Historically Black Colleges Strive to Bring Campus Communities Up to Technological Speed
But are they catching up?
By Kendra Hamilton

Administrators at Morris Brown College were not prepared for the response they received when they made two announcements last year. First, the campus was going wireless and, second, every student and faculty member would be required to have a laptop computer. The second announcement nearly sparked a student revolt.

"It was pretty embarrassing," says Dr. Dolores E. Cross, president of Morris Brown College in Atlanta. "The students actually protested. I couldn't believe it. There I was at the plaza saying to them, ‘You came in under-served. We're working to guarantee that you don't leave here under-served.'"
Not making much headway, the college went the celebrity endorsement route — bringing in Tony Brown of "Tony Brown's Journal" to provide his brand of politically savvy common sense before the student body was reconciled to the change. Now that the campus community has the laptops in hand, the protests are a distant memory.
"I think they saw it [required laptops] as just another burden, just another assignment, so we basically had to persuade the students to take the risk of investing in themselves," Cross says. "But now that they have, there's a new attitude on campus. It's increased morale and raised expectations."
When Cross talks about the Black community being under-served, she's also referring to the technology gap — commonly referred to as the "digital divide" — the technology and information gap that keeps the poor, the rural and overwhelmingly minority populations from participating in or benefiting from the information technology revolution.
Mirroring the larger society in which minority and poor populations are disproportionately at a disadvantage in terms of access to computers, the Internet and other telecommunication services, it is a similar situation within the community of historically Black colleges and universities, where there are technology "haves" and "have nots."
But for the first time since Yahoo!
Internet Life magazine began publishing its "Most Wired" campus lists in 1997, three HBCUs — Morehouse College, Hampton University and Tennessee State University — made it onto the lists in 2000.
Grant writing equals
laptops
Johnson C. Smith University is an example of an HBCU "have," where savvy grant writing has made it possible for every student on campus to have a laptop.
"Some hours a day, we'd have 1,200 computers online, and for a campus of 1,500, that's a lot of usage," says Dr. Don Majer, Mott Professor of English and co-director of the liberal arts major at the Charlotte, N.C., university.
Dr. Dorothy Cowser Yancy, president of JCSU, says the goal was never to be known as a school with computers.
"We've always been oriented toward being a school in which the technology enhanced the teaching," Yancy says.
JCSU started with a "white paper" on teaching and technology in which it articulated a desire to focus on collaboration and teaming, says Frank Parker, director of information/services. And so the faculty began pursuing grants to make that focus a reality.
Parker, for example, partnered with Dr. Phyllis Worthy Dawkins, director of faculty development and co-director of the HBCU Faculty Development Program, to garner a $500,000 grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation that has allowed JCSU to create a series of campus "learning communities."
In one component of the project, groups of courses in various departments were organized by themes — for example, "The Civil Rights Movement in North Carolina." While one group of students conducted the oral interviews, another group worked on photography and graphics, another on text writing or the creation of multimedia presentations.
Approximately 100 students engaged in what Dawkins calls "cross-course environments."
In another component, a group of courses in various disciplines shared assignments. If students worked on a project in a biology class, the project would be reinforced by a PowerPoint presentation on the topic in a computer science course and again in a speech class with a debate or similar presentation.
Additionally, these experiments in learning and cross-course environments were interwoven with improving the university's technology infrastructure.
"We wired our residential halls, improved our multimedia classroom development and completely digitized our foreign language lab," says Parker.
These efforts culminated with the phase-in of laptop computers for the entire student body in the fall of 2000. 
And by creating and maintaining a strong focus on faculty training and development, interesting things have begun to happen in the classroom. The English faculty has become the most technologically savvy department on the campus, says Yancy, and Majer is a part of the reason why.
"I always start by thinking, ‘What is something that I've always wanted to do that I've never been able to do before?'" Majer says.
And so his first assignments for students revolved around such projects as using the Web to allow them to view the original text of a Shakespearean play they were studying.
"The kind of thing that you would never be able to do unless you were at a big university with extensive library holdings," he says.
This semester, in particular, Majer is having students in his Romantic poetry class use the CD-ROM that came with their textbook to create annotated texts of long poems. Majer sees it as a way of teaching the focused reading skills one needs to master the long, difficult poems that are on the syllabus.
But in general, his approach is a simple one.
"I try to come up with the greatest variety of possible uses of the technology," Majer says. "I think where the digital divide really hurts is in developing a comfort level. I don't so much want the students to master specific skills as to see the computer as a tool to solve different problems. I want them to be totally unintimidated."
And the approach appears to be working.
"I'll ask them to do something — and specify the method. But when the assignment comes back, the student may have used a totally different approach that's actually better than the one I suggested," Majer says.