In Black America; Black Student Retention; Part 1

Thank You very much. the Has started all guns I He was a good man. He wrote the same thing that Mr. Taylor said. The other thing that was the women, your women, right? He said the race will never... That was the lesson that was very proud.

We did not understand we did not understand it. But somehow, we're trying to hold on to that message, have sustained us over the years. And I had seen one of those young men James has come for over 30 years and I had the chance to be reunited with him in Phoenix. I resolved where he's a minister now. And we sat and talked about Mr. Fipps in that eighth grade class and he remembered as well as I do. So I want to dedicate these remarks this morning to Lily and Tinsley and Norfolk O'Fipps in gratitude for their leadership and guidance when I didn't even know I needed it. Dr. J. Herman Blake, Vice Chancellor of Undergraduate Education in the University of Indianapolis. Last November in the nation's capital, Florida A&M University celebrated its 10th anniversary National Conference on Black Student Retention. More than 200 University and College faculty administrators, counselors, academic advisors, minority and retention directors,

and students gathered for five days to explore issues that influence the retention of black students in higher education. To gain information that will be helpful towards improving the existence of student retention programs, to interact with peers from institutions and organizations nationwide to improve their knowledge and skills in designing and implementing student retention programs. I'm John L. Hanson Jr. and welcome to another edition of In Black America. This week, the 10th anniversary National Higher Education Conference on Black Student Retention with Dr. J. Herman Blake in Black America. I had the privilege at the University of California at Santa Cruz of building a college from the ground up. In 1968, when I was a new faculty member at the University, I'd only been there two years of assistant professor of sociology. I had the privilege at the University of California at Santa Cruz of building a college from the ground up. In 1968, when I was a new faculty member at the University, I'd only been there two years of assistant professor of sociology.

The University was building individual semi-autonomous liberal arts colleges throughout the campus. It was 2,700 acres of redwoods and rolling meadows, and they organized it around small liberal arts colleges. There were two in existence at the time that I started as a faculty member, and actually one, I started with the first one, and the second one came online the next year. And they were building a new one every year. And they came to me in my second year and asked if I would share a small medi of faculty working with the seventh college, which was scheduled to open in 1912. I had the privilege of sitting down with the faculty member signing the academic program. We designed with the architects the buildings in which that academic program took place. We oversaw the construction of the college. And while it was under construction, we recruited the faculty

and ultimately the students. In 1983, Dr. Glita A. Ford, as director of the Title III program at Florida A&M University, divides a special model for institutional strategies to increase student retention. Although many were concerned regarding African-American student retention, there wasn't a national form that addressed the problem. This past November in Washington, D.C., Dr. Ford and Florida A&M University celebrated as 10th anniversary. This year's conference recognized the new challenges that may require new approaches to keep African-American students in the educational ready mode. The conference theme was entitled, Minority Student Retention relates to goals 2000. The conference brought together some of the nation-leading experts in the field of student retention. Dr. J. Herman Blake is vice chancellor of undergraduate education at Indiana University of Indianapolis. He is the former president of Tugulu College and founding provosts of Oaks College at the University of California. His address at the conference focused on transforming

the educational environment for the next century. We wanted to bring students, nobody else, had brought into the University of California at that time. My campus, the entering students, GPA was about eight minutes or above. That was a GPA of entering students. And the profile of the students, demographically, was about the same as Stanford University students in terms of family income and family background. Well, that's enough what I was interested in and the four colleagues that I worked with agreed with me. We wanted to bring in a different population. Those who have been bypassed by all of these sort of elite approaches of the University of California. So we went up and down the state from San Francisco to Los Angeles and San Joaquin Valley and recruited students nobody wanted. And ultimately, we had an enrollment that was 48% black Latino and Native American. And the other 52% were Anglo,

but among those Anglo-speaking, a portion of poor whites that we went out. We recruited them because, they were included, not excluded. Looked like the majority lived like the men of both. And they were very grateful to be recognized as being worthy and also needy. So we had this population, the same thing we did, was given the students we had, and given the polls that they want, and the important thing to do would be to sell subjects that they would not take. Everybody wanted criminal justice or sociology or something along these lines. At that time, we were developing studies, programs, and ethnic studies programs did not have that. We recruited a faculty that represented everything we wanted. The faculty was 50% minority. I would say 95% women, I would say 99% good.

