Adam Harris: The State Must Provide: Why America’s Colleges are Unequal — And How to Set Them Right

welcome and thank you for joining the new america fellows program for this discussion of adam harris's the state must provide why america's colleges have always been unequal and how to set them right i'm van newkirk class of 2020 11th hour fellow and a senior editor at the atlantic thank you to the education policy program for partnering on this event before we start we have a few housekeeping notes if you have questions during the event please submit them through our q a function at the bottom of your screen and we'll save about 15 minutes at the end for q a in the event and more importantly copies of the state must provide this wonderful book are available for purchase through our book selling partners solid state books you can find the link to buy the book on the event page if you already have one that's great uh if you don't have one please get one and if you already have one get another one for family member it's a great gift and now for the person of the hour adam harris 2021 national fellow is a staff writer at the atlantic where he has covered education and national politics since 2018. three long years he was previously a reporter at the chronicle of higher education where he covered federal education policy and historically black colleges and universities adam well thanks so much i must say before we begin uh you have two hbcu grads talking about hbcus about inequality and education and about the development of america's higher education system adam my first question for you is as an hbcu graduate what's it feel like to have written this book you know i when i set out to write the book actually even before i had the idea of writing about hbcus i i just they were sort of the family institutions right my mom went to an hbcu my dad went to hbcu both my sisters went to hbcus uncles aunts these are the places where um these are places that educated my family um and so you know to write this book about um you know the sector of institutions that not only for my family as you know for your family how important these institutions have been for for black people um and and you know kind of social socioeconomic mobility in the black community um and writing about the ways that these institutions have historically been um uh you know underfunded uh and discriminated against while still doing such yeoman's work in in educating black students um particularly in this moment um i don't know it's it's it's indescribable yeah well i mean so i've been i've known you for years now i've known how it's been really neat reading the book and seeing a lot of these individual stories that you've been talking about for years uh become part of the book i wonder if there were things that you thought you might like to write about or things that have been on your mind since you were in school are there things that have motivated or inspired you since then yeah you know i and at the beginning of the book i write about my experience at a m um you know having great professors having um you know a nurturing community around me but also seeing some of the things you know older buildings um you know our air conditioning never see or you know heat never seem to be working in the winter um the buses never seem to be running when it was coldest out you know they were they were sort of deferred maintenance on campus and all of these sort of different things that um i saw and i would drive across town um you know alabama and huntsville alabama um and there's another institution another public institution that's about 10 minutes away university of alabama huntsville and i remember going there um noticing one their library was open three hours longer two they had newer buildings um i learned later that they had an endowment that was larger than my own institutions which you know had been open for 75 years longer than the university of alabama huntsville had even been an institution um and and it was it was it was sort of jarring to me and then as i got into covering higher education i knew that i wanted to cover historically black colleges and universities because it felt like there was a story there that was that was being undertold or um you know the full picture of what was going on with the sector wasn't wasn't being told and and so as i covered you know federal education policy i really learned the ways that um this wasn't uh you know by happenstance that my experience wasn't um anomalous uh you know that that going to a m and going over to uih and seeing the difference that that wasn't an anomaly but that that was the you know very direct result of of state and federal policy over you know over more than a century that experience uh reporting on higher education uh i mean was that kind of validating for you did that help you explain parts of your own experience it really did um you know and i i think what i first learned is over over the time at a m in particular right a m is an 1890 institution so the 1890s are the institutions that are our land-grant universities the hbcus that are land-grant universities and and for so long i knew that a m was founded in 1875 but um i was like so what exactly was it about 1890 that was such a such a big deal um and the sort of the easy explanation for it is 1890 is when hbcu's with states received money to to help fund hbcus but as i started poking around and you know you look at an institution like auburn which is also a land-grant university when you look at a m and it's like there's there's this vast disparity in resources even though both of these are land grants and what i learned was you know you go back even further to 1862 when congress passes the first morel act and um so they they give states land expropriated land from native americans taken through lopsided treaties and murder and violence and they gave this land um two states that they could sell in order to fund an institution but those institutions of course could not be attended by black students and this is yeah think about this is the largest investment that the federal government ever made in america's colleges and um and it was it was a lopsided investment and so by 1890 um you know there's this acknowledgement that well you these institutions aren't enrolling black students um and and so in the second morel act