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BLACK COLLEGES, BLACK STUDIES
FOSTER

is being brought from many fronts to go out and recruit white students.  This pressure is so strong that some Black administrators actually think they can do it; as if they do not already have enough useful chores to keep them busy.  Moreover, rumored in some corners is the contention that even the federal government looks with disfavor upon Black colleges if they have not made fruitful efforts to integrate their student body.  Black colleges, it should be recalled, unlike white institutions of higher learning, never failed to take our democratic creeds seriously.  I have yet to hear of a Black college president standing in the doorways of his "hallowed halls," with state troopers in full support of his actions, insulting white students for wanting an education.

Around the turn of the twentieth century the function of the university was to "rationalize, uphold, and conserve the existing order of things."⁷ Universities attempting to serve such a function in the 1970's must be considered extremely worthless and should be forced to close their doors.  Higher education, in Black as well as white circles, must help find solutions to the problems Americans now face.  This, of course, requires that colleges and universities be more to communities and cities than local growth-industries creating jobs and buying power; more than mere "brain centers" attracting development and research companies; and not just "think machines" formulating abstract social programs and planning techniques. These institutions must also help cities ask and answer the essential questions of urbanization, dealing with the meaning of it and its present effects on human beings.  Active attention on the diverse problems of density and poverty, revenue crises, pollution, racial conflicts, personal disorganization, poor public services, and pursuit of world peace should be the fundamental challenges consummating university expertise.  But for colleges and universities to fully realize their potential for leadership in humanitarian endeavors they will have to reform, starting with reassessment of the basic education they offer to undergraduates.  The reassessment could, no doubt, decide the fate of mankind.  Certainly the problems are now upon us, literally begging for long overdue solutions.

Carter G. Woodson believed that "the chief difficulty with the education of the Negro is that it has been largely imitation resulting in the enslavement of his mind."⁸ Thirty years after Woodson made this observation, Fanon in pointing the way toward Black liberation, instructed us to chart new courses when he wrote:

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