Address delivered on January 6, 1989, in Washington, D.C., and published in the Proceedings of the Forty-fifth Annual Meeting of the American Conference of Academic Deans, January 5-7, 1989 (pp. 8-19).
Introduction by Joseph L. Subbiondo, Dean of Arts and Sciences, Santa Clara University, and Chair of the American Conference of Academic Deans, 1988-89.1
Throughout his career as administrator, teacher, and scholar, Professor J. Herman Blake has been committed to the education of minority students—certainly the most pressing social justice imperative for American higher education. His writings and his administrative decisions have consistently reinforced each other in insisting that culturally diverse students enrich the academic quality of any college or university.
Professor Blake completed his undergraduate degree at New York University and his graduate degrees at the University of California at Berkeley—all in sociology. In 1972, Professor Blake was appointed Provost of Oakes College at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Under his direction, Oakes College distinguished itself as a liberal arts college primarily for minority students from low-income families, and as a residential college emphasizing the study of values and social change in a diverse society. In 1984, he left Santa Cruz for Tougaloo College, Mississippi, an historically Black liberal arts college, where he served as President until 1987. Presently, he is Eugene M. Lang Visiting Professor of Social Change at Swarthmore College.
For the most part, his writings address a broad range of issues pertaining to cultural diversity, such as the book Revolutionary Suicide, which he co-authored with Huey Newton in 1972, and the essays “Black Colleges a National Resource” published in 1986; “Approaching Minority Students as Assets,” published in 1985; and “The Struggles of Minority Students at Predominantly White Institutions,” published in 1983.
He was appointed in 1983 by U.S. Secretary of Education Terrell Bell to the Department of Education Study Group on Excellence in American Higher Education. He was co-author of its report Involvement in Learning: Realizing the Potential of American Higher Education. In 1984, he was appointed by Governor Thomas Keane of New Jersey to the Educational Commission of the States. Recently he has served as chair of the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on Post-secondary Education for the District of Columbia, and he has just completed its report The Urgent Challenge: Educational Excellence for All. Professor Blake directs an inner-city church program which emphasizes educational excellence for children starting at the pre-K level through high school.
In addition to all our consensus building, curriculum compromises, and committee appeasements, we, as academic officers, must also lead through the power of our own convictions. We will always admire the academic leader who despite the political risks says what has to be said, does what has to be done, and makes American higher education better. Such an individual is our speaker this afternoon, Professor J. Herman Blake.2
Address by Dr. J. Herman Blake
It is both a pleasure and a privilege to be here to address this very distinguished group of academic leaders. As I came in the room and saw so many good friends, for whom I have such admiration and respect, I began to wonder if I really had anything of value to say. I am not saying that I do but Deans Barbara Hetrick and Joseph Subbiondo thought I did and invited me; and if I don’t, it’s their problem, not mine.3
I come out of the context which, as Dean Subbiondo pointed out, is of commitment both to diversity and to excellence; and I find no contradiction between the two. Indeed, I find that there is a synergistic excitement that comes when both are approached in the proper way. It is out of that context that I hope to share some thoughts with you about creating climates of diversity.
It is my experience that each institution is so unique in its history, its composition, and its leadership, that it is very hard to pick up a set of dynamics from one institution, put it down in another, and expect the same or similar results. However, what does seem to work well across institutions is a commitment which leads to a climate in which students from diverse backgrounds can begin to find some degree of reasonable comfort and success within the institution. I want to share with you this afternoon several perspectives. Unfortunately, they may not make sense or fit together very neatly, but they certainly make sense in my head.
