| Desegregating Private Higher Education in the South: Duke, Emory, Rice, Tulane, and Vanderbilt | 
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Sales Rank: 405954
Category: Book
Author: Melissa Kean
Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
Studio: Louisiana State University Press
Manufacturer: Louisiana State University Press
Label: Louisiana State University Press
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 333
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.2
ISBN: 0807133582
Dewey Decimal Number: 379.2630975
EAN: 9780807133583
ASIN: 0807133582
Publication Date: October 15, 2008
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Product Description
After World War II, elite private universities in the South faced growing calls for desegregation. Though, unlike at their peer public institutions, no federal court ordered these schools to admit black students and no troops arrived to protect access to the schools, to suggest that desegregation at these universities took place voluntarily would be misleading In Desegregating Private Higher Education in the South, Melissa Kean explores how leaders at five of the region's most prestigious private universities--Duke, Emory, Rice, Tulane, and Vanderbilt--sought to strengthen their national position and reputation while simultaneously answering the increasing pressure to end segregation. To join the upper echelon of U. S. universities, these schools required increased federal and northern philanthropic funding. Clearly, to receive this funding, schools had to eliminate segregation, and so a rift appeared within the leadership of the schools. University presidents generally favored making careful accommodations in their racial policies for the sake of academic improvement, but universities' boards of trustees--the presidents' main opponents--served as the final decision-makers on university policy. Usually comprised of professional, white, male alumni, board members reacted strongly to threats against southern white authority and resisted determinedly any outside attempts to impose desegregation. The grassroots civil rights movement led by southern blacks created a national crisis of conscience that led many individuals and institutions vital to the universities' survival to insist on desegregation. The schools felt enormous pressure to end discrimination as northern foundations withheld funding, accrediting bodies and professional academic associations denied membership, divinity students and professors chose to study and teach elsewhere, and alumni withheld contributions. The Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 gave the desegregation debate a sense of urgency and also inflamed tensions--which continued to mount into the early 1960s. These tensions and the boards' resistance to change created an atmosphere of crisis that badly eroded their cherished role as southern leaders. When faced with the choice between institutional viability and segregation, Kean explains, they gracelessly relented, refusing to the end to admit they had been pressured. Shedding new light on a rare, unexamined facet of the civil rights movement, Desegregating Private Higher Education in the South fills a large gap in the history of the academy.
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| Customer Reviews:
How the South caught up November 24, 2008
This book is exactly what the title says it is, told from the perspective of the wealthy and influential white men who ultimately gave in. While it's a truly exceptional chronicling of how these universities dealt with their respective trustees during the period, there's actually rather little about the African-Americans who form the locus of the story. This book is really about how conservative white men gave into the financial pressures and ultimatums of northern philanthropists, court orders, and the threat of further loss of academic prestige than about some great moral transformation that took place at the universities in question. Understanding the thesis, you'll love this book. If you're looking for a moral statement about civil rights, this book will disappoint you.
Defeat of the bitter-enders October 20, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
"Harvard is the Emory of the North," said Atlanta boosters in the period following World War II. But it wasn't true, and Harvard was not the Duke of the North, either. The presidents and faculties of five elite southern schools - Duke, Emory, Tulane, Rice and Vanderbilt - knew their institutions were inferior, by orders of magnitude, to the Ivies, Stanford and the University of Chicago. Morally and pragmatically, segregation stood in the way of advancing their schools. To become a research university and to mount competitive graduate programs required outside funding, principally from large national philanthropic foundations and from the federal government. But such funding sources as the Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller organizations began to attach a string to their largesse - abandonment of Jim Crow restrictions on race. And beginning with Truman, each succeeding federal administration increasingly pressured the private schools to end segregation voluntarily or risk losing grants and other major sources of funds.
University trustees manned the barricades, barring transformation of the institutions. Uniformly well-fed, white, and backward-facing, these worthies dedicated their tenure to the maintenance of racism in their beloved schools. Melissa Kean avoids an "inside baseball" study of the five universities. Instead, she offers a well-written, fast-paced account of the faceted conflicts between the academicians and their well-intentioned superiors. University presidents, sometimes aided by a conservative but practical trustee, became whitewater guides, steering through political rocks and hazards. Readers know the outcome of the struggles, and Kean gives us a thoughtful and absorbing account of how it happened.
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