New Howard Chief Brings Distinct Voice to Black Education : Academia: Franklyn G. Jenifer, 14th president of the university, says problems of black colleges must be resolved in a broader context.

Franklyn G. Jenifer, the man who took the the helm of Howard University recently, has confronted angry students, wary legislators, miffed administrators and concerned parents, and he’s had to handle a personnel scandal or two.

Sound familiar?

In some fundamental administrative ways, Jenifer is prepared for his new task as Howard’s 14th president. He brings not only hands-on experience in long-range and crisis management but also the insight of someone who has been taught in Howard’s classrooms and waited in its registration lines.

The university’s challenges are many. It wants to maintain its international standing and mission, ambitious curriculum and sprawling physical plant. It also is recovering from a student takeover last year that forced the president to resign. Because of his own view of the status of blacks as the 21st Century approaches, Jenifer says he’s ready to leave his mark.

To begin with, Jenifer, 51, places Howard at a pivotal juncture as the country looks for new, different and younger talent to meet the changes in the international marketplace.

To him, the argument for today’s Howard is that its students are sound investments, not risks in the educational sweepstakes and not obligations of a moral nature in the liberal social jargon.

Howard, he wants people to understand, is “an investment center, not a cost center.

“I think Howard will be able to approach corporate America and governmental America and say, ‘Give to us because it is in your own self-interest.’ I think we are really well-placed,” says Jenifer.

His is a new voice in black higher education, one of a growing number of black academics who spent most of their professional lives in predominantly white settings but in recent years have sought out the leading jobs at black colleges.

Jenifer served as vice chancellor of the New Jersey Department of Higher Education and, most recently, as chancellor of the Massachusetts Board of Regents of Higher Education before deciding to join Howard.

Johnnetta Cole became Spelman College’s president after four years at Hunter College and 13 years at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; Leroy Keith was a vice president at the University of Maryland before taking over his alma mater, Morehouse College.

The trend, says Jenifer, reflects a new attitude. The critical problems of black colleges, he says, need to be resolved in a broader context.

“Some of the schools are seeing the issues facing black colleges are really related to national issues, and the resolutions of some of the problems contained in those issues will require some degree of national focus,” he says.

Robert Atwell, president of the American Council on Education, says of Jenifer: “He clearly is one of the emerging leaders of higher education. He’s downright eloquent, powerful. And he’s not at all shy off the platform either. Within a few months of Frank’s being here, the town will know he’s here. Not in the sense of the loudness of his voice but the loudness and quality of his agenda.”

Frank Matthews, a George Mason University senior scholar and publisher of Black Issues in Higher Education, says Jenifer has carved a niche as a “straight shooter” in higher education.

“A lot of black people rise to a certain level and then shy away from provocative issues,” says Matthews. “I heard him give a speech last September and he was potent. Frank challenged the basic underlying assumptions about the role of higher education and said it could not be an elitist endeavor.”

Jenifer has a two-pronged personal motive for accepting the Howard job. He grew up in Washington, the child of a woman who raised her two sons alone in a rooming house until Jenifer was 12. His father left the family when Jenifer was 5 and didn’t return until after Jenifer was in college.

Jenifer is also relishing the irony of his circumstances. He earned a bachelor of science degree in microbiology in 1962 and a master’s in microbiology in 1965 from Howard after the university initially rejected him because of poor high school grades.

Listening to Jenifer’s descriptions of his experiences and educational philosophy persuaded the Howard board to unanimously select him last December.

“I was intrigued,” says John Jacob, chairman of Howard’s Board of Trustees. “Here was a guy who graduated from the bottom of his high school class, persevered in a job at the Library of Congress, came to Howard after he was rejected and spent his entire first year in noncredit courses. I have a great appreciation for a guy who has climbed from those depths.”

As chancellor in Massachusetts for four years, Jenifer supervised 27 public colleges and universities, 180,000 students, 24,000 full- and part-time employees, and a $685-million budget for 1990.

Howard is a smaller world, with 18 schools, 12,000 students taking 77 majors and 8,000 employees, all under a $460-million budget.

Jenifer will live in a $1.1-million house owned by the university with his wife of 27 years, Alfleda. His three grown children live in New Jersey. His base salary is believed to be about $125,000.

Jenifer grew up in Washington. His mother struggled to make a living but always hoped for better days. “No matter what our financial condition, the quality of our life was very high,” says Jenifer, who was raised a Catholic. There was no culture of poverty; everyone wore the same neat, nonstatus clothes. After the family’s first apartment, “we moved to a house, then to a better house. That was the way she said it was going to be. She said we would move the next year. She would save, she would count the money for us, and we would see it. When that year came, she’d have it and say OK we’re going.”

Jenifer waited tables in the dining room of the Westchester Apartments and says that was one of the reasons for his poor performance at Spingarn High School. He finished second from the bottom of his graduating class, but the seed of his scientific aspirations had been planted.

