A Meaningful Life

I CHOSE TO TEACH AT HBCUs

                Whether I chose or was chosen to teach at HBCUs is an American knot, one that those who delight in philosophical problems might untie.  Near the end of my tour of duty in Vietnam in 1970, I received an invitation from Dr. N. J. Townsend, chairman of the Department of English at Tougaloo College, to join the faculty as an instructor.  I accepted it.  The opportunity to teach at my alma mater and give back four years of service in exchange for the four wonderful undergraduate years (1960-64) I spent there was more than merely attractive. Tougaloo College had instilled in its graduates a strong sense of obligation.  In the 1960s, as the 1960-61 catalogue informed us,  “great social ferment and rapid change” was occurring worldwide and there was “growing need for young men and women with intellectual ability and breadth of vision, with Christian motivation and discipline and with a spirit of outgoing goodwill toward all men.”  In the 1970s, there still existed a need to help in “an awakening of people who have been denied the privilege and opportunity for the good life.”  I felt obligated to help.

                Armed with a M.S. in English from the Illinois Institute of Technology, two years of courses at the State University of New York at Albany where I focused on the literature of the English Renaissance, and the discipline my serving in  the United States Army provided, I began  to teach courses in composition and literature.  My students, unlike those of my generation, were strongly influenced by what was left  unfinished in the declining years of the Civil Rights Movement and by the assertiveness implicit in the idea of Black Power.  They boldly challenged me to make whatever I taught them relevant.  Many of them thought my regard for Edmund Spenser and Shakespeare was an act of treason or a sign of slavish deference to their enemies. I understood, more than they guessed, that defiance was an integral and noble part of the learning process at Tougaloo, and I was beginning to understand the value of the pedagogy of the oppressed.  I quickly became the subversive instructor.  If my students rejected John Milton, I would teach them to write well and to think critically by close reading of LeRoi Jones’s essays in Home and his historical discourse in Blues People.  If The Scarlet Letter had nothing to say to them, Alice Walker’s The Third Life of Grange Copeland anchored them in the very heart of relevance and made them attentive.

                 My embracing the ideas the students had about relevance did not lead to my abandoning belief in standards of excellence in performance which transcend race or ethnicity or class; it did not lead to minimizing my interests in the works of Plato, Kenneth Burke and Michel Foucault; it led to demanding that students should digest Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Machiavelli.  Relevance changes as the conditions of American society change.  For teachers, the desire to truly empower students and the effort to devise effective way of doing so must remain constant. Change is inevitable, but it is not to be embraced without severe questioning.

 My students knew that I had high expectations of them. As I grew as a teacher, I began to appreciate the importance of being at once demanding and compassionate. A good teacher does not love his students. He simply refuses to allow them not to love themselves.  It has been rumored that one of my students told another he would take my courses “… even if I earn a ‘D.’ At least I will learn something.”

                From my thirty-two years of teaching at Tougaloo College and eight years of teaching at Dillard University I have learned much about American higher education, my colleagues in the profession of English, and the insidious idea that African American students who choose to attend Historically Black Colleges and Universities are innately less intelligent than those students who opt to attend other kinds of institutions.  The fact that we speak rarely of Historically White Colleges and Universities is a clue about what has continued to develop in the total  history of education in the United States.  In higher education in America, the hegemony of confirmative action prevails against any justice that might be discovered, through full disclosure, in affirmative action.              

                Two instances from my life history cast light on what is a central and continuing problem.  Once when I was driving him from Tougaloo College to the Jackson, Mississippi airport, A. Leon Higginbotham  asked me where I wanted to be in ten years.  I replied that I wanted to still be teaching at Tougaloo.  He was much disappointed in my answer, because he said he thought I would at least want to be at Harvard or Yale. Some years later after I had earned my doctorate at the University of Virginia, a historian who had earned his degrees at Yale asked why anyone with a prestigious degree from UVA would want to teach at Tougaloo.  I retorted with signifying anger: “Why do you with your prestigious degrees teach at so third-rate a school as the University of Southern Mississippi?”  On the one hand, it seems I was betraying the race and insulting the aspirations of the integration-drunk black upper middle class.  On the other, I was squandering the investment Mr. Jefferson’s university had made in me by teaching niggers and  untouchables.  Despite the promise contained in the election of Barack Obama, I am not convinced we should hastily conclude that the need for having HBCUs and exceptionally well-prepared scholars who desire to teach at such places has vanished from the American historical process.  Talk about a “post-race society” is only a clever and enslaving use of language. And all Americans have a pathological and patriotic love of being enslaved by the great God Capital in whom they trust.

                I never thought of teaching as merely a matter of employment or as a launching pad for ascent into fame as a critic and scholar.  For me, teaching had to be a more profound investment.  Nor have I been a missionary in quite the sense we associate with those who labored and taught in the nineteenth century when many HBCUs were established.  Despite attractive offers to teach elsewhere, I chose to remain within the orbit of the HBCU.  Until I joined the Dillard faculty in 2002-2003, I never earned a salary commensurate with my years of teaching experience and the scholarly and creative contributions I produced despite heavy teaching duties.  Thanks to a regulation in the old Tougaloo College Faculty Handbook, I had to wait for fourteen years to be granted tenure; only 69% of the faculty members in any department could be tenured. As I near the end of my career as a teacher, I realize the rewards most worth having cannot be reduced to money and things. They can only be measured in terms of how deeply and how  well a teacher has made a significant difference in the lives of others.

                Whether I chose or was chosen to teach at HBCUs, I have no regrets about the choice. The choice was right. The students I have taught since 1970, particularly those I mentored in the UNCF/Mellon Program, have assured me time and again that I did the right thing. I was pragmatic. Obviously, many teachers and scholars in our country’s institutions of higher education have done and continue to do the right thing by way of helping young people to discover and maximize their intellectual capabilities and to become productive citizens of the world.  Nevertheless, HBCUs are unique sites for such work.  To be sure, the fate of educational institutions is determined, more than we often want to acknowledge, by  irreversible changes in the world order. Few of them shall survive in the 21^st century. So be it. It is sufficient that once in time HBCUs enabled me to use my “intellectual ability and breadth of vision” to become a better person as I remained, as some black folk might say, in the tradition.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.