A Love of Learning

What if the Negro people be wooed from a strife for righteousness, from a love of knowing, to regard dollars as the be-all and end-all of life?

—W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Souls of Black Folk”

Recently, one of my friends asked me, “What kind of education do Black students get at Vassar College?”  She wondered whether they develop critical thinking and writing skills and a love for justice or if they put in their time seeking solely a valuable credential and the economic mobility their grandparents could only imagine. She asked this question as a member of W. E. B. DuBois’ so-called “talented-tenth,” and as someone who also believes that a liberal arts education is an end in itself, that knowledge is itself valuable even if it cannot be parlayed immediately (or ever!) on the market place. This deep learning, as Cornel West calls it, is the kind of education that she believes can give students the necessary tools to allow them to live lives rich with meaning and purpose.

I explained to her that I did believe that some Black students see a Vassar degree as a first step toward the stability that has been available to many of their classmates their entire lives.  Indeed, for some students, equality means having a pay check and access to the material goods to which every American feels entitled. In my experience teaching for last twenty-five years, however, most Black students have expectations that far surpass a paycheck and prestige.

Most Black students know that a love for knowledge that can help to liberate people is part of an important Black tradition that began with the schools that Blacks started before the end of the Civil War to prepare themselves for full citizenship. This commitment was seen again in the historic Brown vs. The Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954 affirming that integrated schools were an essential feature of a democratic society. The decades’ long struggle that led up to the decision speaks volumes to Black people’s understanding of education as the very heart of Black community, family, and the struggle for justice. The value placed on education among Black people is at the heart of what it means to be Black in the US.

It is possible for Black students at Vassar to find the value placed on rigorous and transformative education that Du Bois espouses. But such a discovery requires that faculty honestly evaluate ways that we further or undermine such a goal. In my years of teaching the most pernicious and powerful form of undermining I have seen has come in the form of sending Black students mixed messages that impinge on  their ability to fall in love with knowledge. On the one hand, Vassar welcomes Black students wholeheartedly by having culturally tailored programs for them, praising diversity, supporting the Alana Center, etc. At the same time, market logics greet them when they arrive here, ones that assume the assurance of upward mobility is the only reason they come to college.  Such a portrait along with the belief that some of them are underprepared for college because of the schools that they attended before they came to Vassar compels a context of “limited expectations.” We often send both overt and subtle messages that reify these expectations.  What passes as sensitivity to their particular circumstances may be read by some students as a sign that Vassar doesn’t think they can compete with their classmates who are seen as the “real” Vassar students.

This mentality is often not named but certainly begs that we reflect on what the actual motives are among faculty and administrators to create a multiracial college. Why do we want students of color here? Whose purpose is it serving?  Are they here to be the perpetual “other?”  If we are, in fact, committed to a multiracial environment, we need to have high expectations for all of our students while recognizing that apathy, distraction, and the singly-focused goal of making money, are not racially determined characteristics. We need to push ourselves to teach way beyond the prevailing moods of the marketplace.

Without clear messages and high expectations, more than a few students become mired in ambivalence and forget what made them choose Vassar in the first place. They can lose sight of the noble ambitions that brought them here. We need to assert high expectations for Black students, that they have not simply come here to be comfortable and to pick up a ticket to success: we want them to engage with their studies, to stretch themselves and to have a “love of knowing.” When Du Bois wrote The Souls of Black Folk (1903) education was urgent because Black people were just a few decades out of slavery. In this period reading or writing could cost a black person his/her life. One hundred years since the writing of Souls there are no laws forbidding Black people’s right to education. But attitudes, including ones that assume that black students do not or cannot take their studies seriously, rob them of the education their families have spent their lives making possible. The education of Black students at Vassar now is as important to the future of the Black community as DuBois’ ” talented tenth” was at the turn of the 20^th century. The 1984 poster of Romare Bearden’s The Lamp, silhouettes of engaged and focused black students, celebrating 30 years since Brown Vs. Board of Education, has, as its title, “30 years later: The Politics of Excellence.” Emphasis on the “excellence.” Still.