A National Communication Association study finds that black students attending predominantly white universities struggle mightily with the balancing act of maintaining their own identity while integrating into that of the prevailing, far more accepted, culture.
The "Understanding the African-American Student Experience in Higher Education through a Relational Dialectics Perspective," study was recently conducted at one private and two public universities in the Midwest and Southeast where overall student populations were composed of just roughly 6 percent of African American intellectuals.
Researchers noted of the 67 black students interviewed, 28 were administered individual interviews and the remaining 39 undergraduates were subjected to focus group type assessments.
With the sample sizes equally split along gender lines, interviewees were uniformly peppered with questions ranging from the quality of life they were able to carve out for themselves on campus, to the outreach quality of the programs they were left to enroll in to the effects they felt the experiences they endured had on their overall existences and outlooks.
"Black students feel tension between integrating into the dominant culture while honoring their black pride," concluded head researcher Jake Simmons, an assistant professor of communication studies at Angelo State University. "As a group, African-American students wanted to assimilate into their respective universities, but at the same time they expressed a need to maintain cultural independence from them," he added. "The need to segregate was born out of a fear that the African-American culture would become less independent and more similar to the dominant culture."
Though the sample size is considered relatively small, researchers found the irrefutable consensus among those surveyed was that they felt they were being made to feel as if "they could not survive in the white world without altering their language or culture."
Those findings are in keeping with what related trends have found to be the case over the last four decades. "In 1968, something like 60 percent of black students attended an HBCU, but now that number is down to 20 percent," said Georgetown University professor Peter Hinrichs in explaining a report he authored earlier this year on how on how college are failing to keep pace with diverging diversity trends.
Interviewees also incessantly griped about a lack of understanding about their culture from non-blacks on campus. Often times, this lack of understanding, they insist, led to bouts of being ostracized on campus and singled out in the classroom and other like-type settings.
In addition, still more students' spoke of experiencing persistent feelings of frustration born of having to shoulder the responsibility of educating a majority based student body about African-American issues to the point of feeling like "cultural visitors."
"When so much of what is happening socially is talking about how we are moving through racism, this study is about how we are not," said Simmons. "White administrators at predominantly white universities are failing their students" he said, adding that university leaders must now acknowledge the shortcoming, and then proceed with the business of giving greater voices to diverse cultures and perspectives.
Another part of the solution he insists lies in educational leaders providing sensitivity training for faculty members on the need for inclusion in every step of the academic and collegiate experience.