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Welcome to The EDU Ledger! We’ve moved from Diverse: Issues In Higher Education.

Section: Opinion

An Inspiration For Us All

A few weeks ago, I was talking with a good friend of mine about the acceptance speech that Barack Obama delivered in Denver. We both watched the speech at different locations and commented on how Obama’s was so inspiring, emotive, sincere and downright “on the money in his message! I am a generation X […]

September 25, 2008

New Football Program Presents Golden Opportunity for Lincoln University

With the start of the new academic year, Lincoln University has made some big changes to its campus. The nation’s oldest Black college resurrected its football team and created a marching band. The institution and its president Ivory V. Nelson hope that theses changes will attract more students to the suburban Pennsylvania campus. Previously, many […]

September 23, 2008

The NCLBification of Higher Education

One of the most significant yet subtle ways that the No Child Left Behind Act has affected higher education is by shaping the requirements for students intending to become teachers. In this way, although NCLB is a federal act directed at K-12 education, its effects have traveled up the educational ladder into higher education. Here […]

September 21, 2008

Affirmative Action is Still Relevant and Needed

A few weeks ago, the anti-affirmative action ballot measure in Arizona that was supported by Republican presidential candidate John McCain and Black conservative opportunist and hypocrite Ward Connerly failed to garner enough support to be placed on the ballot. Earlier this year, a similar referendum in Oklahoma faced a similar fate. I must admit […]

September 17, 2008

Stay The Course Or Change Directions Is The Question

As Election Day approaches, we must decide whether characteristics will trump the issues of the day. This conundrum makes for a slippery slope for some of us. Those of us that are voting age have participated in some local, state and national elections where we did not always vote for the “conventional” or for the […]

September 17, 2008

Virginia State Election Board’s Use of Jim Crow-like Student Residency Questionnaire Raises Voting Rights Questions

The New York Timesreports that E. Randall Wertz, the county registrar of voters in Montgomery County, Va., recently issued two outrageous and confusing (at best) press releases with regard to college student voter registration. The first of the official missives made several patently false claims: 1) the parents of students who register and vote […]

September 16, 2008

Increasing Minority Ph.D. Completion

September 14, 2008

Advising Students to the Ph.D.: Are We Equitable in Our Support?

A recent report published in Diverse: Issues In Higher Education states that Ph.D. completion varies by gender and race. Specifically, the 10-year completion rate for Whites was 55 percent, for Hispanics it was 51 percent, for Asian Americans it was 50 percent and for African Americans the rate was only 47 percent. Of course there […]

September 14, 2008

Black Voter disenfranchisement in 2008: Jim Crow Returns

The Michigan Messenger reported on Sept. 10, that, “The chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County, Mich., a key swing county in a key swing state, is planning to use a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in the upcoming election as part of the state GOP’s effort to challenge some […]

September 10, 2008

Where are Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders in Higher Education?

How does your university or college classify Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander students and faculty? Most continue to misclassify Pacific peoples within the Asian category, despite the fact that over a decade ago, the federal government issued a policy directive to create the racial category of “Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander.” The implications […]

September 7, 2008

Obama Is Being Lifted Up by the Elders

Sen. Barack Obama made reference to a preacher who made America better in his acceptance speech on Aug. 28, 2008, at the Democratic National Convention. Obama is now officially his party’s nominee to be president of the United States of America. Let’s not forget the “preacher” that Obama referred to was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., arguably […]

September 3, 2008

Claflin University Ranked Best Black College by Forbes

This past week, Forbes determined that Claflin University is the best Black college in the country. The magazine bases its assessment on the quality of education offered to students, the number of alumni listed in Who’s Who in America, student debt, graduation rates and the number of faculty who have won nationally competitive awards. Forbes […]

August 31, 2008

Solidifying Hip-hop Studies

Research on hip-hop has expanded in breadth, rigor and nuance in the past ten years. Currently, this body of work signals the emergence of an interdisciplinary field gaining notoriety as hip-hop studies. The most recognized area of scholarship within hip-hop studies centers on commercial rap lyrics and their potential moral implications on young people. This […]

August 25, 2008

Thinking About Justice in Little Rock: Philander Smith College

Recently I was invited to address the faculty and staff at Philander Smith College, a small Black college in Little Rock, Arkansas. The institution’s president, Walter Kimbrough, asked me to talk about the link between fundraising and academic excellence. As a result of a fantastic visit with the Philander Smith community, I wanted to write […]

August 23, 2008

Being Black, Male and Educated in Today’s World

There are far too many black males being portrayed as useless citizens in our society. We see pictures of us being sent to jail or being expelled from school. Some of us still turn a blind eye to what is going on around us. The CNN Special, “Black in America” pointed out that African Americans […]

August 20, 2008

Apologies Abound and CNN’s Black in America: The Inescapable Nexus

On July 28, in the year 2008, the United States House of Representatives, almost 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, passed H. Res. 194, offering a formal apology for the centuries-long, government-sanctioned enslavement of African Americans and for the generations of Jim Crow segregation and for the institutionalized discrimination that followed and that persists in […]

August 13, 2008

“But professor? You’re not white, you’re German, right?”

As a proverbial “vanilla brother” (as my Dean affectionately refers to me) at an HBCU, on the daily I am in a position to experience and explore racial identity and its implications on classroom pedagogy. This applies to my own racial identity, that of my students, and how we co-construct one another. Occasionally, such rewarding […]

August 10, 2008

In the World of HBCUs, Research Must Inform Practice

Quite often students and others ask me why I do research — What’s the purpose? Does it make change? Am I doing research to fill journals and books that very few people read? The answer for me and most of my faculty colleagues is “No”! Most of us became faculty members because we wanted to […]

August 5, 2008