Dress Codes, Black Respectability & What’s Keeping HBCUs From Moving Ahead

Even as the long touted National Science Foundation study shows us that HBCUs are responsible for producing most of America’s black professionals, including 85 percent of all doctors, 60 percent of engineers and 80 percent of federal judges, other reports show HBCUs have been declining in its role as higher educator for the black student from its height of 90 percent during the era of the Civil Rights Movement to now only 13 percent. With integration came access to more historically and predominately white institutions – and not just the Ivy Leagues. This article in Diverse Education, says that HBCUs have lost many Black students who have increased admission rates to traditional institutions by approximately 14 percent.

According to this story in Roland Martin Reports, the declining enrollments at many HBCUs, which ultimately means fewer opportunities for endowments (Black colleges, on average, have endowments of $15.8 million, which is only about one-eighth the average of traditional institutions), has also meant some lean financial times for many of our beloved institutions including Grambling University, Fisk University, Howard University, Morehouse College, and even my alma mater Virginia Union University. These tough economic times for black institutions has meant a loss of accreditation and Chapter 11 bankruptcy for Morris Brown College in Atlanta and a complete closure of St. Paul’s College in Virginia. Although President Barack Obama has awarded $228 million in grants to assist some 97 HBCUs, the Administration has also tightened terms with with the Parent Plus loan (this in addition to the Education Department, which recently dropped the maximum income eligibility for Pell Grants to just $28,000), which has inadvertently left thousands of low-income and credit-impaired parents ineligible. These factors have also hit HBCUs with another decline in income and a further plunge in enrollment.

All of this fiscal data is to say that when so many black institutions find themselves at a crossroads financially, and potential black students are weighing culturally hostile environments against the financial burden of higher education, it doesn’t make much sense for many of these institutions to continue to cling to the practices of policing arbitrary behaviors like someone’s style of dress. All of this makes HBCUs the suit-wearing stiff while the rest of the world’s institutions have moved on to casual Fridays. And why would a transgendered or black Muslim or just a young dude who likes to sag his pants while he studies for his Physiology 101 exam feel like a double minority on a black campus when predominantly white institutions are giving them way more money — and a little more individual acceptance — to deal with their Isht?

Our historically black colleges and universities were founded on the grounds of being safe havens against racism for the children of former slaves to gain access to higher education. However as E. Franklin Frazier retorts in his classic critique on the black middle class, these institutions were founded in part by white folks, particularly religious white folks, who had very selective ideas of how Negros should behave. Perhaps then, those sorts of policies were needed when the fight for our humanity was most urgent. But the more affluent and far removed great-great-grandchildren of these former slaves who are being educated behind the ivy walls of these black institutions no longer feel beholden to the physical restraints of racism. Nor do they feel the need to hide under the shield of black respectability. These same institutions are going to have to find a new way to rise to the new challenges and needs of today’s African-American student. Therefore, in addition to continued calls on the Obama Administration to reconsider the restrictions placed on the Pell Grant as well as the Parent Plus Loan, these institutions have to become a more welcoming environment for the full cultural experiences of the Black Diaspora.