when predominantly white institutions wanted more money um they went back to the government the government said well we will give you more but you have to at least create a separate institution for black students or at least endow a separate institution for black students um and so you know not only did those predominantly white institutions have that pot to start with and 30 years to build on that pot but then they also received additional money money when when you know the land grant the black land grants were given additional funding and it really it it solidified this idea that again this was not an anomaly that that it really validated the idea that the federal government and state governments have had a hand in not only creating this unequal system that we live with but but also as i reported it out dug into court cases dug through um you know old records state audits you really learned the ways that states and the federal government defended um sustain and maintained this system over the last century one thing you do a really good job of in the book is showing how uh like you said the roots of this of higher education in america and this initial investment by the federal government came at a time when it you know most black people in the country could have been put to death just for reading um and that's a really stark and uh frank way to put that uh i it is it what was your uh you know thinking behind how you portrayed this history i know it's billed as a history of inequality of higher education but it also doubles as a just a pretty good history of higher education yeah i i think what i what i really wanted to do was not only explain the experience of just simply like black colleges but i also wanted to explain how black students were sort of isolated in higher education more generally the ways that discrimination manifested itself in higher education so not only saying that um you know hbcus were discriminated against alcorn states receiving fewer appropriations but also looking at the ways that states broke apart integrated institutions so i look at berea college you know the first integrated co-educational college in the south and the way that their mission that original mission kind of built out of um acts uh chapter two saying god have made of one blood all the people of the earth um and and the only way that that mission was broken apart was through state action going back even further to say um to look at the ways that even sort of abolitionist minded scholars at different institutions were unwilling to support black education looking at the ways that philanthropy also failed um black education um and and so like you say it's i think too often we think of hbcus in this way that's like this is sort of a parochial offshoot of higher education as opposed to like an integral part of it and and you know the reason why this book i wanted to make sure this book felt more holistic it felt like a more robust look at higher education discrimination higher education as it stands is because it's like no it's they are these institutions this sector of institution is doing work and educating a population that the rest of higher education a lot of higher education does not you know um and i also i look at community colleges because the way that stratification works now is the institutions with the most resources have the fewest black students and the institutions with the fewest resources have the most and that includes community colleges in you know a state like north carolina more than 70 of um black students in north carolina go to the five hbcus or the community colleges in the state and so you know i really wanted a robust look at higher education inequality in higher ed so as those of you who have read and those of you who will read will probably pick up i think if i had to identify a single main character in the book it's actually berea college it's the story of the institution why was that particular school and institution and its history so important for this larger narrative you know when i first learned the story of berea college um it struck me as fascinating because you know berea and its founder john fee you know he actually shows up in some of the um some of the slave narratives in the 1930s when people are saying uh you know formerly enslaved people say that yeah john fee this was a true believer this was an actual abolitionist so i was already sort of interested in in his story and the more i learned about the development of that institution and it's it's current iteration right the fact that it has been tuition-free since 1892 um the fact that it is you know trying to get back to that place you know this was a place that where its founder was literally run out of town before the civil war by enslavers um and and he came back to form an institution integrated co-educational institution that was effectively 50 50 you know half white students half black students until the late 1800s early 1900s when um the state passed the day law which which was aimed only at break college because it was the only integrated institution there um i've always been really interested in how they clawed back that original mission how and and it hinges in large part on the fact that they had that original mission of equity of equality in the uh in that in the middle of the century and so you know the rest of higher education isn't necessarily built on those same ideals and so they're having to learn them anew and and so you you can kind of look at a place like berea and say it's possible you know the the what um you're trying to more broadly move to if you're trying to more broadly move towards equity inequality higher education it's actually possible um you just have to have that that sort of um rooting mission um and and i i hoped to to sort of take that mission throughout the the full book one thing you make really clear is just how frankly rare that kind of rooting mission has been in higher education i think it stands out that career college up until i mean maybe ever still it's one of the few institutions founded on equal education on uh providing uh education to people of all races at the same time in the same place and uh it's one of the few that was not necessarily dragged kicking and screaming into the era of integration or in the case of lots of schools not really drag at all um what do