“White Men Toilet.” “Colored Men Toilet.”
The words stunned me like a sharp slap as I hunched over a table full of crumbling blueprints of old buildings on my campus at Trinity Washington University. Preparing for a meeting with the D.C. Historic Preservation Office concerning our plans to demolish a 1930s-era science building, I was not prepared to find this stark evidence of segregation designed into the very bones of the place. Opening another cabinet, I unrolled the plans for an even older building slated for renovation, our dining hall, built in the 1920s; there in the subbasement was the “Colored Help’s Dining Room,” with the “Colored Girls’ Locker Room” nearby.
I was staring at the blueprints of racism.
Colleges founded before the Civil War have agonized over public exposure of their legacies in slavery, forming commissions and considering reparations. Many more institutions were formed well after Emancipation — Trinity in Washington was founded in 1897. But those colleges hardly escaped the pernicious effects of America’s original sin of racism. How can higher education atone for its role?
College campuses across America were literally and figuratively shaped by the blueprints of racism, from the intentional segregation of “the help” in dank basement rooms to the exclusion of students of color from classrooms and the stark absence of African-American faculty members and executive administrators. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, scholars and presidents at some of the nation’s most prestigious universities contributed to the appalling research and advocacy on notions of racial science and eugenics, encouraging the worst ideas of white supremacy and helping to enshrine Jim Crow laws, segregation policies, and discriminatory practices through generations of American society.
Today, 65 years after Brown v. Board of Education repudiated the “separate but equal” doctrine and ended legal segregation, this nation is again experiencing an outbreak of virulent white supremacy encouraged by some public leaders for their own political advantage. American higher education should meet this moment with a strong collective voice rejecting unequivocally the appalling racism that is polluting public discourse.
But our credibility in the public square is compromised by the still-corrosive racial conditions in our own house. Even today, the historic, structural racism of American higher education is not simply some brittle artifact but an urgent reality, as African-American students, in particular, continue to fare poorly in admission to elite institutions, and diversification of the faculty remains an elusive quest.
Low enrollment of black college students, particularly at elite schools, continues a form of de facto segregation. Legal challenges of affirmative action in admissions have certainly stymied progress among state institutions, but private colleges and universities could do more.
Consider the student populations of the institutions in the American Talent Initiative, including most of the nation’s elite colleges and universities, where the average enrollment of full-time black undergraduates in the fall of 2017 was just 5 percent, according to Ipeds data; 40 percent of the institutions in the group fall below 5 percent. ATI’s stated purpose, a worthy one, is to enroll significantly more low-income students. Unfortunately, ATI limits membership to colleges that have Ipeds graduation rates of 70 percent or higher, excluding institutions that enroll significantly larger proportions of black students than the ATI group does.
The Ipeds graduation rate, a notoriously flawed factoid, does not measure the quality of an institution but the risks inherent in the student body’s preparation for college. Those risks can discourage elite colleges concerned with reputation metrics from doing more than token outreach.
The risks for the enrollment of black students are many, for both the students and their colleges. The pernicious effects of racism — deep and chronic poverty among black families and still-entrenched segregation with concomitant underfunding in elementary and secondary schools — limit the collegiate preparedness of many African-American students, hence risking timely college completion. Even with generous scholarships, poverty creates deep stress for many black students. Whether supporting children and families, wrestling with the price of books, or worrying about food and housing, those students face issues that are quite different from the increasingly small population of “traditional” students that are the exemplars for measurements like the Ipeds graduation rate.
Renovation can sometimes cure outmoded structures, but sometimes the only solution is demolition and rebuilding. To make real progress in eliminating the structures of racism that depress the enrollment of black students, universities need to move from gestures of good intentions to real transformation. Rather than using metrics derived from the behaviors of traditional student populations — predominantly white, economically secure, attending full time with parental financial support — universities that want to lead real change in eradicating the vestiges of segregation need to develop entirely new approaches to admissions, curricula and pedagogy, support services, and measurements of academic success that are not seat time in one place.
Improving faculty diversity must be part of the structural renovation to ensure greater success for students of color. According to a 2019 study published in the Hispanic Journal of Law and Policy, black faculty members hold just 4 percent of tenured positions at doctoral institutions, and only 5.6 percent of such positions in master’s institutions, essentially flat over the four-year period of the study.
Many universities claim to be devoting millions of dollars to faculty-diversity efforts, but progress is elusive because money cannot remediate discriminatory processes. Presidential courage, not more money, is necessary to confront and dismantle the blockades erected through traditional faculty hiring, promotion, and tenure practices.
Structural racism takes generations to eliminate; no institution is ever really done. Those fading blueprints are all that’s left of Trinity’s old science building, demolished to make way for an academic center with state-of-the-art science and nursing laboratories. The segregated basement rooms of the old dining hall are long gone, replaced by a fitness center. More important, a majority of African-American students now call Trinity their alma mater, and this historic, once predominantly white, Roman Catholic women’s college now is classified by the U.S. Department of Education as a Predominantly Black Institution with a full-time undergraduate enrollment that is 56 percent African-American and 31 percent Hispanic. Forty-four percent of the faculty this year is African-American, and 25 percent of tenured faculty members are black.
Trinity is making progress, but we still have a long way to go. The paradigm shift in students and faculty members that Trinity experienced over the last three decades was not easy, and often fraught with anger and doubt. Along the way we learned that renovation is hard work, entailing a lot of noise and disruption and, at times, significant destruction to make way for the new structures that work for the modern age.
To exert more-effective leadership in a society roiled by racial conflict, American higher education must have the courage to renovate itself in order to model the kind of change we need in this nation. We must rebuild our campuses as exemplars of effective diverse communities that will teach our students how to build cities and nations more firmly rooted in racial justice, which is essential for a peaceful and productive society.
Patricia McGuire is president of Trinity Washington University.
