Chapter 23: Two Steps Forward, Three Steps Back: Campus Climate, Gender, and African American Representation in Higher Education

It is well known in our society that the more education a person acquires, the more doors of opportunity will be opened. For those who earn degrees in higher education, academic attainment is associated with job security and economic stability, as well as better opportunities to improve socioeconomic status. Although the pathway to success in education is long and arduous, it still remains an important part of the “American dream.”

For African Americans in particular, the pursuit of this “dream” has been a bittersweet struggle. Historically, leaders such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary Church Terrell, and Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as the larger community, believed a college degree would not only enhance the social and economic outcomes of individuals, but would benefit Black people as a whole. The “dream” symbolized equal opportunity regardless of skin color and the chance to prove that Blacks were not intellectually inferior to Whites. Moreover, the racial stereotypes used to justify Black oppression would have been shown to lack validity. Unfortunately, structural and psychological barriers continue to impede Black academic attainment. Today as in the past, African Americans are denied full access to the American dream. Blacks have made enormous strides in socioeconomic status, both absolutely and relative to Whites. These gains were partly due to the tearing down of legal barriers in the 1960s and 1970s that prevented Blacks from fully participating in American social, political, and economic life, and to the institutionalization of strong anti-discrimination and affirmative action efforts in the 1970s (Jaynes, 1990). Despite gains in other areas of life, African Americans are persistently and sizably underrepresented in higher education. Although the most significant gains in educational attainment for Africa Americans followed the Civil Rights Movement, at each decade since this historical event, African American representation within higher education has not increased at a rate that is comparable to their Chicano/Latino, Asian, and White American counterparts (Wilds, 2000).