you think made that kind of why was that mission so rare why was it something that we didn't see pop up in more places or at least that it wasn't allowed to flourish in other places yeah um you know a lot of it um especially for you know and of course the the mid uh 19th century so 1850s 1860s you know you you have the the violent um uh pro-slavery wing and that that's really um suppressing any any forms of of integration or you know equal rights um and then you know as you as southern states start to rejoin the union you have places like the university of mississippi that where the professors say they would actually rather resign than to educate a single black student on their campus um and and so you you have that um that sort of thread running through um running through really the the middle of the 19th or the 20th century um until it sort of enters the federal lexicon that um you cannot discriminate against students based on based on race and then these institutions started saying oh you know you have to start looking at our student population with one percent black students two percent black students um and and you know only when that federal policy started to change did institutions start to um you know really kind of get their act together but even even in that reality right institutions sort of remain as segregated as conditions allow so um for instance a place like auburn university which has known you know at least since the middle of the 1980s that it has had issues with its enrollment of black students right on the same day that bo jackson is named the heisman as the best college football player in the country um they're the federal judge says that auburn is the most uh segregated institution in the state of alabama they had about you know two or three percent black students at that time you fast forward to 2002 they have about four or five percent black students but now today they have fewer black students than they did in total number than they did in 2002 and and so it's like this sort of complacency that states have gotten to where they just assumed that the federal government is not going to investigate these sort of vestiges of discrimination um it just kind of continues to imbue these systems and and you know the fact that berea had that original mission and that most institutions did not i actually think plays a pretty significant role in in the reality that those institutions have today one thing i think the state must provide does better than any book i've read in a long time is it shows the absolute levels of absurdity and contortion that white institutions had to go through to maintain jim crow law you know i think a lot of people as you learn it um it's it's you know you think about water fountains and you think about separate entrances which themselves are absurd levels of of dedication to the to the form but when you're reading the story of george mclaurin and and you're reading these stories of people in classes where they're building literal rails between the students then it really becomes you see this level of almost i don't want to say comedic because it's not very funny but absurd dedication to preserving this thing why were they fighting so hard to preserve it you know it's it's interesting and i'm glad you pointed to george mclaurin's story because you know there was one point where thurgood marshall comes down to oklahoma to see where george mclaren is he was like that man was sitting that man is sitting in the hallway um and and you have you have other students in class learning and and it really is this sort of dedication to um to segregation and oftentimes like the university of oklahoma said well our hands are tied because the state law says that you know we have to maintain segregation so we have to you know figure out ways to segregate with and and also abide by what the supreme court is telling us but you know even so the first major decision the first kind of major higher education decision came down and you know the late 1930s in the gaines case and they said that states at least needed to provide a separate option for black students in the state which is actually remarkable that you you end up having you know a louise simple fisher's case and george mclaren's case because those cases are proved positive that even after the supreme court said you at least need to have a separate option that states weren't even creating a separate option um and so it was really um it was really this sort of commitment to to maintaining this inequality um that that i think that you know we often sort of gloss over and and um it's like you know okay the slavery happened and then you have the the 13th 14th and 15th amendment and then things change a little bit but then you have jim crow and then you have brownview board of education but but in the meantime there were all of these little things that were happening all of these ways to preserve the status quo um that institutions were not just sort of passive partners in but that they were active participants in um and and you know in a lot of ways i it's sort of proof positive of this the way that these institutions need to atone for um for the ways that they were active participants and in that system of um segregation yeah one of the things that i am uh was really impressed by in reading was just how in in the playbook of every single institution dedicated to segregation stalling was such an important part of the package and it seems to me especially when you think about the actual uh instructions on the order that came with brown v board there has not been even now a whole lot of deliberate speed in creating any sort of just or equal environment one thing you do really well in the book is show that in every single juncture even outside of these really big cases it's outside of place of ferguson outside of uh brown v board and outside the fight for affirmative action it takes positive difficult action from black folks and from advocates of black folks to force those institutions hand in force in the move was it ever i don't know frustrating for you often i mean any time you were you're having to think about the levels you know and extent that folks had to go to i i mean i was most affected you know writing about lloyd gaines and researching about lloyd gaines because you really see the toll that it not only that it