The Attitudes of Black "New Students" and Administrative Response

Young Black people are going to college. For reasons probably related to de facto segregation by race, their attitudes about the college experience and their expectations of it are identifiable, widespread, similar from campus-to-campus and different from those held by students. These students with special needs and expectations have made demands of faculty and administrators of the predominantly white instititions they attend. The faculties and administrators have responded to black student demands. Generally, the attitudes of black students must be deduced from what they say are their attitudes, what their concrete demands of college indicate, and what administrators and counselors feel are the attitudes, apart from black expression. There are some relatively hard data on what may be the basic attitude: alienation.1 Black authors James Baldwin and Malcom X, describe the alienated feelings of American Black people. It may be that such attitudes are strengthened by contrast when experienced in the college atmosphere of hope and promise through education. Alienation can be described more accurately by subdividing it into the feeling of powerlessness, normlessness and social isolation. The Burbach and Thompson study concluded that Blacks might well blame the university for these feelings that may not have been manifest prior to the student's matriculation. A pervasive motivating feeling of black college students like those of their counterparts is the desire to gain the knowledge that will be useful economically after graduation. Black students, however, want an expressive education also; they want

Mathematics education · Political science · Higher Education Research Studies · Psychology · Public Administration