Thesis Author Finds Niche at Black College

While growing up in suburban Columbia, Md., Suzanne Malveaux lived in an integrated neighborhood. She attended predominantly white schools. At Harvard University, where she graduated with honors last June, her roommates were white, yellow and black.

Yet, Malveaux said she keenly felt her black identity. She also wanted to find out what it would be like “to be a member of the majority for the first time.”

To explore both points, she spent a semester at Howard University, going to classes, living in a dorm, working at the radio station.

She also gathered material for a senior thesis on students who transferred to Howard, one of the nation’s best-known black universities.

Last spring, her research was summa cum laude at Harvard. The 298-page thesis, based on interviews with 50 students who transferred to Howard from predominantly white schools primarily for social reasons, was named the best undergraduate thesis in sociology at Harvard and won a $1,500 prize as one of the best theses in any Harvard department this year.

Large and Diverse

Although she went to Howard looking for a “black university,” what Malveaux found there was less clear-cut. More than 80% of Howard’s students and faculty are black. Most of the rest are foreign. Very few are American whites.

Yet Malveaux said in her thesis that Howard is more similar to the predominantly white colleges than she and most transfer students expected.

‘Cold and Aloof’

Its student body is large and diverse, she wrote, frequently “apolitical” and often “cold and aloof.” Although most transfer students come “with the explicit expectation of meeting a friendlier, more receptive black community,” she said, “I found that to a newcomer, Howard was not supportive or nurturing. It was a large (diffuse) commuter college in the heart of one of D.C.’s most economically depressed communities. Registration was a four-day rude awakening to Howard’s large bureaucracy and defensively scared freshman body.”

Yet Malveaux said that she, like most transfer students, “found a niche,” based not on race but on interests and background. There, she felt comfortable and thrived.

By transferring to a predominantly black university, “race becomes much less of an issue” for the students than it was at their previous schools, she said. They are able to develop as individuals, not “as a representative of the black race.”

Malveaux said about three-quarters of the transfer students in her survey would recommend Howard to their black friends.

But Malveaux said she decided to return to Harvard. “I had gone through three years of Harvard, and I enjoyed it,” she said in an interview. “I think black students should go where they are comfortable and where they are challenged.”

Kenneth Tollett, a professor of higher education at Howard whom Malveaux consulted in preparing the thesis, said it confirms his view that black colleges provide a congenial setting that allows many black students “to move from isolation to the mainstream without the destructive and demeaning competition with whites.”

The ‘Trial Period’

For nearly all of the black students who make up about 7% of Harvard’s undergraduates, there is a “trial period . . . of proving his-her ‘blackness,’ ” Malveaux wrote. “Everyone wants to assert, in one way or another, ‘I didn’t lose it coming here. I didn’t lose or give it up to be here. I didn’t lose my black identity because I’m here at Harvard.’ ”

At Howard, she said, students have an opposite concern: “How will I stand out in this crowd and make a name for myself?”

Malveaux, 22, graduated from Centennial High School in Columbia. Her father, Floyd Malveaux, is a professor of medicine at Howard. This coming school year, she will be working and studying at the American University in Cairo.

Overall, Malveaux said, what the transfer students most dislike about Howard are its administration and living conditions, but that is more than offset by positive feelings toward professors and students.

Polling the Students

Richard Seltzer, a political science professor at Howard, said these findings are consistent with a poll of undergraduates he and his classes took several years ago. Last spring, criticism of the Howard administration and poor housing conditions were key points in the student protest that disrupted the university for several days.

Nathan Glazer, a professor at Harvard who was one of the readers of Malveaux’s thesis, said it “makes the case for black colleges that is the same argument made for single-sex schools. . . . They really are places where race or sex isn’t an issue and students can develop themselves on some other basis.”

David Riesman, a Harvard sociologist who served as a thesis adviser to Malveaux, said that “one of the virtues of going to Howard is not being forced to fit into a mold . . . of what it means to be a black student, which may be sitting at the back of the classroom.”

The thesis said 55% of the students surveyed said they moved to the front of the classroom when they transferred to Howard, instead of sitting in the middle or rear. About 68% said they participated more in class discussions.

An Active Role

Malveaux suggested that the students may take a more active part in class because Howard generally has smaller classes than those at the students’ previous colleges. She said the students may also move forward because they have changed majors and are more interested in the subject matter.

But she said the most frequent reason given was that the transfer students feel much more comfortable because they are “no longer . . . singled out as a minority.”

Malveaux said some of students said they felt like “quota fillers” at the predominantly white schools, admitted only to show affirmative action. But at Howard, she said, most felt proud to be “at home,” and comfortable enough, with their own race a majority, to develop as individuals.