I served on the Advisory Committee for the UCLA Freshman Survey; and I was provided with a special run of the 1987 Survey, which was broken down according to institutional type, ethnicity, and gender. Institutions were grouped into two-year colleges, four-year colleges, and predominantly Black colleges; and ethnicity was broken down to Anglos (White), Chicanos, Blacks, Asians, Puerto Ricans, and American Indians; and by gender within each of these institutional types. It would not be appropriate at this point to go into a detailed analysis of the data, but I want to point out the strong differences and similarities among students the data indicated.4
There are four areas in which I found significant differences in comparing minority to majority students: family status, family income, academic preparation, and determination. First, family status. Most Black students reported that they come from homes where the parents are divorced or separated. Forty-two percent of the Black students who completed the 1987 Freshman Survey reported that they come from single-parent homes. This is significantly different from every other racial or ethnic group in the survey. In the other groups, students who live with both parents range from 61 percent for Puerto Ricans to 85 percent for Asians. I mention this factor because it sets Black students apart from other minority students entering the academy, and it must be taken into consideration if we are going to be sensitive to their context.
When it comes to family income, a much higher proportion of Blacks, Chicanos, and Puerto Ricans come from families where the estimated annual income is below $6,000, while Anglos and Asians are much more likely to come from families with incomes above $50,000.
As for academic preparation, I also find significant differences. Asian students—more than any other group of students—spend a great deal of time on homework and preparing for school. Asian students reported spending 40 percent more time studying, doing homework, and preparing than all other students in the survey.
What I think is most significant in the data, is that Chicanos and Blacks, as compared to the other groups, report impressive levels of determination. That is to say, when asked “how do you feel about your ability to make it in the institution and your determination to do well?” Chicanos and Blacks expressed much higher levels of determination and confidence than other students, even though they had lower levels of preparation.
Now, then, there are significant similarities for minority and majority students. When looking at the motivation for attending college, there was no substantial difference in any group. Most of the Chicanos and Blacks, like all other students, said they went to college for two reasons: to get a better job and to prepare themselves for entering the professional mainstream. In selecting a college, they listed academic quality as their first consideration and an institution success in career placement as their second. When it came to why Black and Chicanos go to college, why they go to the particular college, and what they want to do afterwards, they fit a very traditional and familiar mode. The only difference was in the third most important consideration for selecting the particular college—a good financial aid package. But I want to stress that, according to the Freshman Survey, academic quality is the number one attraction for all students, minorities and non-minorities alike.
I am racing through a lot of data because I don’t want to spend time on the data—I want to set a context. That context becomes very important when we look at another issue that I think helps shape the environmental challenge that minority students face when they enter our institutions. I analyzed in some detail the key values and attitudes of the Black and Chicano students; and when I compare them to those selected by at least 60 percent of all the respondents in the Freshman Survey, I found similarities as well as differences.
All students want to become an authority in their own field; they want the recognition of their colleagues; and they want success in their professions. However, I was surprised at what I found when I got beyond the professional values and attitudes and looked at the personal ones. There were substantial differences. Among Anglos and Asians, two of the most significant personal values and goals were to get married and to raise a family. The same is not true for Blacks, Chicanos, or American Indians. While they reported these as goals, they rank them at a much lower level than the other students. Among Blacks, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, and American Indians, there was a high degree of desire to help each other, to help others in difficulty.
At Santa Cruz, I gained, through systematic research as well as much trial and error, some valuable insights into the academic and social experience of minority students. At Tougaloo, I had students who were seriously underprepared but highly motivated, and who were facing desperate financial needs. Nevertheless, when challenged with the same expectations of excellence, they saw the high expectations and the demands as signs of respect and honor rather than as barriers. At Swarthmore, I am working with students who are highly prepared and highly motivated. The institution’s commitment to diversity is extraordinary and clearly demonstrated by the large number of minority personnel appointed to high-level administrative positions.
Now, while there are many differences among the minority students at these three institutions, there is one constant that strikes me forcibly and it reinforces the survey data. That constant is the profound sense of alienation experienced or reported by the students in every setting as they move further and further into their academic programs. As they gain greater competence in the academy, minority students become aware of their growing alienation from their families, their home communities, and their cultures.
This alienation can be a painful realization which presents a difficult dilemma for minority students. If they attempt to return to the home community, they find themselves changed and out of pace with the local culture. If they continue in the academy, they find they are moving into a world which is unfamiliar, and that their movement implies certain negative criticisms of their past life. They become classic cases of marginal persons—products of two worlds yet members of none. In the fullest sense of the expression: they cannot go home again.