The end of our seventh year of operation, 50% of our black Latino students, successful major in history, biology, math, computer science, and economic, in University of California. Those students entered without the ability to do some basic things. But they were put in a context where they were supported, nurtured, and curred, and held to high expectations. They thrive. We took the position that if your friends are hard on you, when you meet your family, be ready. Our college taught the most difficult course in introduction to chemistry. When students would leave that course on a Thursday, they'd have something like 40-hour par problem sets, do on Tuesday. And they could take the departmental course of a lot of lower expectations. But we raised the expectations because we knew our students came from situations where nobody expected them to learn,

nobody told them. But when those students learned that we would not turn them loose unless they were good and about, yet sir, we would throw them out. They began to thrive in my 12 years of leading that college on the entire campus of 6,000 students. During that time, only two students did a perfect course on the MCATs, both from my college, both were minority. We ultimately reached the point where we had the highest rate of graduation and professional school admissions. At the six years, we had the lowest after four years. But we had the highest after six years. Those students learned the things people thought they could not learn. All right? Now, I'm trying to shape for you an understanding of how I came to a philosophy of learning, which structures my thinking. While I was building the college in the late 60s and early 70s, I was also spending my weekends and evenings

in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I was doing research on the Black Panther Party. I lived, traveled, and worked with the leadership of the Black Panther Party for self-defense, ultimately writing the autobiography of its founder, Hughie P. Newton. During that time, I saw in the Panther, in Oakland, particularly at the headquarters on Peralta Street in West Oakland. I saw young people who were as good as the students in my college, who loved life as much as the students in my college, but who had not been provided opportunity. And I was always puzzled by how wonderful they were, but also how committed they were to dying if they could not live the way they wanted to live. I mean, we would have wonderful times, sometimes on Sunday afternoon watching football, joking, and eating, and just enjoying our fellow children.

And then as the sun would begin to set these say, wonderful young people would go to closets, and they'd strap 357 magnums to their waist, and they'd put nine millimeter pistols on the tables around the beds, not expecting they would live. And I would never take a weapon. I was always there, and they used to laugh at me. They'd say, you know, pig, show up, you ain't going to look at your PhD. But I would not touch a weapon. I was there for other reasons, and even though I was well accepted, I could not do that. I was there for watching this scene with all one evening, and one of the Panther leaders, Big Bay, huge guy, loved chicken and women in that order. A.K. came over to me with a shotgun, and shook it in my face. He said, Doc, he said, Doc, some people decorate their walls with phases of flowers. We decorate our walls with the revolutionary tool. And one of the problems with me, ladies and gentlemen,

was how good those young people were. They put out a newspaper, they financed an organization that was beginning to do some community development, and ultimately some political engagement, and none of them had even high school diplomas. And what was even more striking was that most of the women who did the real work and who kept that organization going for women, many of them had had at least one child before they were 15, some two, and the Panther offered them another hope. Now, what I'm saying is on one side, I'm looking at some brothers and sisters who appeared to be pathological, who had no opportunity, but who were setting the city of Oakland on its ear. Then I drive 75 miles south, and I'd see my students, who were taking advantage of what we were giving them, and who were excelling beyond what others could believe. Looking at those two, I mean, my book came out in 1973, the college opened in 1972, so you can see they were going simultaneously.

Looking at those two, and realizing what we were doing, I developed a philosophy of learning, and please forgive me for taking this much time, but I want you to understand, it wasn't something you just sit out and come up with. Looking at those young people, particularly in the Panther, who were doing so much in so well, and nobody had ever trained or taught, quote, educated them, I came to the point of view which I have always applied of a philosophy that holds there is no known limit to the capacity of the human mind to learn, grow, develop, and change. And I always tell that to my students when I start with them, I tell that to faculty, I tell that to administrators that my point of view holds there is no known limit to the capacity of the human mind to learn, grow, develop, and change. And for that reason, I stand in strong opposition

