There’s no shortage of research on the college achievement of African-American men. Data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics show that for years they have graduated at much lower rates than their white and female peers have.
In his new book, Being Black, Being Male on Campus (State University of New York Press, 2017), Derrick R. Brooms, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Louisville, injects into the dialogue a voice that is often left out: that of the black male students themselves.
The book includes excerpts from interviews with dozens of students at two universities, at various stages in their college experiences.
The young men, for the most part, said that going to college was expected of them by their families and was something they believed would improve their life trajectories.
But they often felt underprepared, both academically and socially. Unfolding crises, whether in the national news or at home, pulled their attention elsewhere, and they struggled to find a sense of belonging on their predominantly white campuses.
“It’s diverse, but you can tell people don’t want you there,” a second-year communications major told Mr. Brooms. “We’re on the elevator, and say there’s a group of white girls talking — and they just get quiet. They stop talking when we get on and pull out their phones and act like they’re messaging. It’s like they’re scared.”
Mr. Brooms found that campus programs to help black men are working, but that certain characteristics improve the programs’ chances of success. He spoke with The Chronicle about those characteristics, his own college years, and what life on campus is like for black male students.
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How did your experience as a student at the University of Chicago in the 1990s inform your work as a sociologist?
I went to a university in my home city. I played sports in high school and I played them in college, and that opened up a level of access to the university that helped smooth out my transition. Being exposed to other people who were upperclassmen, who had navigated the college to some different degrees of success, gave me access to people I could talk to.
Many of our historically and predominantly white college campuses still are fertile grounds for hostility.
I was involved in the Organization of Black Students. I worked in the admissions office for a little while. I worked in the gym. And so I was able to experience the college from a lot of different perspectives that allowed me to tap in to other people who could serve as resources that could help get me access to important social and cultural capital on campus.
The other thing, too, was I participated in a program of summer-research opportunities. I was able to work with Dr. Edgar Epps. My project that summer was looking at black students’ experiences at historically white institutions.
Were you motivated by the experience of peers who didn’t succeed because they perhaps lacked the support network you had?
People who go to the University of Chicago are self-motivated, family-motivated, so they’re not necessarily facing the same challenges as students we would see at different types of four-year institutions.
I had people I went to high school with who went to state universities. Student support looked different there than it would at a liberal-arts college.
Not all of my friends went to college. Part of what I wanted to investigate in some capacity is: How can we help support students who have college aspirations, regardless of their family background, regardless of their class status, regardless of the type of school that they went to or even the city that they live in? If we can identify some of the factors that contribute to student success in students’ transition to college, then hopefully we can put mechanisms and structures in place to support those things.
For your book, you spoke with 40 students from two universities. Has it gotten better for them than it was for you and your peers?
Some of the things we see are consistent, and that is that at many of our historically white institutions, there are issues of racism, discrimination, stereotyping that impact not only black men but black women and other students of color across race, ethnic, and gender backgrounds. Some of our campuses are rife with instances of microaggressions or macroaggressions, structural barriers.
Some of our students don’t persist because they can’t afford it. Some of our students don’t persist because of academic performance. Some of it is because of family dynamics. They may have things going on with their families that require attention.
Given these myriad factors, what can we do as institutions? We’ve seen a call for increasing diversity in our student population, but our faculty remains very consistent with regard to population. That matters with not only what we teach but how we teach. Are we presenting diverse voices, experiences, and lives in our classrooms?
The two schools that I looked at are large public schools. As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, I had an adviser. I had somebody in the admissions office. I had a coach. Office hours were not a suggestion, that was something you actually did.
I had classes where there were 15 people. That’s very different than if you’re in a class with 140 students. I could engage in ways in college that aren’t necessarily replicable in a school with 30,000 students.
There are still, across any kind of college campus, people who are there who can serve as critical institutional agents and critical resources for students. The challenge becomes, what are the pathways for students to connect with those folks?
That’s where I look at the black-male-initiative programs. They create a scaled-down version of the institution so it makes it more amenable for students to navigate the college.
What makes a black-male-initiative program successful?
I found both planned and unplanned ways that it worked. For a black-male initiative to be successful, it has to have institutional support. We’ve got a significant wave of black-male initiatives popping up at different institutions, but some of them are given a very shoestring budget.
One of the things that I have seen in my own investigation of such programs is that they are usually very understaffed. They’ll target 100 men, and then they’ll have one staff person.
We also need to make sure the program is not in a silo trying to meet all the students’ needs. The program can be connected to the writing center. The program can be connected to the advising office. The program can be connected to orientation. The program can be connected to maybe some institutional personnel in the dean’s office.
What are some unintended ways that these programs worked?
Given some of the racism that many students experienced on campus, both interpersonal and larger things that happened off campus that students felt affected them, like the killing of black men that we’ve seen in the recent past, the black-male-initiative programs provided a space where students could go and have conversations about how they were feeling. That wasn’t something these programs planned for.
Some of the camaraderie felt there really can help people feel whole — so even though I’m facing all of these challenges, my experiences are going to be listened to and validated by some of my peers.
Are these programs the answer? Is there something universities can do to alleviate the challenge that some students say comes from being on a segregated campus?
The best black-male-initiative program can’t make up for the campus climate. At the same time that we develop student-centered programs, we still have to continue to address our campus climate. We can look at 30 years, 40 years of research that continues to show us that many of our historically and predominantly white college campuses still are fertile grounds for hostility, discrimination, and microaggressions.
Another step that schools are taking is creating diversity officers. But diversity officers aren’t the answer if they are considered a one-stop shop. What ends up happening is that other people on campus deflect responsibility to the diversity office. A diversity officer can play a role if it’s interwoven in the fabric of the school.
So diversity officers or programs should be integrated into the structure of the institution, not just for logistical reasons, but to transmit to students that there is a chief financial officer and a chief diversity officer, and they’re right here with the president?
Students will read into those positions. Where are they located on campus? How are they integrated into the campus structure? And if they see misalignment or lack of alignment, they’ll come away with an interpretation that these things aren’t as important as they’re making them out to be.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Nell Gluckman writes about faculty issues and other topics in higher education. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.
