Blacks Face Agonies In Higher Education, Says UF Researcher

May 14, 1996

GAINESVILLE — American colleges and universities, long considered open and tolerant places, are bastions of hate and discrimination for many black students, says a University of Florida sociologist and co-author of a new book.

“Predominantly white college campuses are not isolated from racism in modern society,” said Joe Feagin, a UF expert on race relations and co-author of The Agony of Education. “They account for much of the pain felt by black students and their parents, in spite of the tolerant image that academia loves to proclaim.”

The problems are so monumental in most public and private universities that black students who enroll face a quandary in deciding whether to stay or to leave and start over at black colleges, Feagin said.

“For the parents, the agonizing dilemma is Do I send my children to historically black colleges where they will have strong personal support, good friends and the opportunity to be president of the student body, but which do not have as many well-funded programs?’” he said. “Or Do I send them to predominantly white universities, which often have better professional programs, but where their self-esteem will be savaged?’”

Feagin, who wrote the book with Hernan Vera, a UF sociology professor, and Nikitah Imani, a sociology professor at James Madison University, said it is the first to examine in detail the fate of blacks in a traditionally white university from the perspective of black students and their parents. “There have been a few essays about the black experience in higher education, but to my knowledge, there is no book that presents the voices of large numbers of black students and parents,” he said.

Several recent popular books have portrayed white students at the nation’s major colleges as being overly solicitous of blacks, and campuses as actually being taken over by black students or multiculturalism, Feagin said.

“Part of the reason for our research was to examine this rather preposterous claim,” he said. “It’s quite clear that none of these journalists and scholars have been on college campuses very long, and they certainly haven’t talked to black students.”

In focus groups, Feagin and co-authors interviewed and surveyed 41 parents and 36 juniors and seniors randomly selected from another major state university’s black population. They developed a portrait beyond the university, which required anonymity as a condition of the research, by looking at various other studies at more than a dozen other campuses nationwide.

More than half of the black students in the new study reported being mistreated by white professors, administrators and staff because of their race.

“The bottom line is that most black students find a white campus to be a very white, white place, in terms of its faces, rules, expectations and campus climate, and one in which they are made to feel out-of-place,” Feagin said.

A common problem for black students was being unwantedly singled out for being black by college professors when classroom discussion focused on issues where a so-called black perspective was sought, Feagin said. Some instructors even let it be known they are uncomfortable with having blacks in class, he said.

White students’ behavior also served as a constant reminder that blacks were not welcomed on campus. Black students were frequent targets of racial epithets or hostile looks, such as when they dated white students, he said.

“When whites signal in a lot of subtle and blatant ways that blacks are not wanted on campus, that’s tough, especially when you’re 18 or 19 years old,” he said. “Life is hard enough growing up with the normal problems of colleges and universities, without having to deal with the whole additional problem of racial oppression.”

Feagin believes higher education must substantially diversify the ranks of faculty and administration. “Wherever that happens, you get change,” he said. “We’ve already seen that with women. When colleges and universities hire significant numbers of women, campuses suddenly overnight become concerned with sexual discrimination and harassment, date rape and women’s issues in a serious way.”