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A White Male in a "Historically Black University"

By Brian Vanlandingham

FrontPageMagazine.com | August 16, 2001

MY EXPERIENCE as a white male in a 'historically black university' began when I enrolled in an evening Masters program in Information Management which allowed me to work during the day and attend classes at night. I soon discovered the school was unlike anything I had ever encountered. Having previously been through a Masters degree program at a major research university, I was prepared to spend late hours writing papers and cramming for exams. What I found was, to be polite, less than challenging. Being a Master's student here wasn't just like being an undergraduate again; it was more like being back in high school. That was fine with me, since I had already done the academic rigor thing at my previous university. Here I was just after the degree to put on my résumé. I soon found myself in the school's computer lab most of the time playing with the computers, and after a time was hired as a graduate assistant to maintain the lab and help other students with their assignments.

Most of the faculty and staff were very friendly and helpful. At one point, I was having trouble with finances and the dean of the school loaned me tuition money out of his own pocket so I could stay in school. If I encountered any problems it was with the older members of the faculty who seemed to have some sort of chip on their shoulders.

After graduation I went out into the real world and worked for a year and a half. Then the university brought me back to work in their Academic Computing department. IBM had donated a computer lab to begin providing computer support for the university's faculty. I ran the lab, tinkered with the computers, taught classes in basic computer skills and ran around campus providing desktop PC support throughout the university. Very few faculty came in to use the "Faculty Support Center." I learned eventually that this was a sort of ego thing with the faculty. They didn't want to go out to get access to the computers or educational programs. They wanted the resources brought to them and would do without until that was the case.

IBM had also sent one of their people to campus to teach a class or two and oversee the company's investment in the university. Towards the end of the school year, he had a mild heart attack and was away from school for a couple of months. While he was gone, the administration building announced its training program for its staff in basic computer skills. The administration flatly refused to work with the training classes set up by the Academic Computing department and brought in their own instructors to teach the same classes that we taught. I was not even given the courtesy of being told when they were coming. I would simply come to work in the morning, find my office full of people, and have to spend the rest of the day somewhere else. After they finished their series of classes, they announced the Faculty Support Center was unnecessary, and it was shut down. I was laid off. The program that IBM had envisioned for the school was first ignored, then run off campus. The person responsible for getting rid of it was given a special commendation for her excellence in promoting computing on campus.

When IBM's man on campus came back to work and discovered what had happened, he raised hell in the administration building. I was rehired, this time to build computer networks throughout campus. For the next several years, we built a campus-wide Novell network and introduced Unix to the campus, building networks in several departments. We introduced the campus to the whole range of Internet services. I stayed very busy. Years later, most of the sophisticated services we built had barely been used. They were too difficult for people to figure out. We had begged the faculty for years to let us come in to their departments and hold workshops, but the answer we got was always the same... they were full professors; we were mere staff. It was not our place to teach them anything. Better the equipment lay unused.

IBM had also donated a file server for the Computer Science department. We filled it to the gills with free software that was being donated to the department--educational software, utilities, compilers, source code libraries. The department could have run its program for years on what was being given to them. The department held a small ceremony where the machine was presented to them. At the end of the school year, the IBM man left school to go back to IBM. The next day, the department removed the machine from its computer lab and the students no longer had access to it.

One day, the head of the Data Processing department, which served the administrative computing needs of the university, came to talk with my boss. The training programs for the administrative users weren't going so well. The level of literacy of some of the people in the administration building was so low they were not trainable. He didn't know what to do. A couple of months later, a report was issued in the administration building that administrative users weren't getting any computing support. The chancellor accepted the report. The fix for the problem was to replace the heads of Data Processing and Academic Computing. The director of Data Processing, who was white, was replaced by a man with a tenth of his experience, but who was black. The head of Academic Computing, who had networked the whole university, brought the Internet to the campus, and introduced scientific computing to the sciences, was replaced by a faculty member who had been responsible for running the most mismanaged and incompetently run computer lab on campus. I can only presume he was seen as less threatening by people who didn't want to learn anything new. He was also black.

For myself, I now found myself sitting there with two masters degrees, industry certification as a network engineer, with years of experience networking the campus, now being supervised – and my projects managed – by a gentleman who didn't have half my education and no background or experience at all in the field we worked in. But he was black. In the racial apartheid policies of the administration building, whites were no longer allowed to supervise blacks. Blacks had to supervise whites. It was time for me to leave.

My overall impression of the university after seven years? In the whole time I was there, every conference, colloquium or public speaker brought to campus addressed their topics through the eyes of race. Everything was black this or Afro-American that. Everything. For some reason, I didn't believe they were serious until it affected my own job.

The message that was given to the students was that the problems blacks have are due to white racism. I found it a rather odd sensation to be in the back of a classroom working on computers while the instructor stood at the front conducting a sociology class by asking the students leading questions to bring them to the conclusion they were victims of white male oppression. In seven years, I never heard the topics of illegitimacy, welfare dependency, or black crime raised on the campus. Maybe it was, but I didn't see it.

The level of the intellectual climate on campus was so much lower than anything I had ever seen, it is difficult to describe. It was like being in a Third World country. I would be surprised if some of the tenured faculty I worked with were operating at a tenth-grade reading level.

Despite all of this, most of the people I met were open and welcoming and pleasant to work with. The ones that were hostile were a small minority. Where we ran into problems was the arrogance of a faculty that put social status above getting anything done and the institutional racism in the administration building that wasn't about to let white people rise to the point where they had any significant impact on the university.

Why did I stay as long as I did? Partly I was promised that after I had been there a while, I would get a chance to teach some graduate or undergraduate level classes. That never happened, but it was a carrot in front of me for a long time. Also, with the job I had gotten to work pretty much independently, with little supervision. I enjoy that. I also had a lot of toys to play with, in implementing all the latest technologies.

I believe there is a place in our society for small public universities. The slower pace and laid-back management style was a welcome change after the pressure-cooker environment of a research university. Just let's leave out the racial politics and not be afraid to replace people who can't do the job. The government has no business funding a school for the purpose of promoting a particular racial identity. Public schools should be for everyone.

From time to time, I feel nostalgic and pull up the web page for my old Academic Computing department to see what has changed. The last time I looked, I was not surprised to see the staff had expanded in number. We had run the department for years with three people, supporting services all over campus. The additional staff we had begged for was never approved. After we left, the funding and personnel slots became available. The department now boasted thirteen people and proudly displayed their pictures on the web. Of the thirteen smiling faces, eleven were black.

Brian Vanlandingham graduated from divinity school in 1983. Having decided not to become a minister he went back to school to learn more marketable job skills. He is currently employed as a Unix systems administrator. E-mail him at brianvanl@hotmail.com.

-- Anonymous, August 16, 2001