to any ideology, any organization, any social structure, any individual who would say to any human being, looking at him or her, you cannot learn something. That mind can accomplish anything it sets itself to do. It might take longer for some things than for other things, but there's no doubt in my mind that it is possible. So when I begin to approach the whole subject of transforming an institution and a culture, what I'm talking about is creating a sense where everyone is committed to the view that regardless of position or status, one can learn something one didn't know before and can often learn it from somebody else in a way that one hadn't thought. And when you make those kinds of connections and create an environment of that kind of respect,

you begin to build an environment which is a transformed environment. Now, we applied this at the University of California at Santa Cruz. I used it when I was at Tougaloo College, and I used it in my current work. At the University of California at Santa Cruz, we built, like I said, a whole college, around these ideas. And we brought the students on to campus. We had them 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and we expected them to learn. And we had one particular approach to that expectation of learning, and that is we asked them to organize their time so that they would spend four hours in study for every one hour in class, four to one. Now, students, of course, didn't like that. But what it did was it forced people to begin to think about priorities and the organization of time

in such a manner that they could get things done. We also knew that if a student planned and organized himself or herself around that particular principle, once they got it down, they could begin to tell it to meet their needs. But we didn't say two to one. Because if we knew we said two to one, they might try to figure out how to get one to one. We said four to one, and we'd sit there and work with them on it. When I went to Tougaloo, we did the same kind of thing. I had the most wonderful teaching experience of my life at Tougaloo College, teaching young people who very often had not had four years of high school English, not because they couldn't do it, but because the school districts could not provide it. And taking young people out of that kind of environment and turning them on to their minds, the most exciting experience in the world. And I could talk about that, but then you wouldn't get to my main point. I love talking about that experience. Now, I'm in an urban commuting university with 28,000 students,

20,000 of them undergraduate. And it is my responsibility to provide the kind of environment, academic and non-academic, which promotes high academic achievement among those students. 12% of them, approximately, are African-American. And what we do is develop, or what we are doing is developing a matrix kind of arrangement, whereby we are reaching out, building a set of expectations, as well as programs designed to transform the culture. Now, when I talk about transforming the culture, what I am talking about here, is changing the situation for students and faculty and administrators, from one where people come to work and do what they're expected to do on the case of faculty research and teaching. And on the part of students, credit acquisition,

change that to a learning environment. Now, there's a big difference between acquiring credits and developing a thirst and a love and a desire for learning. And in my university, an urban commuting university, where most of the students are over 26, most of them have families. Most of them are working to talk about learning, rather than getting credits, is almost to be talking nonsense to them. But it is our goal to transform that environment and we are working toward it in a very systematic and deliberate way. There are three things we are doing as a part of that. And I want to share a little of that because I've already gone longer than I should. First of all, creating a sense of inclusiveness and a sense of community,

particularly for students and staff, within a context in which people find that regardless of their circumstances and regardless of who they are, they are greeted with a sense of community and expected to learn. Building a sense of community in an urban commuting institution is extremely difficult. And people often wonder what we think we are doing. I don't try to do it with respect to the students as much as we do with respect to the staff. So that we expect staff, student affairs staff, and all staff ultimately, if you see a student more than three times, learn his or her name. Great the students in such a manner that they feel like they belong. We spend time working on workshops with clerical staff,

receptionists, telephone operators, and others around the notion that you are the voice and the door of the university. And if a student comes into your office and is treated in a cold and hostile manner, by the time they get to the counselor or the financial aid advisor, they already got a bigger attitude or problem than they had before. And it is very critical that the first who greet become the kinds of ones that make people feel welcome. Our staff make it a point to walk around more and more where students hang out and greet the students and talk with them, always with a business card, always saying, if you have a problem, come and see me, let me serve you. We don't talk about helping. We talk about serving. And ultimately, we believe in the notion that everyone who touches a student is ultimately a teacher.

