New report on Black and Latino Studies Programs in the U.S.
I have published a comprehensive list of the Number of Black and Latin American Studies Programs in the United States.
Aldemaro Romero Jr. Miscellaneous
I have published a comprehensive list of the Number of Black and Latin American Studies Programs in the United States.
Aldemaro Romero Jr. Letters from Academia
During the recent convention of the Democratic Party, Michelle Obama said something that surprised many. “I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves,” she told the audience of delegates. And that is a historical fact. Another historical fact is that some of the most venerable American universities also have strong ties to slavery, not only because some of them were built by slaves, but also because many of their founders and major benefactors were either slave holders or publicly supported slavery or clearly racist policies.
These troublesome facts were revived recently due to an incident that took place last June at Yale University. Corey Menafee, a dishwasher in Calhoun College’s dining hall (one of Yale’s residential colleges), purposely broke a stained glass window with a broomstick because of its racial imagery. The window included images of slaves carrying cotton bales, which he described as “racist, very degrading,” according to the local press. Menafee, who faced felony and misdemeanor charges, told reporters that although he regretted what he did, his act was a gesture of civil disobedience.
Menafee later apologized and resigned his position from the university. He was charged with felony criminal mischief and misdemeanor reckless endangerment (glass fell near a passerby) but the university asked prosecutors to drop the charges and Menafee was later reinstated in a different setting. But there is a background that really helps to explain this incident. The building in which the window was broken is named after John C. Calhoun, a Yale graduate and white supremacist of the class of 1804 who became vice president of the United States and was an unabated advocate for slavery.
Because of Calhoun’s background there have been calls for changing the name of the college. Julia Adams, head of the college, had announced in an email earlier that the dining hall would be named in honor of another former Yale student, Roosevelt Thompson. Thompson was a brilliant student who was African American. He was also a Rhodes scholar, a distinction that only about 32 seniors in the nation receive each year. He even scored a perfect 48 on his law school admission test. Thompson died in a tragic car accident when he was only 22 years old. Although Yale had planned to replace the window and had removed three portraits of Calhoun, the university refused to change the college’s name, which drew sharp criticism.
Following public uproar, Peter Salovey, president of Yale, declared that the decision to keep Calhoun’s name was not final. “It is now clear to me that the community-wide conversation about these issues could have drawn more effectively on campus expertise. In particular, we would have benefited from a set of well-articulated guiding principles according to which a historical name might be removed or changed,” he said, reversing his original decision that the Calhoun name would remain in the interest of the university’s educational mission.
The connection between slavery and higher education in this country has a long history. It became notorious when, in 2003, Brown University’s president Ruth Simmons commissioned a report on the Rhode Island institution’s historical ties to slavery. Published three years later, it showed that during the colonial period enslaved people had helped build the campus, and that some of the first officers and trustees of the college were slave owners.
Since then some scholarly work has been done on the issue. One book that encapsulates the sad history of higher education and slavery is Craig Wilder’s “Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities.” A professor and head of the history department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Wilder uncovered many universities’ stories that had remained largely unknown even to people associated with those institutions.
Neither Yale nor Brown are unique cases. Recently Princeton University went through a similar situation when the school’s leaders decided not to strip Woodrow Wilson’s name from the university’s public policy school and a residential college. As president of the United States, Wilson took legal action to segregate the workplace and was an admirer of the movie “Birth of a Nation,” in which the actions of the Ku Klux Klan were glorified.
Many other northern universities are revisiting their historical connection with slavery. Harvard has announced a symposium on this topic for 2017.
In the meantime, southern colleges and universities are also confronting the issue, although from a different perspective. The University of Mississippi, for example, is still debating whether or not to remove confederate statues from its campus, or add historical explanations on plaques attached to them.
One of the reasons why many universities seem to be hesitant to respond to calls to erase any trace of slavery or racism on their campuses is the fear of losing support from many of their wealthiest (and oldest) alumni. In a recent article in The New York Times it was reported that when campuses are the involuntary hosts of protests, donations start to dry out in terms of both number of donors and total money donated. Since the influx of money is vital to private schools, and to make up for diminishing state support at state colleges and universities, the institutions’ leaders do not want to irritate their donors.
In these times of racial tensions, the Black Lives Matter protest movement, and incendiary political rhetoric, higher education leaders need to take a stand and do what is right for the historical memory of their institutions and what they will represent in the future.
