Black Student Retention in Predominantly White Regional Universities: The Politics of Faculty Involvement

Abstract

In 1967 the American Council on Education's board of directors and the Education Commission of the States appointed a Commission on Minority Participation in Education and American Life. That commission concluded in its subsequent report, entitled One-Third of a Nation (1988), that America is moving backward-not forward-in its efforts to achieve the full participation of minority citizens in the life and prosperity of the nation (p. 1). Nowhere did that movement backward come as more of a surprise than in our universities. Since the advent of the civil rights movement, Black student attendance and retention at universities had grown significantly. From 1966 to 1976, for example, the proportion of Black college students increased from 5% to 10% of the college population (Graves, 1988). Meanwhile, the proportion of Blacks who had completed four or more years of college rose from 4% in 1970 to 8% in 1980 (Lang & Ford, 1988). Census experts optimistically counted on more of the same and drew their straight-line projections accordingly. Harold Hodgkinson (1983), a noted educational administrator and researcher, thus toured the university lecture circuit trumpeting the topic Guess Who's Coming to College? However, a comparison of Hodgkinson's predictions with what was actually happening by the late 1980s provides yet another grim reminder of the jarring impact for Black Americans that societal conditions can have on normal demographic trends. Black college-student retention communicated an even more dismal situation. By 1991, Stewart could write that while approximately half of White college students were graduating six years after entering college, barely 25% of all successfully recruited minority students were doing so. To meet this increasingly serious societal problem, institutional arrangements in the university setting must be altered. Black and White activists inside and outside the university must more carefully rethink