‘Black Studies’ Sought By Negro Students

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31922, 25 February 1969, Page 21

‘Black Studies’ Sought By Negro Students

'From FRANK OLIVER. N.Z.P.A. special correspondent) WASHINGTON. Troubles in the public schools continue unabated and there are troubles on scores of college and university campuses across the continent.

In more than one instance, troops of the National Guard have been called in to ensure that student revolts do not close these places of learning. The colleges are kept open but it is reasonable to doubt whether education can be continued in the midst of strife.

The size of the problem is indicated by the fact that while, 10 years ago. there were three million students in institutions of higher learning, today the figure is six million and in another 10 years it is expected to be 10 million. Today about 50 per cent of students graduating from high schools go on to college. Ten years from now it may well be near 100 per cent.

Student revolts in recent years have largely been started by a variety of students including Left-wingers, those against the military draft system, those against current university methods, those against the Vietnam war and those against “the establishment” and who want more to say about the making of the world in which they will have to live. Then there were Negroes who were against “whitey,” what he stood for and what he taught. Most of the recent crop of student revolts have been by Negro students, and it has been demonstrated time and again that a handful of black students can bring a seat of learning almost to a standstill.

The slogan of these educational rebels is “black studies.” Black studies, says one well-informed writer on the subject, has replaced Viet-

nam as the entering wedge for trouble on campuses all across the country. An academic revolution is unquestionably under way and the Negroes want their say in that revolutionary change.

No longer is the word integration heard. Civil rights are seldom mentioned. The aim of the students engaged in revolt is independence for the black. “Black is beautiful” is one of the slogans of that movement The black wants the university he attends to pay more attention to his origins, his history, his problems, his race—in short black studies must, he argues, come into the curriculum. One Negro writer says the universities have become the new battleground and they "have become the dusty Southern towns of today.”

There are a number of colleges and universities which have responded to the call for black studies in the curriculum and have increased the enrolment of more and more black students but the revolts go on. Recently five notable universities have, despite their efforts to meet black demands, found themselves the targets of sit-ins. strikes and attempts to take over the universities by black students, in each case a small enrolment of the total student body. Some important universities did take time by the forelock and instituted black studies, among them Harvard, Yale and Stanford. Their programmes offer courses in African history, Swahili, the story of the Negro in the United States and even Negro music. Such things, it has been pointed out, are not so very different from courses offered for Asian and arabic ; studies. | There have been no troubles at such large institutions of learning, and one writer suggests that this is because the blacks studying there are widely dispersed among different groups and are also scattered among the dormitories. Trouble has come to some of the smaller universities where, says one writer, Negroes stand out as

| a minority and unite together and frame their demands for more and more black studies. It is added also that trouble seems to come to institutions where special sympathy for minorities and their rights draws whites to the side of the protesting blacks. “Thus Brandeis is largely Jewish, Swarthmore is Quaker, and San Francisco State, like Berkeley, is imbued with the Bohemian culture of San Francisco.” In some cases university administration officials have been blamed for the troubles Mack studies demands have created. Some universities went quickly and quietly to work to institute such study programmes before black studies became a matter of public grievance. Some university officials not only failed to set up such study courses but resisted the idea and tried to stick by the traditional curriculum. At San Francisco State, as one commentator has pointed out, Governor Ronald Reagan actively sought a public confrontation with the black students “and he has got it with a vengeance.” It can be taken for granted that black studies will, before long, figure in the study courses of every college and university in the country. The unanswered question is what will their quality be? Will they be “real” studies such as those instituted at Harvard and other great centres of learning, or will they become what is known as “crutch.” “Crutch” courses have, in recent years, become common in public high schools. These are relatively unimportant courses for which credits are given and they help almost every student to graduate. High schools now. says one commentator, make it possible for almost anyone to get through with a diploma and he cites as “crutch” courses such things as basketweaving and home economy (the high-flown phrase for cooking).

What a lot of people are wondering is whether colleges will not be forced to make similar allowances as those now made by high schools to see that practically every student graduates. A writer in the “Washington Post” insists, “the colleges in their new role are going to have to make the same kind of allowances (as high schools do now). They are going to make it virtually impossible to fail. To that end they will be instituting—indeed they already have—various courses of the ‘basket-weaving’. variety. He foresees black studies becoming that kind of a “crutch,” “one of the many ‘crutches’ bound to come given the trend towards nearly universal college attendance.”

Nor is that all. The “Wall Street Journal,” in a long and well-documented article, says that more and more college students cheat and it finds professors slow to interfere, that instructors fear losing their “rapport” with their classes, and “ghost writers” are kept busy.

It records the case of a graduate student at a MidWestern university who left his part-time job at $1.65 an hour in a book store during examination week. He had a better job. He took examinations for other students, five examinations in six days at three nearby colleges, and thereby made $lBO. Ghost-writing is reported to be common in fraternity houses, graduate students turning out essays or a full thesis for anywhere from $6O to $5OO.