Despite accusations of political correctness, the truth is that we need to remember the words of the SpanishAmerican philosopher and Harvard graduate, Jorge Santayana. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
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Slavery, Racism Still Cast Shadow on Colleges
Aldemaro Romero Jr. Letters from Academia
Among the unfortunate curses affecting the image of higher education are the scandals taking place with unrelenting regularity. Whether they have to do with athletics, sexual assaults, murders, cheating, hazing, or corruption, the media are echoing those scandals, sometimes in excruciating detail. In some cases, like the “Sandusky affair” that made headlines for months and tarnished the reputation of Penn State University and its renowned football coach Joe Paterno, these scandals have a lasting effect on public opinion.
We in academia have always been worried about the effect of these scandals on an issue very important to colleges and universities – enrollment. We have also asked ourselves how common those scandals are. Now a study recently published by Harvard University is providing data corroborating what we feared most, that scandals are extremely common in higher education and they are followed by a significant drop in applications to the institutions involved.
The report, titled “The Impact of Campus Scandals on College Applications,” analyzes a dataset of scandals at the top 100 U.S. colleges and universities between 2001 and 2013 as measured by U.S. News and World Report. The researchers behind this study found that during that period of time there were 124 major scandals at these institutions, affecting more than 75 percent of them. In other words, public scandals are extremely common. Six colleges experienced more than one scandal in a single year, with one experiencing four different scandals during the same year.
The researchers looked at stories published in The New York Times or in magazines in the form of long-form articles. They found that scandals with more than five mentions in The New York Times lead to a 9 percent drop in applications the following year for the colleges involved. Colleges with scandals covered by long-form magazine articles received 10 percent fewer applications the following year. Because the number of applicants is one way colleges and universities are ranked by U.S. News and World Report, colleges affected by those scandals fell roughly 10 places in rank from one year to another.
In other words, this is a vicious cycle. The scandal gives the college a bad name. That reputation in turn leads to a drop in the number of applications, which leads to a lowering in ranking. The lowered ranking leads to even fewer applications. After all, rankings influence students’ (and their parents’) decision on where to apply to college.
The report also points out the fact that a college or university tends to respond rapidly to a scandal and is 50 percent less likely to have another scandal a year later. In other words, academic institutions know how detrimental these scandals are for them and tend to take immediate action to ameliorate their effect.
Of the 124 scandals analyzed, the most common ones had to do with murder (42 percent) followed by sexual assaults, hazing and cheating. This is not surprising. Murders are always investigated by the local police and they always end up in the media. Since campuses are perceived as supposedly secure places, the news looks even more shocking. These incidents, of course, can never be hidden from public view.
Other crimes are not always reported. Case in point is sexual assaults. The victims are many times silent. And when they are not, many colleges and universities do their best to keep the crimes under wraps despite their obligation under federal law to report them. In fact, there are studies that indicate that more than half of all sexual assaults are never reported. We also need to remember that not all scandals at colleges and universities are reported by The New York Times or major magazines. Many of the stories are confined to the local press. Yet, the effect of those stories cannot be dismissed given that in many cases they affect the very few institutions found in a particular rural area. We also need to realize that with the use of social media – the favorite means of communication among traditional college students (between 18- and 22-years-old) – there is a lot of information, accurate or not, being circulated that is not necessarily picked up by the conventional media.
This study also found that the reason why there were fewer or no scandals after the initial one was reported was because, in most cases, the institution took measures to avoid another situation. In this instance we can see the positive effect of the media in generating a sense of accountability.
There are other aspects of this problem that we need to keep in mind that have to do with the culture of higher education. Colleges and universities tend to be secretive in the way they handle things. That very culture is conducive to some people thinking that they can get away with malfeasance. The other problem is that the leadership of some of these institutions is not always well prepared to deal with public relation crises. Instead of acknowledging the problem and taking action right away, many take refuge behind vague statements generated by their public relations and marketing departments.
The general public has grown very savvy. They realize the difference between cover-ups and decisive responses. As any expert in public relations crisis management will tell them, there is no substitute for the head of the organization to appear in public and explain what kind of action she or he is taking. The problem is that many times they listen too closely to the advice of their lawyers for whom the less said the better. The problem is that the court of public opinion can be even harsher than courts when it comes to shedding a bad light on the institution.