I began to see this alienation as I was working with the young people at Santa Cruz. At first, and this is my critical point, one of the things I had to do was to help them become more comfortable within the institution—help them adjust to the institution, as well as help the institution adjust to them.
In Mississippi, I found a very same to be the case; but I used the situation in a very positive way. I started out with first-year students, pointing out the quality and kind of education we were offering them would make them more and more uncomfortable at home. When they went home on breaks, they would often find that their high school friends, their parents, and the people in their church did not understand some of the dynamics going on or the things they were learning. They knew that they were moving out of a familiar context into an unfamiliar one.
But it came home very powerfully in recent weeks and months at Swarthmore as I spent hours talking with young people, many of them Black, who face the uncertain challenge of what to do with their future as they begin to make their way through that wonderful institution. In some cases, they find themselves in conflict with their own parents, who sometimes feel that the education they are getting is good but it’s taking them out of a so-called “Black context” and turning them into someone else that even their parents don’t understand. These young people are very sincere and very good people, and so are their parents. But what they are coping with, and being challenged by, is that the quality of the education we offer and the direction and demand we put on them make them even more alienated.
Let me illustrate this from some ideas I picked up when I used to talk with the students at Santa Cruz about Shirley Caesar’s song titled “Sons.” You all know Shirley Caesar, don’t you?5 (No response.) Well, cultural deprivation goes more than one way. Shirley Caesar is a gospel singer who was recently elected to the city council in a North Carolina city. She is an extraordinary gospel singer, and she has this wonderful song about a woman who has two sons. One son goes to the university and becomes a doctor—what everybody wants their son to become—while the other son becomes an alcoholic and a ne’er-do-well. The mother finds that the doctor, as he moves up into the higher echelons, and his children, as they begin to go to different kinds of schools, can’t deal with her because of the way she speaks and acts. So the doctor sends her over to live with the ne’er-do-well son who doesn’t have anything, but at least he understands the way in which he and his mother are connected. Shirley ends this powerful song by singing, “I’m a stranger, don’t drive me away.”
My students used to listen to that song and relate it to how they wanted to achieve the highest expectations without becoming strangers to their own parents. But, in fact, that is what was happening. Or the other song, sung by Richie Havens: “I’m a stranger here Lord, I’m a stranger everywhere; I could go home but I’m a stranger there.”6
It seems to me that to create climates of excellence, we must take into consideration the alienation experienced by minority students. It’s a universal experience. I remember giving a talk in Iowa, and a young man came up to me afterwards and said, “All you have to do is be hit in the morning in the face with a cowlick while you’re out there milking, and it makes you want to become a stranger to this experience.” Another young man said to me, “I know what I’m getting away from but I don’t know what I’m getting into; and I don’t know how to handle the difference between them because I just don’t know.”
I have also found that minority students often become disoriented moving between two worlds and finding it impossible to relate to either. They are in a push/pull dichotomy: pushed by the academy toward expanding opportunities that are unclear and uncertain; and pulled by a home situation that is known, clear, but limited. In such a situation, then, it is very difficult for them to adjust. They experience excruciating social and psychological problems which can diminish their academic performance.
While the previous fabric of social support and comfort for minority students is being discarded at the academy, it is not being replaced with adequate support systems. Often goals and options remain hazy and undefined as individuals realize that their range of choices is greatly expanding. The anxiety level is increased from not knowing exactly what one is choosing. What is worse—and this is confirmed by the UCLA survey data—is that this common sense of alienation among all minority students has an added dimension for minority women. They come early to the realization that academic and professional success may reduce the likelihood that personal goals, such as marriage and family, can be achieved.
This double bind is particularly serious for Black women. I have engaged in some intensive discussions with Black women students at Swarthmore and at Baruch College. They point out that they are so committed to overcoming some of the challenges they had to deal with as young people that they simply no longer even think about these personal goals as achievable or perhaps even as desirable. As these women talk, it begins to heighten the sense that they are becoming strangers in more ways than one.
