Educating, Challenging
Future Journalists of Color
Sept. 10 will kick off National Historically Black Colleges and Universities Week, when we praise schools that “have allowed many disadvantaged students to attain their full potential through higher education,” in the words of a U.S. Senate resolution. At many HBCUs, those words mean everybody deserves a shot at a college education. But how many are asking whether everybody really does? Overly liberal admissions policies can lead to more work for faculty, frustration for those students who are ready to work and false hopes for those admitted to schools they aren’t really prepared for.
As editor of Black College Wire, a news service that aims to improve the quality of newspapers at HBCUs, I see the problem in both the news and the students. And journalism educators bemoan students’ lack of critical thinking skills, poor command of basic grammar and ignorance about current events.
In June, the Wilmington (Del.) News Journal reported this embarrassing story from Delaware State University:
“Two former DSU admissions staff members say the staff was told to enroll as many as 250 academically unqualified students … because the university was facing a $657,000 budget shortfall and needed the money.”
Two years ago, we at Black College Wire saw an alarming spate of criminal incidents on HBCU campuses. At Lincoln University, in a dormitory named after Frederick Douglass, two students had told police they were studying about 2:30 p.m. when they answered a knock at the door. Four men, two of them Lincoln students, burst in wearing ski masks, wrapped the roommates in duct tape and stole a laptop computer, a phone and $2,400.
