PRINCETON, N.J.
Educators must do more to “excite dissatisfaction” with the status quo among students, Dr. Julianne Malveaux, president of Bennett College for Women, told a luncheon crowd gathered for the Association of Black Women in Higher Education conference at Princeton University on Friday.
Malveaux said she borrowed the phrase from the language of an 1821 law in North Carolina that made it a crime to teach a slave to read or give them a book, warning that to do so made them less satisfied with their enslavement.
“In other words, ignorant slaves are happy slaves and reading slaves are unhappy slaves, so let’s excite dissatisfaction,” she said.
To do so will require a new commitment to invest in American education at the K-12 levels, as well as in higher education, to make sure students are ready and eager for the opportunities.
Organizers said 155 people registered for the conference celebrating the organization’s 30th anniversary, hosted by the university. Attendees included provosts, deans and graduate students who came from such divergent institutions as Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of the District of Columbia, the College of the Holy Cross, Coppin State University, Georgia Southern University and Ithaca College.
Other keynoters were Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis, psychologist and assistant professor at
Pepperdine University; Dr. Melissa Harris-Lacewell, associate professor at Princeton
University; and Dr. Shirley M. Tilghman, president of Princeton University.
Makeba L. Clay, the conference organizer and president of ABWHE, noted that the conference was focused on the organization’s anniversary themes of “leadership, scholarship and service.” She said attendance at this conference was higher than usual because “the anniversary has created a lot of excitement and energy.”
Clay, who is director of the Carl Fields Center for Equality and Cultural Understanding at Princeton, said that among the issues on the table were “advancing in the workplace, strategies for that and looking at our historical impact in higher education — what some of the challenges have been and what some of the opportunities have been and are for women in higher education.”