took on people um you know the the levels that they had to go to in order to fight for basic rights you know he was just trying to go to law school in the state where he lived and you know he they're build there there are places on the university of missouri's campus named for him now but he was never able to step foot on that campus and it is it was incredibly frustrating um but also like there's there's always a piece of it that's it's like yes i i know that you know we come from a legacy of people who who really fought for their rights but you know knowing that they should not have had to do all of that they should not have had to give up all of these years of their life fighting for something that that is a basic right of theirs um you know he was just trying to continue his education hey louise sipple fisher which is trying to continue her education you know she started that fight in 1945 and wasn't and you know enrolling in the university of oklahoma's law school until you know 1950 um you know the the ayers case right it started in 1975 you don't get to a settlement until 2001 and even that settlement is is incomplete so the amount of time that people had to spend fighting for for basic rights you know it it was there were a lot of times where you know you just kind of have to stop and and take a breath and go walk around the house and play with the kids because it can get incredibly frustrating so i want to remind everybody uh before i ask my next question uh that the q and a form is open if you have any questions and you want me to ask them in the last 15 minutes of this event just put them down in a form on zoom one of the if you haven't read again uh one of the things about the book that is also interesting and striking is you tell it you tell the story of higher education through what are really a bunch of small biographies what was it important for you to center these stories of people in this larger big you know clash of institutions and forces it was um in part because i think we often we often think of higher education as like this abstract thing um and it's in the same way that people they don't like higher education but they love their local college right um because they see their local college they can connect to their local college they're the personal stories their friends their family that attended their local college um i i think that our our tendency to make higher education abstract really pulls away from our ability to see the people who um who make up higher education and who have fought to make higher education more equitable and i wanted i wanted people to be able to to connect with with those people with their stories right so i could i could have written about you know okay the morel act passed and uh iowa was the first state to accept the land grant and this is how iowa state was formed and it didn't enroll any black students and you know move on to the next thing but you i can also give you the first black student who enrolled at iowa state what the experience was like for him as and of course george washington carver is the first black student to enroll at iowa state and and he doesn't enroll there until 30 years after they accept the land grant and only because the federal government is like well you either need to create a separate school for black students or um enroll black students in your university and so i think you know the importance of stories the importance of you know connecting that on a sort of human level with with the people um i i really wanted the humans to sort of shine through and and um in the book now i know you've been reporting on all this for a very long time now and you know all the ins and outs you probably knew the rough shape of the book would take take for a long time but is there anything that you came across while you were researching and reporting that surprised you yeah yeah um so a couple of things i mean we talked a little bit about like the lengths that states went to to um maintain segregation so like the little details so when when the state of oklahoma when the federal government supreme court's like well you guys need to create at least a separate law school for a louis sipple fisher or enroll her at the university of oklahoma school of law the state of oklahoma created a law school in five days um you know they said okay we're going to use a floor of the capitol building and we're going to hire three part-time professors for what will be full-time work and um we're going to create a curriculum and and this is going to be equal to the school that's been around for 50 years and so even when you know you sort of know intellectually that states were going you know as as far as they could to stymie black education it's jarring to see the um kind of at a granular level like that in practice um and it's also jarring you know even if i knew the broad outlines of the day law i knew the broad outlines of you know how states segregated education to see up close and to dig in the archives see what people are saying in the newspapers in the early 1900s about why they're segregating um was was remarkable and then again to see the ways that states and the federal government have studied their underfunding of hbcus in particular um for years and years so to to see that you know they've studied this and they've known about these issues and then they just sort of let them sit and let the institutions languish like kentucky they did a study of of uh kentucky normal and industrial institute now kentucky state university in the early 1900s um and so the fact that you know you still see some of those same problems today that that you know this research is coming down and was identifying in the early 1900s is is really galling and was jarring to to see as i was researching the book one of the people who gets a little bit of the biographical treatment in the book is carter g woodson and uh it made me think about the lineage the tradition really to which this book belongs there's been a lot of scholarship a lot of uh work situating black education as kind of the cornerstone or maybe not the cornerstone but the the thing around which all of the rest of the education policy is built and influence on whether that's positive or or in segregation negative how does it feel for you now to be a published part of that tradition have something where