The Black College Mystique (review)

The cohort of institutions federally designated as historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) represents a unique collegiate context in the corporate system called American higher education. Institutions founded prior to 1964 for the purpose of providing collegiate education to African Americans, HBCUs have a unique educational history compared to other postsecondary institutions in the United States. There are 103 public, private, four-year, and two-year HBCUs. In addition to those 103 HBCUs, there are approximately 50 predominantly Black institutions—institutions that have greater than 50% Black student enrollment, that were not founded primarily for the education of African American students, and that may or may not have been founded prior to 1964.

HBCUs remain an indispensable part of the national higher education landscape. Despite all of the positive evidence relating to their successes and achievements, negative misconceptions and erroneous information continue to affect the image of HBCUs (Brown, Ricard, & Donahoo, 2004). In the introduction to a special issue of The Review of Higher Education focusing on empirical research on HBCUs, Brown and Freeman (2002) issued a clarion call for higher education researchers to document, describe, and detail these unique institutions. They stated, "Historically black colleges evince objectives, populations, philosophies, and environments which are worthy of scholarly investigation" (p. 240). This call resulted in a number of book-length projects on the topic, each referring to Brown and Freeman's introduction: Brown and Freeman (2004), Ashley and Williams (2004), Samuels (2004), and now Willie, Reddick, and Brown (2006). The latter of these is the focus of this review.

The Black College Mystique is somewhat authored by the father of Black college research, Charles Willie, and two of his students—Richard J. Reddick and Ronald Brown. Actually, three of the seven chapters are reprinted from seminal articles published by Willie in the 1970s. The volume hews back to many of the classic ideas offered about HBCUs during the last century. However, the book offers few new citations to publications on what we know about HBCUs as a result of the last decade of empirical research by scholars like Walter Allen, M. Christopher Brown, James Earl Davis, Len Foster, Kassie Freeman, Sharon Fries-Britt, Marybeth Gasman, Barbara Johnson, Charles Outcalt, and Albert Samuels. The Black College Mystique does not join the recent cavalcade of scholarship responding to the call to expand the extant research base on HBCUs.

In fact, the book never defines the "black college mystique," leaving the reader to wonder what it is, how it is relevant, or why the project was given this name. According to the preface, the volume has two overall findings: (1) HBCUs are essential to the national system of higher education, and (2) the mentoring of students by HBCU faculty is significantly greater than in all other institutions. It is extremely difficult to link either of the two findings to the research and/or logic offered in the volume. It is as if the findings were drafted before the volume was ever written. Despite its absence in The Black College Mystique, there is evidence of the essential role that Black colleges play on the postsecondary landscape, albeit not for the reasons Willie, Reddick, and Brown suggest related to racial homogeneity and heterogeneity. Recent literature speaks to the role of HBCUs in providing access and opportunity that could not otherwise be afforded to many African American, low-income, or undereducated students, as well as to other racial minorities (Brown, 1999; Brown & Davis, 2001; Wenglinsky, 1996, 1997). Despite common parlance that HBCUs are culturally more congenial living and learning communities, there is no empirical data on the role of HBCU faculty as superior mentors when controlling for institutional size (Brown, 1998).

The issue of the intangible and dynamic cultural context of the Black college has been referenced anecdotally by numerous writers. However, prior to this "treatise," no effort had been made to name or explain...