Nationally, Black men are not entering higher education in equal numbers as Black women, and this growing disparity should cause us great concern. The fact that marriage and family are ranked low by minority students is a reflection of a harsh reality. I feel that the campus alienation many students feel is partially a consequence of this grievous situation, as well as a cause for further alienation. To add injury to insult, I have seen a growing trend of racial unrest on campuses across the nation, which I don’t need to go into detail with you.
Yet, in spite of these sobering facts, there also is considerable evidence that the trend of minority enrollment and retention can be increased. In discussing what we can do on this front, I always like to call to mind the advice of Ted Hollander, Chancellor for Higher Education in New Jersey. In discussing New Jersey’s efforts to increase minority enrollment, Hollander argues that he and his task force made a number of major errors.7 First—and this is very critical for me—they misunderstood and underestimated the depth of institutional commitment needed to make a substantial difference. Second, they primarily emphasized access. Finally, they treated minority programs as special rather than as integral parts of the overall institution. As a result, they found that they had taken racial conflicts from the streets into the colleges. Many of those who entered the academy and were disappointed went back to their communities and told others that the effort was not worth it. Hollander stated that the communities lost their trust in the institutions, and the institutions lost their credibility in the communities.
I emphasize this because I just recently received a document from the president of a rather well-known private institution about new efforts to move toward excellence through diversity, and he outlined some efforts. I read it and put it down feeling it was good of heart, good of intent, but just absolutely abysmal in terms of implied execution. It did not really address issues of the curriculum or issues of the faculty but embroidered the periphery of the institution with recruitment programs. A little effort here, a little effort there, implying once again that so many institutions look at minority students in terms of their deficits and needs rather than in terms of their strengths and assets, and what they can contribute.
In talking about creating climates of excellence and looking at some of the work I have done and other situations, there are four critical elements. I want to refer to them briefly as we move toward another part of this presentation. The first of these is institutional commitment. Here I refer to the commitment of the institution’s president and senior administrators to the goals of recruitment and retention of a diverse group of students. The commitment must be expressed verbally and frequently in such a way that is serious about the issue and expects others to be equally as serious, if not more so. In my review of about twenty-seven institutions, clearly institutional commitment was the important first step in achieving climates of excellence. This verbal commitment was accompanied by the allocation of personnel and financial resources to the goal of academic success for diverse groups of students. In so doing, the administration created the incentives and established the rewards crucial to bring about a different institutional climate; a climate which had high expectations of success; a climate which welcomed minority students and faculty; and a climate which supported their success within that framework of high expectation.
The second key issue is the absolute necessity for faculty commitment and sensitivity to what it takes for minority students to make it. As I have begun to talk around the country, I have come to the conclusion that this is probably the weakest area for us. I say this to you as administrators—the weakest area. Now, the first reaction I get is “How do we get more minority faculty?” and I think that is an important reaction. But the hard reality is that even if we are able to increase the number of minority faculty in our institutions, the Anglo faculty must take up the challenge. These faculty have to understand that in their classrooms, their offices, and their laboratories, the ways in which they relate to, educate, and respond to a diverse group of students are going to be very critical. I won’t get into this in more detail because this isn’t a faculty group; but if it were a faculty group, let me tell you, I would spend all of my time talking about this issue.
About six weeks ago I was on the campus of an institution which is really an outstanding place—if I said its name, all of you would agree with me. I was talking with a young woman who was the first in her family to go to such an institution, and she went over her family objections to her going. She was from Mississippi, and she was the first Black from Mississippi to go to that institution. As we were talking, she reported she had taken five courses, was doing very, very well in four of them, and she was getting a lot of support from various faculty and administrators. But she was doing very poorly in one course. She went to her advisor seeking help about this one course, and the advisor said, “Well, maybe you don’t belong here.” Now, that one statement from one faculty member just absolutely undercut everything the administration and the faculty had been doing to help this young woman make it. This was the last person she expected would give her this advice, especially about her not belonging there. The advisor never recognized that she was doing well and 80 percent of her work and doing poorly and only 20 percent of it in the first semester. Further, knowing that the holidays were coming up and she was going to be back in Mississippi, he should have known that she would be facing pressure from family and friends to “get away from them white folks and come on back here where you belong.”