your children where people who are going to be attending universities can are going to be able to go to the libraries and check out for years and generations to come yeah um you know it was it was while i went to the bookstore on on pub day and i saw the book there it's like that you know people can buy this my my my brother went to you know barnes and noble in ohio and picked up the book and did a facebook live uh and so that that part of it in itself is is kind of surreal but but thinking about this this more general intellectual tradition um right this book would not be possible without the work of of scholars of journalists of researchers you know past who who have really catalogued and and thought critically about um about black education about education policy and as you say if if we are to move towards a a more equitable education policy in america not only in higher education but also k-12 you know the foundations of that kind of really hinge on whether or not um the most you know marginalized minoritized populations in those spheres um are being treated equitably and and so i don't know situating situating this book you know and having it in conversation with you know with these titles that you know i grew up with and um is is is remarkable and i think that my hope is that this book can at least um you know speak to someone so that they might want to kind of take up the mantle from here and and and dig in a little bit deeper um and so to kind of continue this this conversation again i don't want to give away too much about the book although i mean i think you all kind of know where this ends unfortunately um the the status quo is there's been a lot written about it we know that uh it's we're not just talking about the legacy of white supremacy and segregation we're talking about very real structures that still exist um and in some ways are even more powerful than intractable today so i'm sorry if you came to this session and didn't know that um but uh i'm sorry to spoil that for you but i do want to point out one part of the book that did that got me to thinking a little bit and i'm still going over and over again in my mind during uh george mclaurin's fight to integrate the university of oklahoma one thing one of the officials in opposition to him said and i'm reading from uh the book it says he argued that desegregation would make discrimination by individuals more robust and intense and he argues and i think it's kind of you know it is obviously a self-serving argument that the state and illegally enforcing segregation was not trying to humiliate and degrade mclaren instead it was doing his black citizens a favor now we can toss aside the the part that's obviously self-serving for the state uh we can toss it aside but this argument that the legal enforcement illegal creation of segregation kept a sort of individual level racism at bay that seems like a sort of accidentally profound observation in some sense um as we look at school systems today that have created a de facto segregation that is as strong in many cases as jim crow was uh i don't really have a question behind that um just an observation that i thought was um that got me to thinking yeah and and it's it's been interesting to see the ways that the cycle um it's almost like the momentum that the system of segregation had is sort of perpetual right there's there's still several states that haven't proven to the federal government that they have desegregated their higher education systems in part because of how they treat their black colleges um in part because of things like unnecessary program duplication and all these kind of wonky things but at their at their root you know it kind of comes back to enrollment it comes back to um the finances and uh it's it's it's been interesting over the last several years to see how um you've had this sort of increasing stratification um where you know resources and higher education like i said are sort of concentrated and these institutions that tend to have the fewest black students and um you know until there is a concerted effort to break that cycle you know a an effort that is as strong as the momentum from segregation that was pushed that's kind of pushing against it um you know i i fear that we won't have um there won't be that that sort of genuine equity inequality that that you know one might hope for in the higher education system now in the past few years we have seen in the past couple years a spike in enrollment in some hbcus we've seen things like mega donors like mackenzie scott who is giving millions and millions of dollars in solutions we've seen what appears to be a moment for black college attendees and graduates in the last couple years but that sits kind of uneasily with how your book ends when we talk about the clock that's ticking that's due next year for mississippi for funding in mississippi how do you square your conclusions on the policy and the piece and what most people would say it's a feel-good error right now for hbcus at least yeah um and as you mentioned like 2020 was a record year for a lot of hbcus in terms of philanthropic giving in terms of attention this year right hbcus are expecting about three billion dollars and you know in a typical year it will cross about 15 programs they get about a billion dollars from the federal government so um you know it is a sort of a moment that hbcus are in the spotlight and they have not been in the spotlight like this for a sustained period like this um in the past but i i also the reason i mean one of the reasons why i'm hesitant to look at last year's phone throughout the giving and think that oh this is this is fantastic it's is in part because you know an institution like my own wasn't the the recipient of you know one of those large gifts there are a lot of hbcus they were not recipients of those large gifts um and then on top of that you know in 2021 the chronicle of philanthropy has this database of you know the largest donations um uh period but also to colleges and universities if you look at that list this year um you know the top 100 gifts gifts about five million dollars there there may be one or two of them that are to historically black colleges and universities and so you know the idea that that one year was going to address this this historical pattern of segregation um uh is is i think that