Franklyn Jenifer : Taking Howard University Into Slum Neighborhoods

Franklyn G. Jenifer has written articles on diseases of the turnip and the effect of test results on minority college admissions. A plant-virologist-turned-academic-administrator, Jenifer began to attract national attention last spring, when he was named president of Howard, the nation’s premier black university.

He is no stranger to the place. Born and raised in Northeast Washington, Jenifer, 51, first applied to Howard in 1957, but was rejected because of his poor grades and test scores. He took a job as a messenger at the Library of Congress and studied Russian in his spare time. A semester later, he was accepted.

Jenifer completed a B.S. in microbiology in 1962 and an M.S. in 1965. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, he taught at Rutgers, where he was named associate provost in 1977. Most recently, Jenifer served as chancellor of the Massachusetts Board of Regents of Higher Education, where he oversaw three universities and 24 colleges with a total enrollment of 170,000.

Brought on in the wake of student protests that led to the resignation of his predecessor, James E. Cheek, Jenifer was chosen by the board of trustees in part to help Howard compete for top black students and raise the university’s flagging reputation. His ambitions, however, go far beyond that. Jenifer says he wants Howard to become more involved in the problems of the developing world and in the ghettos of the District of Columbia. He intends to use the institution’s considerable resources to promote black economic empowerment and to assist in revitalizing neighboring slum areas that abut the campus.

The product of a broken home--his father abandoned the family when he was 5 and didn’t return until Jenifer was in college--he has been married for 27 years. His three grown children live in New Jersey.

Speaking in his office overlooking the campus, Jenifer began guardedly but became more animated and jovial as the conversation continued. His manner is understated, donnish. He spent the better part of an hour filling and fidgeting with his pipe, but did not manage to get it lit until after he finished talking.

Question: The need for separate black universities was clear at the time you were a student here before integration. How can you explain the place of black universities now?

Answer: When you say black institutions, the opinion . . . most people have is that these are exclusively black institutions. One has to keep in mind at Howard University that the first students who attended were white. It’s always had an integrated faculty. I’m only the fourth black president. Our population of faculty members who happen to be white is higher than the population of people in predominantly white institutions who happen to be black. If America’s higher education was integrated as well as Howard University is, we wouldn’t have any problems in the nation.

It is the same if you were to go to Yeshiva, or Notre Dame, or Georgetown. The concept there--as the concept here--(is) that people feel they have a rich culture, and that education should reflect that culture and those values. It’s not exclusively Jewish or exclusively Catholic, but if you go there, you expect to understand and get a feel for that particular culture . . . . It just so happens that when they say black university, people have the sense of separatism and nationalism, where it’s nothing but as much a part of the American higher-education scene as the others.

Q: What’s life like for white students at Howard?

A: We don’t ask them. We don’t think of them as anything other than students.

Q: I wonder how it compares to life for black students at predominantly white universities.

A: Considerably better, I can guarantee you . . . . Black students at white institutions have, for the last 10 or 15 years, been victims of racial problems. I don’t think Howard has ever had a situation like that, at least to my knowledge. (Whites) may feel uncomfortable because they’re in a majority black environment, but in terms of the way they’re treated, you don’t go into our lavatories and see comments like: Get out white students.

Q: Race has become an obsessive preoccupation at college campuses. Is it less of an issue at a predominantly black institution?

A: It’s an issue, but it manifests itself much differently. At white institutions, you see the issue of race regularly. Often it’s raised in fits of anger. When it’s raised on black colleges and campuses, it’s not raised in the context of chauvinism or bigotry. It’s usually raised in a political context. By political context, I mean students being concerned that their institution may lose its flavor, its heritage, or its cultural orientation.

Q: Are you distressed to see Howard losing those who would be among its best students to schools like Harvard and Yale because of affirmative-action programs?

A: I don’t think so. I think each student has to make those kinds of judgments. Howard University is not the place for all students. We like to think we are, but clearly a lot of students will have other options, and they may do much better at Harvard or Yale or any other school.

The semantics of affirmative action lead people to think that individuals are admitted when they have lesser qualifications than the majority of the population. No matter how well they perform, it is always the view of the majority that they’ve been given some kind of a break and they are not as good as they are. I think that is not a pleasant and healthy environment for any population, particularly black students.

When we talk about affirmative action, it should not be--and has not been in my interpretation--a circumstance of giving special breaks to a population or people. What it should mean, and hopefully does mean, is that you’re looking for a diverse population of individuals and you give weight to an individual’s differences. That should be no more the case for black students than it should be for students from the Midwest or from the East. You try to choose a student population of different socioeconomic circumstances, so that the classroom is not a monotonous environment. That, I believe, is appropriate affirmative action . . . .

Unfortunately, that’s not the way it has worked in America. And many people believe that people are allowed to get in when standards would not normally admit them. Where that is the case, I think those people have bastardized it. That was never its intent.

Q: How do you have an affirmative- action program that increases the number of minority students yet does not create the stigma, both internally and externally, that those who benefit are less qualified?

A: I think what you have to do . . . is make sure that people understand that there are standards for admission, and no student should be admitted that is below those standards.

Q: There have been some demands that Howard adopt a more Afrocentric curriculum. What would that mean?

A: I have believed all my life that historical black institutions have a responsibility to ensure that young people who come (to Howard) should receive some understanding of their culture, their history. That does not mean scholarship changes. It is something that exerts itself in the being of the institution. It manifests itself when you walk across the campus.