I don’t have to tell you that you have a serious problem if you have faculty like this on your campus, regardless how much good you do. And we all have such faculty members, so we all have this problem; and that is a part of our challenge. Institutional commitment without faculty sensitivity is really not going to work. And I would submit to you that a part of creating a climate of excellence is to reach the faculty.
The third major component is a high-quality program which takes into account the challenges we face, is founded on the unique qualities of the institution, is rooted in its strengths, and is visionary in its approach. The design and development of programs of excellence which are successful with diverse students require more than looking around and importing other efforts. Such programs require an in-depth understanding of what must be done, creative approaches to the issues, support for innovation and failure, and the time to allow the successful efforts to come to the forefront. Academic and intellectual excellence are very fragile and not susceptible to canned formulae or quick fixes. There must be special programs which develop this excellence in diverse students. We must have no less than equity and access, and we must permit nothing less than excellence in these programs. As Reggie Wilson of the American Council on Education reminds us: “Standards of excellence and minority success are mutually compatible goals when resources are provided and efforts extended to minorities to meet standards of excellence—whatever they are.”8
The fourth component I have found necessary to enroll and educate the diverse group of students is the quality of minority program personnel. Apart from administrative and faculty participation, the people engaged in these activities must also have a high level of commitment and professional competence. They must not only be well trained, but be highly intuitive. I was recently at a major institution that was trying to recruit me, and was introduced to the Vice President for Minority Affairs. After meeting him, I honestly told the university administrators they could go to hell. They were trying to get visibility for a very poor quality person. They use that person to show their commitment, and they were not willing to face the fact it might be politically sound, but educationally it was a disservice to minority students. If they don’t see this, I’m surely not going to go there and be their hatchet person; they can take that madness elsewhere.
What I am saying is that each institution must face up to these kinds of things in terms of quality of commitment. If a president says “I’m committed,” a dean says “I’m committed,” and then they put in place some fourth-rate people who get mired in a lot of perks—a big desk, a secretary, a title, and business cards—but do nothing substantive, believe me, none of us has time for it.
It seems to me that among the things we have to do, in addition to these, is to begin to focus more on students’ strengths and assets. So many of our programs are designed around deficits. When I have asked faculty to give me three, one-word descriptions of minority students, I usually get negative descriptions: “underprepared,” “low-motivated,” “high need,” etc., etc., and etc. We know what the deficits are; the students know what they are. But young people coming out of the fields of Salinas, California, or out of the ghettos of San Francisco and Los Angeles know when they enter the university that this is their one chance to make it. They come with a commitment and determination which is very impressive. Despite their deficits, they want to make it. And, indeed, the survey data support this.
Somehow or other our academic programs and approaches have to build on these young people’s strengths and assets. Indeed, first of all they have to recognize that there are strengths and assets. Second, they have to build meaningful links between academic and student life programs. Yet, many of the programs are in student services. I have seen many places where it looks like the Dean of Students and the Academic Dean rarely meet; and when they do, they rarely talk about substantive things that link each other. In some of the places where I’ve been doing research recently, I asked the Academic Dean: “If I were to ask the Dean of Students what are the top four priorities on your agenda, could the Dean of Students tell me?” Then I asked the same question of the Dean of Students about the Academic Dean. Very often, I find that they don’t know. Moreover, in some cases, the Academic Dean feels that it would be inappropriate for the faculty to be concerned about the life of the student outside the classroom—and you know that as well as I.