we would it would be to the sector's decrement it would also um be a sort of fallacy if we were to understand that last year as as changing the entire narrative of course there are some hbcus that are that are thriving in this moment um but they are thriving in spite of that historical discrimination not um not sort of because things have changed so radically that everything is okay and that does fit in with the ultimate conclusions in the book because i think it what you show in the end is essentially the system is is held together and moved by every couple years these band-aids right these uh you get uh infusion of funding from a lawsuit you get a breakthrough in a lawsuit for inclusion you get a uh half-hearted affirmative action um uh mandate from the federal government on what level do you think we should be thinking uh as if we really want to i guess it's a little bit too bad to say create equality but to actually address some of these structural inequalities yeah i i think you know on on one level it's important for state governments to accept sort of the responsibility for for their role in creating and fostering um um inequitable systems um it's also on the federal government for for creating the environment that allowed right when when elizabeth warren was running for president um you know i spoke with with heather mcgee and and she she told me something you know uh that was you know public policy created um the racial wealth gap um only public policy can fix and in a lot of ways public policy is what created or at least allowed for this system of an equitable education to exist and so public policy is going to be necessary to fix that but then there's also the responsibility that that some of these institutions have right the institutions that were actively blocking and stymieing at black education while you know hbcus were doing the work of educating black students so you look at a state like mississippi where you know the air settlement um sort of came and it will now be going phasing out um the black colleges got 500 million dollars over 17 years split between three institutions um where the university of mississippi can make 500 million dollars in you know five years of private donations um and and if you go back to the 1800s and mid-1800s when the university of mississippi was keeping black students out and you look at a place like alcorn state that was educating those black students um in 1871 they were supposed to get a guaranteed appropriation for a decade of 50 000 a year um four years later when the you know uh the so-called redeemers sweep in and with their quote-unquote white revolution um they reduce that appropriation to fifteen thousand dollars a year the next year five thousand five hundred dollars a year and so you you sort of see the ways that that inequality is sort of stacked up and you start to ask yourself well do not only state and federal governments have have a sort of role in um making this system more equal but also do do these institutions that profited and flourished in the era of of slavery and segregation do they have a responsibility to help the institutions that that served black students when they would yeah i want to remind the audience i'm going to go to q a shortly so if you do have any questions uh please drop them in the form in zoom last couple questions first of all uh the state must provide where is the quote where's the title come from so the quote comes from uh the fischer adolescent fisher case um where they said the state must provide an equal education for as soon as it does for for any other student and and that's really the the crux of this because as much as this is about you know a history of higher education as much as it's in history of hbcus as much as it's sort of an examination of inequality it's really about that the students because the institutions you know exist to serve those those students and um you know as i write in the introduction you know higher education has a dirty open secret it's never given black students an equal chance to succeed and and um and so the state must provide really grows out of um that that notion that the state must provide an equal education for black students as soon as it does for anyone else and and that has not been a practical reality now last question from me and then i will turn it to our uh q a here one of the really elemental things that moved me when reading was seeing all these stories of uh going back to what we talked about before uh you know this story begins in an era when black folks could have been put to death for reading and yet they read and yet they learned and yet in the span of a couple years after the end of slavery there were several institutions of higher education not only run for them but run by them and you saw a really unprecedented proliferation of education of the quest for education among people for whom it's seemed so dangerous and difficult to seek that attainment what i want to ask as we go into the audience questions is has that has seen all those stories has living and seeing through all those people's eyes has it made a mark on you and you know i don't i i think questions about hope and optimism are a little you know not for me but what is what do those stories mean to you yeah i think you know they really they really show the resilience of of black people through through time i i mean and and you know fast forwarding to to now i i often think about what folks have been through um you know the amount it took to sort of fight for for basic rights and and knowing that in in some ways this book is is a continuation of that that sort of push for for equity and equality and higher education and i think that for me as i was as i was reporting this book out as i was digging into the archives i i really got a sense of you know okay i'm staying up a little bit late at night to finish writing but but you know not too long ago right you know my my grandfather's grandfather's generation um you know this would have not this not this wouldn't have been a possibility for them um and so it's like knowing what we've been through knowing that you know states would literally you could literally be killed for being found with a book um you know for a period of time they wouldn't even allow black people to read the bible um because they feared a revolution if black peop for