The Dilemma of the Negro College: Transition and the Brain Drain

Abstract

The most astonishing thing about the predominantly Negro (or Black*) college is that it has survived to face a dilemma or, more correctly, dilemmas to be involved in transition, or to be subjected to a drain. From its humble beginnings, more than a century ago, to the present, it has been dedicated to what has been perhaps the most difficult mission in American higher education the education of Black Americans while the majority of other Americans could have cared less. The mission has been incomparably difficult for a number of reasons: its students, in the main, have been the most academically ill-prepared; its resources, compared with its predominantly white counterpart, have been grossly inadequate; its educational objectives for its students have been complicated and restricted by a society that limited their aspirations and their careers; its standing as an institution of higher learning has been in question throughout its history, primarily because it is Black. To have survived, the Negro college has unquestionably fulfilled Sir Eric Ashby's two indispensable conditions for the survival of an institution : fidelity to the ideal for which it was founded and continued responsiveness to the needs of the society from which it derives its support.1 In other words, despite the difficulty of its mission and the enormity of the handicaps with which it has been chronically confronted, the Negro college has provided the higher education for the vast majority of the Blacks who have achieved it; the teachers, the ministers, the lawyers, the physicians and dentists, the businessmen and the leaders in almost every socially useful walk of life. The Negro college is, nevertheless, at the crossroads; it does face dilemmas; it is in transition; and it is confronted by a brain drain whidh could further jeopardize its mission, or effectively destroy it as an institution of higher learning. Thus, it is not only appropriate but impera-