Let me talk about the sense of alienation because it is at once the most profoundly negative and also profoundly positive characteristic of minority students. Let me see if I can pull that together by saying that the sense of alienation itself often lead students to think that they don’t belong, they don’t fit, and they won’t be comfortable where they are going. And to a great degree that is true. On the other hand, it is also an experience that can be created because it provides a new perspective—sometimes even a vision—that leads to an understanding that many people do not have. Alienation, disaffection with one’s home or previous experience, is an important part of a good liberal education.
We spend a lot of time trying to make our students “feel comfortable.” But, at the same time, we do not understand the ways in which their discomfort can become a source of intellectual excellence. That, it seems to me, is the challenge of creating the right kind of climate. What I worry about when I look at minority programs is that people are attempting to deal with the sense of alienation and lack of comfort on the student life side but not on the academic side. I discovered this accidentally when I began to challenge students not simply to do well academically, but to look at the things which they would not otherwise have looked at.
I know an extraordinary professor who decided that he was going to do something that he had never done with his diverse group of students. He was going to take that which was most familiar to him and teach it to students in a way that they could come to own it. His course was about tragedy, and he had them read works like Antigone and Death of a Salesman. Initially, the students began to approach it with a sense that “this doesn’t belong to me and I don’t fit here.” But as the professor began to help them understand that very often the study of tragedy is the study of a society in which some people have become disaffected or alienated while others don’t feel that way, the students began to see ways in which their experience could take on new meaning and new insight. As a result, the students informed the experience of the faculty member.
What I am saying here is that the faculty member did not say to the students, “We must do something to make life easier for you.” Instead, he said, “This is what I do well, and I want to challenge you to reach new insights and understandings about an area that you may not know.” Then the students—Black, Chicano, American Indian, and poor white students—began to approach him in a way they didn’t realize they could approach him. Soon, they began to feel not “that I’m more comfortable,” but that “what I’m grappling with in my personal life has echoes here; echoes so familiar that I can provide some insights that others may not understand.”
Let me refer to a paper from that class by one young man, a Chicano, who had entered college having difficulty with long division; and by the time he got into this course, he had been accepted to Harvard Medical School. He wrote that he had spent all his undergraduate years believing that scientific inquiry differed enormously from literary inquiry. This young man, among others, reported how unaccustomed he had been to exchanging ideas. On one occasion, he discussed how faith in God can cruelly turn into an acceptance of suffering mistakenly seen as part of a great plan. But then he observed that the tragedies he had read provided examples of how people can choose to resist oppression and corruption or can internalize the logic of their oppressors and use it against themselves or those near them. He reflected on how in reading Elie Wiesel’s Night, the final work in the course, the young Wiesel blamed his father, who was a victim, for allowing himself to be beaten by a Nazi guard. In thinking about the various offenses to Oedipus, Antigone, Faustus, Desdemona, Willie Loman, and Elie Wiesel’s father, the student remembered that as a child he had blamed his mother for allowing his father to beat her. He had never thought that this event in his personal history could become a subject for discussion and analysis. Indeed, he never knew that others conceivably could’ve gone through the same ritual of blaming the victim until he began to read other people’s experience within a framework of tragedy. Then he could begin to make it similar to, and see the way in which it related to, his experience.
What I am trying to suggest here—and I could go on and read other accounts of many students—is that the way in which the course ultimately succeeded was at the academic level, with sensitive faculty. If it had been a sociology course, probably the professor would have started talking about the deficient Black family—you see what I mean?—and used a whole set of negative assumptions that would have turned the students off before they ever got in there. But the English professor didn’t attempt to do that nor did he attempt to solve these students’ problems. Instead, he challenged them to look at some of what he knew in terms of literature and to look at it within a context in which they were affirmed rather than denied in their experience.
