Colgate White – No, not

Colgate White – No, not the tooth paste, the college. There is a depressing essay (link requires subscription) in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the sorry state of affirmative action-induced integration at Colgate University, a selective “junior ivy” in upstate New York, by Phillip Richards, a black associate professor of English who has taught there since 1988.

At Colgate — like other small, competitive liberal-arts colleges with overwhelmingly white, suburban cultures — the truth of its racial exclusivity, so basic to its social life, is rarely mentioned overtly. Yet colleges like mine seem to reproduce the inequalities of American society in ways that they can’t avoid, despite their best intentions. Perhaps it’s time to stop pretending otherwise and deceiving minority applicants into thinking that they will achieve the same academic and social success as their white counterparts — or even be held to similar standards.

Last fall, an unexpected incident shattered that pretense at Colgate. . . .

The uproar began when Barry Shain, a tenured white political scientist at Colgate, wrote in an e-mail message to a female black student that minority students were often seduced into unchallenging courses where liberal professors, who were “sensitive” to their needs, gave them inflated grades. That practice, Shain continued, harmed black students, who were generally less well prepared academically than their white peers. He further complained that a growing number of courses encouraged students to examine their feelings as a way to explore racial issues.

Shain’s message was widely distributed (without his permission), and an uproar followed by much soul-searching ensued. According to Richards,

The specific charges in Shain’s message created less of a stir than his breach of the university’s racial etiquette. He had publicly exposed the tacit assumption that black students hold a subordinate academic status at Colgate. The violation of that silent code predictably upset many black students, who resented the attack on their academic credentials. The claim that liberal professors gave them inflated grades distressed them much less than the implication that their teachers saw them as academically inferior. . . . The most thoughtful black students remarked, however, that Shain had simply aired a long-hidden truth about life at the college, that they were just being confronted with the reality of their stigma as black students at Colgate and in a predominantly white society. Unfortunately, I had to agree with them. . . .

The double standard leaves its mark on black students long after graduation. . . .

Colgate’s separate tracks of expectation, performance, and success for black students have been the most disheartening aspect of my experience here — especially as those disparities have persisted over the years. Although every professor I know has observed it, the institution has done little to deal openly with the problem within the faculty as a whole. Public discussion focuses on multiculturalism and diversity — not the problem of inadequate black intellectual achievement at a prestigious academic institution.

Richards concludes by questioning, and rejecting, the widespread, optimistic assumption of “the necessary connection between a Colgate education and social mobility, especially for poor and working-class students.” Colgate, he finds, simply reflects and, despite its best intentions and with too few exceptions, reinforces the social chasm separating its black and white students.

Given the unrelenting bleakness of the social and academic landscape Richards so unsparingly describes, his recommendations are almost pitifully lame. He really offers only two suggestions. First:

At the very least, colleges like Colgate should no longer recruit black students without alerting them to the nature of life in an academically competitive, rigorously white upper-class environment. Black students should understand such institutions’ academic and social milieu from the beginning. High-school students who visit the campuses should not be sold a bill of goods: that they will live in a world of close social and intellectual relationships between students of different classes and racial backgrounds.

The depth of his pessimism is reflected by his only other recommendation:

[Colleges like Colgate] may also be able to solve some of the problem by recruiting black students who have already succeeded in the integrated social and academic worlds of prep schools or elite suburban high schools.

Richards recognizes that a racial double standard is the root of Colgate’s problems, but his two recommendations, even if followed, would leave it undisturbed.