Looking Out for No. 1

For blacks on campus, separatism yields to careerism

For the first time since the U.S. invasion of Cambodia nine years ago, officials at Dartmouth College had to cancel classes in response to student protest. The chief issue: charges of racism by Dartmouth's black students and other minorities, who hurled black and red paint at the traditional Winter Carnival Ice Sculpture. "Without tearing something up or hurting someone," said Black Student Leader Donald O'Bannon, "it was the most dramatic thing we could do."

Some of the causes of the trouble were specific--demands for more tenured black professors, charges that the black studies program is too meager, pressure on Dartmouth to sell its stock in corporations with holdings in South Africa. Beyond that was a sense that minority students were isolated. At an all-campus meeting, Dartmouth President John Kemeny felt compelled to assure minority students, who make up 10% of Dartmouth's 4,000 enrollment, "This college cares deeply about you."

Ten years after blacks at Cornell captured national attention by brandishing rifles following their occupation of Willard Straight Hall, the sense of racial isolation continues. Today, though, the activism of Dartmouth blacks seems a bit anachronistic. TIME reporters who recently visited a score of the nation's colleges found that campus militancy and the idea of black separatism have passed with the "Stokely generation" of committed activism. Black students, like their white counterparts, say the social issue of the moment is not making the world better, but simply making it. Observes Vivica Rosser, a University of Georgia junior: "Unless something helps them get a better job, they're not going to engage in it. People are just looking out for No. 1."

More blacks are attending college now than ever, 1.1 million, or more than triple the number in 1966. One out of nine college students in the U.S. is black, double the level in 1966 and nearly the same as the proportion of blacks in the U.S. population as a whole. In families with incomes from $10,000 to $15,000, a higher percentage of blacks (21%) goes to college nowadays than whites (17%).

One casualty of the job crunch and changing student mood is the Afro-American studies department, the creation of which was often one of the chief demands of campus militants. "Curriculum demands now run to courses like How to Operate Businesses in the Black Community," says William Banks, Afro-American studies chairman at Berkeley. At Harvard there are only ten Afro-American studies majors this year. Reports Eugene Matthews, a black in Harvard's class of 1980: "I was told not to take many black studies courses because law schools don't look favorably on them." Black studies programs still flourish at a few universities, where departments have been well funded, courses well taught and students willing to work.

Outright racial clashes have disappeared at most colleges. A number of blacks have won notable acceptance. Senior Willie McLendon, star tailback of the University of Georgia Bulldogs, was elected to the Sphinx, a previously all-white secret honor society; and Georgia Senior Tommy Haugabook was voted student-body vice president. Yet blacks often still room together, dine together, play together and together endure virtual exclusion from white fraternities, sororities and other campus activities. Whites complain that blacks even vote together in blocs to elect black campus leaders or black homecoming queens. Separatism may be on the wane, but separation--partly voluntary, partly imposed by the white student majority--lives on.

Blacks also contend with a steady undercurrent of petty insults. At Harvard the sign in front of the Afro-American studies building was stolen so many times that it finally had to be moved indoors. The two black women undergraduates in a government course were upset when their instructor repeatedly returned papers of one of the blacks to the other. "As far as the instructor was concerned, I was her," recalls one of the students. Harvard's black dean of students, Archie C. Epps III, glumly reports: "You can say that a code of conduct exists between white and black that says, 'We're going to coexist and call that integration.' "

A look at race relations at a representative group of other major campuses:

CORNELL (11,300 students, 600 black). A cross-burning incident helped inspire the black students' 1969 seizure of Willard Straight Hall; last year a cross was burned on the lawn of a black dormitory, but the reaction was far milder: the shortlived Student Alliance Against Racism blockaded the Johnson Art Museum for 90 minutes. Scholarship money is tight at Cornell, as at an increasing number of other schools, and black students fear there is less interest in poor applicants. Observes Economics Major Curtis MacMillan, active in several of Cornell's black student organizations: "In the '60s, Cornell recruited blacks off the streets of Harlem and Chicago's South Side; now they go to Shaker Heights."

KENT STATE (18,300 students, 1,300 black). A year before National Guardsmen shot demonstrating white students, black Kent State undergraduates marched for, and won, a number of major concessions. Chief among them was the creation of a black studies program, which is still flourishing. It enrolls 450 students and offers 23 courses, including the African Yoruba and Kiswahili languages, as well as five special sections of English for minorities.

MISSOURI (23,000 students, 700 black). Walter Daniel, the black vice chancellor at Missouri's Columbia campus, describes the place as "inhospitable" to blacks. University President James Olson admits that the atmosphere at Missouri is marred by "covert racism." Not long ago the school's 13 white sororities were scandalized when Anita Estell, a black who had been student-body president of her Decatur, Ill., high school, signed up for rush week. "I never really realized I was black until I came to U.M.C.," Anita recalls. "Nobody wanted to be the first sorority to pledge a black woman."

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS at Austin (42,000 students, 992 black). At the largest university in the South the number of black students has tripled since 1972, but it remains relatively small, and only 20 blacks serve on the 1,800-member faculty. "This university simply isn't interested in black affairs," laments John Warfield, 42, director of Texas' Center for African and Afro-American Studies. That seems to apply to blacks themselves. Explains Warfield: "Some black parents are saying to their kids, 'Stay away from that black stuff at school. You can't eat it.' "

STANFORD (11,000 students, 540 black). This academic year, over the opposition of minority students, the Stanford Medical School abolished a special admissions committee that processed minority applications. Students fear a further decline in black enrollment at the graduate level, down from 256 in 1973 to 183 this year. But the Supreme Court's decision supporting white Medical School Applicant Allan Bakke has discouraged protest. "Sign carrying would be sort of after the fact now," says one Stanford student. "I guess we'll just have to see how the new plan works."

Beset by shortages of funds, the nation's colleges are finding special programs for minorities increasingly difficult to maintain. Not only are the costs and the legality of many minority-helping programs receiving new scrutiny, but there is a new uncertainty over their educational justification. Where once it seemed a school's moral duty to admit disadvantaged applicants, now the failure to discriminate between qualified and unqualified members of minority groups is widely denounced as harmful to the students, as well as to education generally. Where once it seemed crucial for previously all-white universities to bolster blacks' sense of their own racial history and culture and to make whites aware of it, today many of the black students resent what in practice swiftly became ghettoized academic offerings.

But some black students still say they are searching for a black cultural identity. As one 17-year-old puts it: "I suppose the black man's struggle is eventually to gain equal standing in this predominantly white country without at the same time becoming a carbon copy of the white man."

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