Colleges: The New Black Presidents

Of the nation's 120 Negro colleges, most are in the South and most have traditionally had ministers as presidents—often men of intellectual distinction but with no training as educators. However bombastic in the pulpit, they made a point of being obliging to white authority. They demanded little, and they got little. The result was what Sociologists David Riesman and Christopher Jencks have denounced as "an illfinanced, ill-staffed caricature of white higher education." Lately, reflecting both the new pride and the new competence of the U.S.'s black community, a number of more militant Negro college presidents have risen to power.

All professional educators with substantial records of academic achievement, they are committed to integration but are nonetheless convinced of the permanent need for stronger Negro institutions. Responding to the surge of black consciousness among their students, they have added Negro-oriented courses in history, sociology and psychology, and are determinedly trying to make their schools more relevant to the problems and opportunities facing young blacks today. Outstanding among the new Negro presidents:

∙JAMES E. CHEEK, 36, SHAW UNIVERSITY, Raleigh, N.C. (1,078 students). A militant from way back, Cheek was expelled from one high school for "agitation." As an undergraduate at Shaw, he was nearly fired for leading a student strike against "an indifferent, broken-down faculty" and "Victorian social standards." Thus Cheek is an appropriate president for the campus where the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee got its start in 1960. Says Cheek: "I'm not telling my students to be sweet little nigger boys and girls so they can get a good job."

When Cheek took over in 1963, the Baptist university was virtually bankrupt. He mounted an emergency fund-raising campaign that eventually allowed him to double faculty salaries. Full professors now earn up to $14,000, which is in line with faculty salaries at most private white colleges. Following his conviction that Negro applicants who score low on white-oriented aptitude tests are not necessarily unfit for college, he has relaxed entrance requirements, abandoned rigid grading and allowed students to proceed at their own pace, graduating in anywhere from three to six years. When critics suggest that he is indulging in "bargain basement" education, Cheek retorts: "We had not a thing in the world to lose. We weren't going anywhere at the time."

He has expanded the curriculum to include courses on black culture and his tory, next fall plans to launch a new : School of Urban Sciences to attack the problem of ghettos. Says Cheek: "It is our contention that the urban cri sis, except for air pollution and transportation, is basically a problem of black people." Cheek thinks that it is therefore up to black people to find solutions. Rather than overloading his faculty with Ph.D.s, he would prefer to hire "somebody like Claude Brown," the angry author of Manchild in the Promised Land. He would like to set up a program under which an undergraduate would spend two of his four years at Shaw actually living in a New York City ghetto.