forecasting forward i think that it really shows that even after i'm gone the fight kind of continues the sort of push for equity inequality continues um and um it's almost kind of comforting knowing that but it's also a little bit knowing that it's been going on for so long is in some ways depressing so there's like this this mix of like like knowing that it's been going on for so long is kind of depressing but also knowing that people have have dedicated their life to this and continue to fight um actually does sort of provide a form of hope now i have an audience question that will segue directly from that response which is it's from alex and it's uh what readings or writers inspired you the most while writing them so a couple um i think at the roots like uh du bois i read um black reconstruction and sort of his examination of sort of the education pieces of that and then also you know reading and really kind of digging in deeply to the ideas around um black education and how people were thinking about black education in the early 1900s as you know um the atlantic's archives are full of you know the debates between dubois and booker t washington and thinking about you know on the trainings of of um black men and um forecasting forward thinking about the writings of carter g woodson on black education um and then even more more currently there's some really great histories of hbcus that i actually have on my shelves here um sorry um so like bobby lovitz um america's um historically black colleges and universities and narrative history from 1837 to 2009 um was massive um the origins of federal support and higher education um really sort of helped me kind of cement some of the ideas um around the ways that the morel act was was structured and how the federal government got involved and has stayed involved in higher education now that sort of excluded black students so i mean there were there were a range of folks who i was leaning on as i said it's sort of um you know even even up to now um catherine wiedel's dissertation on um on the second morel act um you know from illumina foundation incredibly helpful in helping me think about um um you know the ways that the federal government has um sort of stymied black education even as it was sort of you know creaking the door open right it was never willing to to kind of throw the door wide open but it would at least sort of unlock it a little bit now question from vanessa vanessa says thank you for this conversation i am really enjoying adam's book and wanted to ask him given the incredible resistance to integrated higher education how long do you think we'll be we'll be living with this legacy of stolen public resources i think as long as and in some ways right so the late 1960s early 1970s um through court action the federal government really started enforcing its policies on discrimination and higher education systems and and so until there is an environment where where states realize that they cannot kind of continue this um this cycle that has momentum of um of sort of believing that the federal government will not strictly adhere enforce um uh these laws that are on the books that bar discrimination i think that we will continue to see you know um the state sort of be complacent right there there are a couple of ways that states can get out of federal monitoring and one of them is through these these settlements that we talked about a little bit earlier um so maryland has recently settled with its hbcus they offer 577 million over 10 years but between four colleges um and when you really start to do the math it's like okay ten years it's like all right that's that's 57 million dollars a year 57.7 million dollars a year um um you know you have to do a map on the fly here but that's like you know 12 13 dollars for each institution um and so when you really start to uh or something thirteen million dollars which institution and so when you really start to break that down you see how you know if that's supposed to make up for a legacy of in the messages of discrimination that's going to be wholly insufficient um and so until you start to have a real accounting for for you know the damage that has been done and the fact that these institutions have been able to um persist and and produce successful graduates um and educate you know black people in spite of this this sort of um regime the jim crow regime that they lived under um is is a testament to the institutions but also should be a um a sort of wake-up call to say that what would these institutions have been able to done if they were provided with the resources they were just supposed to receive um and i think the more we we ask these questions the more we have these conversations um you know the better off we will be in the long run maybe the more we'll move towards a sort of equity what were some of your favorite sources to work with in your research in your reporting um newspapers uh so i really enjoyed digging through uh digging through old newspapers and you know you you always had to figure out the political bent of of the news sources and um and so you know you would read uh like the utah wagon observer and then you would go over and be like the utah democrat they would have two completely different perspectives um and and you you really kind of had to to um square it down and pair it down to okay what's what is the base roots of this where where is this paper coming from so i really liked digging into the news archives because you would always and on top of like finding the interesting thing that was relevant to the book you'd you know you would and inevitably run across an interesting story like you know person throws 13 000 pound boulder like across the mississippi or something like that you know um but you run into these interesting stories i really liked working with newspaper archives but i also like digging through um supreme court records at the um uh um just over at the library of congress and seeing like the internal conversations that the justices were having about affirmative action seeing the letters that were flying back and forth where you know thurgood marshall says that you know what this case hinges on when he's talking about the bakke case is um you know it really hinges on whether you think of this as you know we're keeping students out or whether you're thinking