The challenge for us, it seems to me, is to create affirming climates. That involves bringing faculty to new insights and understandings. Heaven only knows how you do that. I don’t say that to be cynical. I say that because I think that sometimes one of the problems is that our colleagues feel, “Well, I’ve got a Ph.D. and I’m an expert in my field.” They have yet to know how to teach in a way in which their knowledge comes alive for others—I mean for Anglos, let alone the diverse group of students. And I hope you will hear Uri Treisman when he speaks here because Uri’s point is not that he and his colleagues changed the students, but that they changed the faculty.9 One of the problems with this whole notion of deficient students is that we assume that if we could fix them in some way, get them remediated, or get them enough financial aid, somehow or other they will fit the institution. It ignores the fact that to a great degree, public institutions do not even serve our majority students well, let alone our minority students. We break and bruise them in ways we simply are not ready to face.
I had intended to summarize about twelve pages from my manuscript in which I talk about some of my strategies, but I realize that time does not permit that. I would submit to you that your commitment as administrators and your institution’s commitment will only succeed to the degree that you begin to get others on your faculty, on your board, and in your administration to recognize that perhaps they have been looking at the wrong part of this issue—not problem, but issue.
The questions have been: “How do we get these students?” and “How do we make them feel comfortable and fit?” It would be better if we asked: “What is it that diverse students bring that can benefit us all, and in what way should we as members of an academic institution change our attitudes, our philosophy, our convictions, and our practices to make these strengths flourish?” When the strengths of the minority students truly are understood, we realize that they want to be accepted as a part of the human community with all its strengths, all its variety, and all its frailties. So often, our narrow approaches say to diverse students: “You belong over here in this, and that is all you can do.” They get as infuriated by that as they do by tracking programs. This is not always easy to know, and it is even more difficult to understand; and I would add that it is almost impossible to change. But only if we bring about this change, will we have provided the leadership and understanding that this country desperately needs.
Notes
These notes were prepared by ACAD board member Andrew Adams in 2021 and are not part of Dr. Blake’s speech published in the 1989 Proceedings.
1. A brief biography of Subbiondo from 2013 can be found at https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/founderssymposium/55/
2.. Dating from 1989, Subbiondo’s biographical sketch is incomplete but nonetheless captures highpoints in Dr. Blake’s career to that time. The reader is encouraged to study Blake’s life and career as recounted in Look’n M’ Face and Hear M’ Story”: An Oral History with Professor J. Herman Blake, Interviewed and Edited by Cameron Vanderscoff with a Supplemental Interview by Leslie López
Santa Cruz (University of California, Santa Cruz University Library, 2014). https://escholarship.org/content/qt4m01p3bz/qt4m01p3bz.pdf?t=nr2sx1&v=lg
3. In 2017 Hetrick received the Alumni Professional Achievement Award from McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland. A news report featuring a biography can be found at https://www.mcdaniel.edu/news/barbara-hetrick-67-receives-mcdaniel-alumni-professional-achievement-award
4. See The American Freshman National Norms for Fall 1987 at https://archive.org/details/ERIC_ED290371/mode/2up?q=1987+ACE+UCLA+freshman+survey
5. See Caesar’s biography at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Caesar and a recording of the song “Don’t Drive Your Mama Away” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KXSDe4lBvk
6. See Haven’s biography at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richie_Havens and a recording of the song “I’m a Stranger Here” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ivgc7qi5_mk
7. On February 22, 1987, the New York Times published an overview of Hollander’s work https://www.nytimes.com/1987/02/22/nyregion/higher-education-ongoing-challenge.html
8. See the biography of Reginald Wilson at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reginald_Wilson_(psychologist).
Also see Reginald Wilson, ed., Race and Equity in Higher Education: Proceedings and Papers of the ACE-Aspen Institute Seminar on Desegregation in Higher Education (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1982).
9. Treisman’s remarks at the conference were not recorded in ACAD’s Proceedings; however, his thoughts on mathematics education were included in Crisis in Science and Math Education
Hearing Before the Committee on Governmental Affairs, United States Senate, One Hundred First Congress, First Session, November 9, 1989, vol. 4, pp. 39-42. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Crisis_in_Science_and_Math_Education/qR-aEhZ0SIMC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=uri+treisman+1989+american+association+of+colleges+and+universities&pg=PP3&printsec=frontcover