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Scandals Are Threatening Higher Education
This is a video version of a radio interview by Dr. Aldemaro Romero Jr. with Gordon Bush ob the role of local politics in everyday life.
Dr. Aldemaro Romero Jr. interviews Gordon Bush on the role of local politics from Aldemaro Romero Jr. on Vimeo.
Aldemaro Romero Jr. Letters from Academia
At least some international experience is becoming commonplace for college students, from those that go to other countries just for a short trip in the summer to those who do their entire studies abroad and even stay in those countries after they graduate. Another important way that American college students gain international experience is through the presence on their campuses of students from abroad.
Nowadays, because of demographic stagnation in many states as a consequence of flat and even negative high school graduation rates, more and more institutions of higher education are relying on enrollment of international students to make up for those U.S. students who are not enrolling. Additionally, because those international students pay higher rates of tuition, public colleges and universities find them as a good source of revenue.
Yet, we oftentimes fail to examine the data needed to fully understand what is going on when it comes to the migration of college students from one country to another. One of the most compete sources of information about higher education at the international level is the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) annual World University Rankings report, which provides statistics and analyses about students moving from one country to another for postsecondary education.
This year’s report shows that there has been a dramatic increase in the number of college students moving internationally for college. Between 2005 and 2012 there was a surge in the number of those students by 50 percent with a total of more than five million by 2015 deciding to study in a country other than their own. This reveals a swelling interest by college students to have an international experience.
Despite this worldwide interest in getting such an experience, the interest is not as high among U.S. college students. In fact, ours is one of the few countries in the world that host significantly more international students than we send abroad, about 13 times more. On the other hand, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the U.S. remains the leading destination for international students, hosting around 19 percent of the world’s mobile students. Yet, despite the fact that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development shows that the U.S. is fourth (after Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Ireland) in disposable income and third (after China and India) in world population, it is only the seventh largest sender of international students worldwide.
It is also very telling that the two major destinations for U.S. students are countries for which no special language skills are necessary: the U.K. and Canada. According to the report, the major considerations of U.S. students when going abroad are location, lifestyle, ability to travel, networking opportunities, cost and flexibility of the programs they attend. One of the reasons behind choosing universities in other countries is the cost of attending them. Because higher education is much more subsidized (in some cases even free) in many other countries, students feel they can get a lot from their money even counting for living expenses and transportation.
This latest point is interesting given that students from most countries still choose the U.S. as their favorite destination despite the fact that their living standards are lower and that U.S. higher education is the most expensive in the world. Despite this, international students are more interested than their American counterparts in the quality of programs than the factors around convenience that seem to command U.S. students’ decisions.
U.S. students also seem to be more concerned about an educational institution’s ranking and more interested in data related to employability after graduation than their international counterparts. International students who come to the U.S., on the other hand, are mostly interested in the prestige that comes from graduating from a U.S. institution. I once had a student from France who told me that she came to the U.S. because she wanted to study business and “if you have a business degree from the U.S., regardless of the school, you have better chances in getting a job in France.”
U.S. students also say that, in general, it is more important for them to get in a school with a more impressive reputation than in actually doing well there.
For them it has to do with how they can impress others rather than how much they actually learn. Also, they feel that being at a well-known institution gives them a better opportunity for networking and getting a better chance to get a good job.
This is sad because what students learn and the skills they develop are the ones that will determine their future success.
Unfortunately, our educational system at the high school level seems to emphasize diplomas over gaining an education. And part of that education should include broadening their horizons and learning different languages. Europeans have an old joke about Americans. The say “the easiest way to differentiate a European from an American is by counting the number of languages they speak, for the latter is usually only one.”
This is an issue that was famously addressed by the late Illinois politician Paul Simon in his 1980 book “The Tongue-Tied American: Confronting the Foreign Language Crisis.” Yet, we are not doing much to address it – particularly in higher education.
It is time for U.S. colleges and universities not only to become savvier about attracting international students to make up for the decline in domestic enrollments, but also to improve international language skills while creating more opportunities for U.S. students to study abroad. And if they think such a goal is too expensive, they need to see it as a great opportunity for fundraising. No one knows better the benefits of an international experience than those alumni who have become successful in life because of it.
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Internationalization a Must in Higher Education