about it as students who have historically been excluded you know getting it so you know and you know the way that he and before other justices thought about that case was it was about people getting in these are these are people who institutions have not enrolled who have institutions have actively kept out of of these seeds and so yes it will take some time we we need to take race into account in order to get past race right it's the exact same thing that um was written in the atlantic in 1977 right in order to get past raised you must first take a counter phrase um and so to to see that working with those archives was was really interesting and illuminating for the book all right we have a question from anna and asks what lesson does the educational model of hbcus offer for the non-hbcus that now educate a majority of black students in higher education today yeah i i think um so jelani favors has a really great book his shelter in a storm and you know he talks about the sort of second curriculum um that hbcu students often receive um that it's not just about the you know learning the arts and the sciences and all of this but it's it's about learning how to navigate in in the world how to navigate the sort of um dearth of resources you might receive how to navigate navigate the job market and um how to navigate racism um and and not from a place of okay we're gonna throw you into an environment where you're just going to face racism but but really sort of nurturing the students and i think um you know the the sort of emphasis that sort of um uh mentorship that that students get from hbcus oftentimes right i i am sure you had this this experience where you know i remember there were days where i would just walk over to the department of behavioral sciences at the time and just sit and hang out with professors and talk um and like just kind of sit in their offices not during office hours um because it was sort of built into the mission of the institution that um these were um these were places where you know that that sort of extra mentorship was was not peripheral to the job of of the hpc professor but it was it was sort of almost central to that position and you you have to think about what the rest of higher education is right now where you have a series and i mean of course this is also these are issues that face hbcus as well but you know the sort of emphasis on um you know getting to getting to the next level um and then also the racism that black professors are facing at their at their institutions where it's like you know i'm also trying to navigate um racism within within my institution while trying to help students and it becomes this additional burden so so i think the the more work that institutions can do to make themselves um you know more equitable not just for students but for faculty um create a better working environment for faculty so that they they can do that extra um kind of that extra work and then also kind of compensating them for that extra work um i think that the better off those institutions will be as well as the students who attend them in addition to that you know a large share of black students now are at community colleges and so the more states can do to fund community colleges provide resources to community colleges so that you know they can have those additional supports that students need in order to be successful the better off students and and those institutions will be yeah i named my kid after one of the presidents of my hbcu so um i'm all in on the sort of extra extra legacy of them benjamin elijah yeah um what's one thing you wish you knew or understood better before you started the book um i think um you know the process of writing the book or you know writing a book generally is advantage you know it's kind of like it's an exploration and you know you never know what you um what you don't know until you you know that you don't know it or you didn't know it and and so you know all of the little things as you mentioned a little earlier kind of about the the extent that states went to um you know oklahoma rushing a law school into existence in five days um you know what a reintegration of berea college looked like how an institution that had this original mission sort of reclaims that mission um after integration uh i i think all of those all of those little things uh i i i think added to the experience of writing the book in in some ways made the experience a a you know pretty fruitful and interesting learning experience for me too so um i i hope that that readers um i hope that in my writing and that readers can sort of get that you know in some ways this was this this was a learning experience for for me too and i tried to pour as much of what i learned into into the book and uh the last question i'll save this one for me um before we uh wrap up who is your ideal reader who do you hope gets their hands on this book the most yeah um so i mean of course you you hope that policymakers read this book you hope that college leaders read this book but really i hope that anyone interested in history anyone interested in understanding um the ways that um you know the machinations of slavery and jim crow and the systems that they created did not sort of um end when um overt um you know de jure discrimination did they did not end when slavery ended but people who are interested in understanding how a system of higher education the the colleges higher education that you know the founders are really talking about higher education is the place to build a good citizen how over time black people have been systematically excluded from the the greatest benefits of that um so honestly anyone who is generally interested in um in that sort of accounting of history i'd hope would read the book well adam thank you so much for joining us i know you have a very busy week so thank you for taking the time thank you everyone who joined us on the zoom today and there's still time please go and order a copy of the book at solid state books uh even if you already have a copy get another one thank you all for coming and uh see you later take care thanks you

Channel: New America

Views: 227

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: new america, renewing america

Id: bCKpaXzNZRg

Length: 59min 6sec (3546 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 17 2021