So we expect staff to interact with students as though they are teachers. Now that's a hard notion to get across to a secretary or clerk who doesn't have a degree himself or herself. But our point is if a student walks into your office and they've got a French textbook, you can ask them a question about that book or about that subject. Teach me how to say this glass of water in French. And we try to get the staff to ask students questions and interact with them in such a manner that when students go into those offices, they know they're going to be asked about their subject. And they know they're going to pursue certain kinds of understanding. And it's a way of reaching out and touching others. But the most important part of this is creating an environment in which staff are free to be creative in their interaction with students. And to begin to seek new and unexplored ways of engaging students in the learning and studying

and learning environment. We saw this work out very brilliantly when we developed our sense of community and we developed a philosophy of community which we put on a poster and shared with the entire university. So this little poster, which is in English, with the seven principles of community, was soon translated into Wall of and about seven or eight other languages. And gold on the walls all throughout the university. And we even play games with faculty. We ask them to tell us what language it is they can't tell us. Then when they realize that this student sitting there looking like me and looking like you is in fact from some country in West Africa and has this language which is on the wall when that student walks in and sees both his or her language as well as the English, they know somebody is trying to reach out to them. We have an in Spanish, in Chinese, in German,

and all of these languages. Even to the point where the German department came and said, your German is wrong. And they gave us another translation. The student said, I used a vernacular. I'm not going to go by them. And so we refuse to change it because it's not like there's only one way to approach this. You see what I'm trying to say? It's creating an environment of respect and trust which ultimately becomes a community. But the heart of our work and the heart of the transformation ladies and gentlemen in my view is in the academic program. Everything has to be organized around increasing the academic achievement of our students. And in doing that, the first thing we do is articulate and support high expectations of the students. When they arrive, we give them a compact design. I wanted to call a covenant.

My chancellor wouldn't let me. But we give them a compact design, a commitment to excellence. And in that, they talk about what they're going to do, including figuring out a way to spend four hours of study and one hour of class. Now when I introduced this, my chancellor argued that that was not appropriate. He was afraid it was going to hurt enrollment. People say you expect me to put in four to one. We shared it with the black community and the black community's response was for the first time somebody is laying out to us the clear expectations of the university. We didn't know what it really meant being in the university. And so we went ahead with it. What we find is students will say, who are serious, I won't try to take 12 credits. I'll take six because I can't put in that study time. But nobody had ever explained that to them, creating these high expectations. But the high expectations are done within a context in which there is the supportive framework

for students to begin to develop. My position holds that we should try to get our students into the areas where they feel least comfortable and get them there early. So we began a program designed to get students through the math requirements, the first semester or the first year. The traditional pattern is to leave the math till the end. What you find then is a student who comes in insecure, who begins to develop a sense of strength and security and gets well entrenched in another discipline, ends up in their last semester or their last year with their entire career hanging on the thread of their ability to pass a math course. Our position is turning around. Do it early for a number of reasons. One, it gets it out of the way. Two, it builds confidence. And three, you might discover hidden talent.

And if you discover hidden talent early on, you can develop it. So we built a very strong program designed to get the students into and through math from the time they arrived. We organize it with faculty and with a supportive staff. And it's called academic aerobics. That is to say, you meet every day and you spend one to two hours practicing math. You do math problems. And what you find is the more math problems you do, the more comfortable you become. And the more math problems you do when you take an exam, you're likely to find you saw that before. Now, this program working with the faculty in the math courses takes the students in such a manner that outside of the courses they continue to work on the math in a collective way under the leadership

of a black faculty member. When we began to pilot the program, we could get no takers. Nobody wanted it. That's not the way we do it. And when we opened it last year, we were able to get, we targeted 25 students. We recruited the 25 students. We got four takers, four takers. By the second semester, it was up to 12. This past year, we started out with 36 and we cannot meet the demand. We now have, among our math mentors, that is to say, students, seven math mentors who are African-American, five of them male. Dr. J. Herman Blake, vice chancellor of undergraduate education in the Annie University of Indianapolis. If you have a question or comment or suggestions ask the future in black American programs,

write us. Also, let us know what radio station you heard us over. I would like to acknowledge Florida and M University for their assistance in the production of this program. Until we have the opportunity again for IBA Technical Producer Cliff Hargrove, I'm John L. Hansen, Jr. Thank you for joining us today and please join us again next time. Cassette copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing in black America cassettes, communication building B, UT Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712. That's in black America cassettes, communication building B, UT Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712. From the University of Texas at Austin, this is the Longhorn Radio Network. I'm John L. Hansen, Jr.

Join me this week on in black America. Learn your history. You have no reason to bow your head. That was in 1948. We didn't know we had a history, we didn't know we were bowing our head. The 10th anniversary National Higher Education Conference on Black Student Retention with Dr. J. Herman Blake, this week on in black America.