In certain courses where it lends itself to it, one would expect a more expansive interpretation of sociology or history than you would find in other institutions. . . . If you wind up taking a history course at a female institution, one would expect that the role of women in history would be magnified and spoken about, so that those students feel good about that. If you were talking about European history in a Jewish class or school, I would expect that you would talk about the role the Jews played in it. That’s legitimate history.

The press and the public make it appear that those who talk about Afrocentrism are doing something unique. In fact, they’re talking about nothing more than what has been going on in America for years. When blacks talk about it, people view it as separatist, as negative, as nationalistic. When others do it, they see it as pride in their background and their culture. Why that is the case is something that stretches my imagination.

Q: Do you think there is any merit to the proposal to introduce Afrocentric principles to the D.C. public school system?

A: One has to be very careful when one is talking about public schools and the public environment. Public schools by their definition are schools that are open to all people, and should be cognizant of the needs of all of the people. . . . The thread that has to be constant is that there should be no dilution of quality. There should be no creation of non-existent history.

Q: What other kinds of changes would you like to see in D.C. schools, or in urban school districts around the country?

A: I think it’s very important that we ensure, we give every individual in our city--regardless of the circumstances of his or her birth and environment--a true opportunity to be successful. Even when we are imaginative, there is always a small population, usually a city within a city, where things are the most desperate and people live under the most difficult circumstance. Often there is one parent at home. Often that one parent is working or, if not working, is involved in some activity that is not conducive to a healthy home environment. The neighborhoods are rough. Drugs are prevalent. Their colleagues and friends are dying off at a very rapid rate, not from disease but from homicide.

Our present structure to try to change their lives during school time is crying in the wind. These young people have to go home and suffer very bad situations.

We’ve got two choices. We can either change the environment in which those young people live--which I don’t see occurring any time in the next, I won’t say millennium--or we can take them artificially out of that environment. For that population of students, I would recommend there be urban residential schools--schools that run 24 hours a day, where not only do they get the good things that other kids get to have in the daytime, but they also get the same good things that they get during the other hours. That sometimes scares people to death, especially liberals. But the point I make is--that’s not unusual. . . . Rich people have always had residential schools to send their kids to.

Q: Where would you get the money to pay for this idea--in the middle of an expensive war?

A: The 24-hour boarding-school model is one extreme. The other extreme is simply an extended day. The point is not to choose one or the other model, but to address the problem of the relationship of a student’s life in school to his life after school. You don’t anticipate doing many of these schools--only for those parts of the city where students are in serious jeopardy. In large cities, I wouldn’t anticipate more than one or two. In these cities, the cost of educating a child is already very high, and I expect the difference would not be significant. But even if it costs a lot to do it, it would cost 10 times as much not to.

Q: There has recently been something of a debate about the term “underclass.” Some liberal sociologists such as Herbert Gans have argued that it stigmatizes the poor as responsible for their own conditions. Do you think it’s still an appropriate term?

A: Again, too often, we get caught up in semantics. To the degree that occurs, I think he’s right, but I think if we focus too much attention on it, it can be a problem. Clearly, the reality is that poverty has become almost a genetic phenomenon, with generation after generation bred back into that same circumstance. To talk about semantics of the word, whether they’re underclass or not underclass, serves scholarly intent, perhaps. But when someone has their foot on your neck, you don’t want a definition of what is a shoe or a heel or a black or a white foot. You want the foot off your neck.

Q: Are programs that replace welfare with workfare on the right track?

A: I think too often they do not take into consideration all the circumstances of people who are on welfare programs now. It’s very difficult for people who don’t understand that culture to try to act as though they have the solution. I think we have to create an environment that is conducive to bringing more and more poor people into the economic mainstream. We’ve talked about incentives to encourage businesses to move into urban centers, we’ve talked about incentives to encourage minority people to go into business. That is the kind of thing that I think goes to the heart of our problem.

Q: Jack Kemp talks about incentives and privatization and uses some of the same language you do. Is he on the right track?

A: I think he uses some of the same language I do. I don’t know how serious he is. I do believe there are some similarities between the things that he and I say. I don’t think these things are right or left philosophically; I think we have become much more cognizant of the importance of economics, and more cognizant of the nature of the struggle that we’re involved in. I’m not saying throw away the social agenda. I’m saying open up a second front. I just think that heretofore we’ve only done one, and I don’t think that’s productive.

Q: How about former drug czar Bill Bennett? Did you think he was on the right track?

A: I don’t think he’s on any track. . . . The whole notion that one is going to cure the drug problem in America by stopping the supply is contradicted by history. . . . Wherever there is a demand, there will always be somebody who is creating the supply. The demand has to be addressed. I think education is the long-term answer.

Q: Howard is one of the wealthiest black institutions in the country. How can it use resources to promote the kind of black economic empowerment you talk about?

A: That’s a big part of my agenda. I think economics is critical. To be a player, you have to have assets. If you’re in a poker game, you need to ante up. If you don’t have assets, you can’t play. . . . Black colleges and universities have financial power. We can help ourselves as we help our community if we use the wherewithal of our institutions to develop businesses, develop our neighborhoods. If we spur economic activity, we can reap financial rewards, at the same time ensuring that our minority community partners are major players. Everybody benefits. It’s the American way.