“I knew I wanted to be a scientist but I didn’t know what it was so I thought it was a physician,” says Jenifer. After Howard rejected him, he worked at the Library of Congress for a year, studying Russian so he could get a better job filing foreign periodicals. On his second try, he got into Howard and saw black scientists at work.

In Massachusetts, Jenifer faced a public education system divided into fiefdoms, where the college presidents negotiated individually with their state legislators for money. To build a solid base, he had to step between the two.

Because of Jenifer’s strong advocacy, says Edward Lashman, the Massachusetts secretary for administration and finance, “he shook things up and in a brief period of time the college presidents had dreams of excellence they hadn’t had since their 20s.”

During Jenifer’s tenure, the public system was pulled together as a unit for the first time, a teacher training plan was restructured, a comprehensive tuition and fee plan was developed, undergraduate education was reviewed and redefined, and graduate education was restructured.

Jenifer describes his technique: He begins by writing down his goals and how he intends to get there.

“I don’t play the game of people saying, ‘Here is a problem--you tell me what you think of it.’ My style tends to be--’Here is the problem, this is what I think about it, and I would love your comments.’ Now I am very open to totally tossing out the idea. If you think it is terrible, let us start all over again.

“I am not the kind of leader who listens to the consensus of opinion and then becomes the great articulator of it. I am much more likely to try to give a vision and to try to pull people along with that vision. Now I am not always right, because the Lord does not speak to me in the morning.”

The most frustrating hurdle in Massachusetts has been the shrinking budget. Last year, Gov. Michael Dukakis ordered Jenifer to reduce the system’s budget by $35 million. Jenifer was able to persuade Dukakis not to trim $10 million of that, a victory that saved 4,800 tenured faculty jobs. However, in the last two years, the system lost $107 million in funds.

During the fiscal crisis, the legislature proposed eliminating Jenifer’s office and the regents. He worked behind the scenes, prepping the regents for damage control.

“He told us it was coming. He assessed it and helped us get prepared,” says Ellen Guiney, a regent and Boston Mayor Raymond Flynn’s adviser on education. “He is not confrontational, and one of his wonderful skills is he gets on top of things early.” The proposal petered out.

He comes to Howard 13 months after the campus witnessed the largest protest of students in 20 years.

Angered by the appointment of Lee Atwater, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, to the school’s board, nearly 2,000 students took over the administration building and raised an array of practical and philosophical issues. The demonstrations forced Atwater to resign and opened channels of communication between the Administration and students to talk about run-down housing, disarray in the financial aid office, campus security and the isolation of Howard’s leadership. In the aftermath, Cheek resigned after 20 years as president.

One of the student demands was for an Afrocentric curriculum.

Jenifer explains his philosophy, which he freely admits did not satisfy Howard students at a meeting with them last year. (Student leaders recommended another finalist for president.)

“Everything we do as both a scholarly institution and as a significant economic entity should be flavored with the historical context from which we evolved as a people,” says Jenifer. He knows his fellow scientists will argue that science is science, and others believe these same arguments 25 years ago led to some watering down of excellence. But, he says, “when we teach immunology, we can talk about measles still being a major disease in Third World countries and certain diseases such as lead poisoning being a major problem for urban youngsters.”

When a student finishes Howard, Jenifer believes, the Afrocentricity should be part of his walk, talk and thought. “You are going to have a whole milieu that is going to impact your psyche, your commitment, your being as a young citizen.”

In addition, he believes this orientation has to extend from Howard’s scholarship to its staff. “If we are going to ask other institutions to change, to be more Afrocentric in the context that they relate to people in a different way, then we have got to act like that as one of the largest economic powers in the area. To be honest I don’t see any indication that relative to our people that we operate any differently. We treat them just as well, just as shabbily,” says Jenifer.

Moving from a predominantly white education system to a black college will present Jenifer with a new set of nuances, traditions and challenges.

One test will be melding Howard’s mythical reputation as the mecca of black education with Jenifer’s new directions. It still holds the distinction of producing the majority of black graduates, doctoral recipients, doctors, dentists, engineers and pharmacists in the country, according to Black Issues in Higher Education. But in some measures of quality Howard has slipped, says Frank Matthews, including “the bar pass rates, the numbers of its physicians accepted into colleges, such as the American Academy of Allergists.”

In his 20 years in higher education, Jenifer says, his role with black colleges has not been significant. “The primary focus has always been to the problems of black students on white campuses,” he says. Yet some of the overall problems of blacks in higher education could be directly traced to the ongoing struggles of black colleges.

The future for Howard, given also the court-ordered integration of many black state schools and what Jenifer sees as the diffusion of their role, is to reenergize its mission to prepare black leadership: “One must be extraordinarily cautious to make sure those institutions in the private sector get the kind of support that they can sustain their historical mission through these very litigious times.”