes no difference. If human, failure or inability to adjust spells doom; if institutional, and temporally far removed from the conditions of inception, as conditions. become altered, inflexibility of program and function yields an ever-increasing tendency to lag and to deteriorate. The fact that fluent adjustability is a prime requisite for existence a more or less competitive, complex social order is quite unimportant compared to the manner, method, and direction which adjustment can be achieved. The point is that it must be decided definitely by those who are strategic positions by what means and which direction the organism is to move. In that our colleges are formalized attempts at preserving the status quo a balance-demanding socio-psychological continuum, there is an inherent lagging which enables and promotes the development and extention of practices that are at once internally incompatible and untelic. It is assumed that an un-organized or semi-organized student personnel program is systemically unjustifiable and socio-educationally injurious. In order to ascertain the educational philosophies, programs, and practices of selected Negro colleges, a questionnaire was drawn up, submitted to authorities, and forwarded to a number of four-year colleges accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools. While it was