Walter Massey

A generation ago, when the best black high school students pondered where to go to college, America’s more than 100 traditionally black institutions were not necessarily among the top contenders. For many of the most promising black students, whose predecessors had fought to gain entrance to majority-white schools, the best education was an integrated education.

But now the children of those students are going to college, and according to Dr. Walter E. Massey, the president of Morehouse College, some are making very different choices. “This generation seems to want to go back and experience some of the older traditions,” said Massey, who runs the nation’s only historically black, all-male, four-year liberal arts institution. “In many cases, their older siblings or parents didn’t have the greatest experience at a majority-white school. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t what a Morehouse can offer.”

Massey is well-suited to make such comparisons. During his 30-year career, the 58-year-old physicist has held a range of academic and administrative positions at public and private institutions from Brown University to the University of Chicago. A former director of the National Science Foundation, the government’s lead agency for support of research and education in mathematics, science and engineering, Massey was for two years the provost of the University of California--a position second only to the UC president in responsibility and prestige.

But in the summer of 1995, as he was being considered as a candidate for UC’s top job, Massey took his name out of the running. Instead, he said, he would go to a place where he and his wife, Shirley, felt they could make more of a difference. Massey became the ninth president of Morehouse. And in doing so, he went home.

Four decades earlier, Massey--a native of Hattiesburg, Miss.--had enrolled at Morehouse straight out of the 10th grade. There, on the Atlanta campus, he discovered a love for science and graduated in 1958 with a degree in physics and mathematics. But Morehouse--where Martin Luther King Jr. and other prominent black men had studied--gave him something else as well, he said: confidence.

In San Francisco recently on a fund-raising and recruiting mission, Massey sat in the lavish offices of the Bank of America, where he is a member of the board. From 40 floors up, he gazed out at the bay--one of the things he says he misses most about California--and talked about the pleasures and challenges of running a traditionally black college in an era when race and affirmative action are once again on the front burner. There are few times in Morehouse’s 129-year history, he said, that it has had such an important mission. His 3,000 students remind him of that every day.

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Question: What do you say to people who believe traditionally black colleges contribute to the Balkanization of America and detract from the goal of integration?

Answer: I’ve had this question raised and I’ve had to think about it. Look at the experience that Morehouse students have and what they do with their lives in terms of dealing with a broader society outside the black community. If you compare [them] with students at other schools where I’ve been--the University of California, Brown University--the students from Morehouse come out much more prepared to go out into a broader world of a majority-white or even foreign culture.

From my own experience, there are two aspects to this. One, the students at Morehouse genuinely leave with real confidence in their own abilities and a sense of who they are. They are not uncertain about their past or their history--and, therefore, when they deal with people in other cultures, they don’t deal from a sense of defensiveness.

That’s not often true at most of the majority-white schools, where you will find that black or other ethnic students try to create within their institutions that sense of belonging by either asking for separate dorms, forming separate societies or being together to the extent that people criticize them. They try to invent within the majority culture the experience that students at Morehouse have naturally. And many of them leave the majority-white schools a little more resentful--alienated, in fact, from whites--because they’ve had to work so hard to define themselves and defend what they do on an almost daily basis. Ironically, when they leave, many want to go to a majority-black environment. Our graduates have already had that experience.

Many of our students, if not most, have spent all of their high-school and elementary-school years in majority-white schools. They see these four years as a time to build a sense of self. So, rather than these schools contributing to dis-integration, in fact, I think we can make a strong argument that we produce the kind of people who move easily in many worlds.

Q: So you believe that ethnic minorities need this separateness before true integration can occur?

A: I don’t think you need it, but I don’t think it detracts from integration in the ways some people think. Maybe in their minds what goes on at these schools is that we’re preaching separation and putting a message forth of alienation. Whereas the message we’re presenting to students is just the opposite: You have to be prepared to deal in an increasingly diverse, global society. And you will need to be competent and educated and to learn to deal with people of other cultures. You must have a sense of confidence in your own abilities to do that.

Q: California sends more kids to Morehouse than any state other than Georgia, where you’re located. But are you drawing from the same pool of students as UC? Are your standardized test scores and grades as high?

A: The top fifth of our students--and we will have an entering class this year of about 800--so the top 160 or so of that class have the same profile as Stanford University’s students. Their SAT’s range from 1,100 to 1,400. But we have a much broader spectrum--we also have students who have SAT’s as low as 700 or 800. Our GPA’s are all pretty high, and our average SAT will be about 1,100.

But to put it in perspective: There are only 5,000 black [high school] graduates a year in the entire country who have SAT’s over 1,000. So from that group, Morehouse gets a good segment . . . . In fact, for many Morehouse students, this is the first time they’ve been around that many smart black men. Usually, when they see themselves, it’s in a movie or on a television show that reflects back to them an image of black men their age. They come on this campus and [it’s] like a mini Million Man March.

Also, they find out quickly that they aren’t the only smart [black] person in the world. It can be a very intimidating freshman year for many of them. We have to work with them. Because they’re often used to being treated differently--as the only black kid in a class, sometimes you get encouragement because the teacher singles you out. But when you’re just one of 30 in a room, the specialness that you had because you were one of the few blacks in your school has to be replaced by a confidence in who you are, individually.

Q: You say Morehouse looks not just for intellectually gifted kids, but also for students who yearn to learn but perhaps haven’t proved their abilities yet in test scores and grades.

A: Morehouse’s ability to attract students who have very high test scores is a more recent phenomenon. Our historic tradition is to look for what we call diamonds in the rough. I was one of those myself, a kid from Mississippi--I didn’t know anything. I had potential, but I didn’t know it. That’s been the essence of the college.

Q: That view--that there’s a value to admitting kids who have not yet proved their academic mettle--is one that’s being challenged here in California.

A: I think that’s a mistake. I understand the pressures, because at the large state-college systems, it’s very difficult to do what Morehouse or Stanford or Brown does. It takes quite a bit of work, investing in recruiting and admissions, to look at students’ potential individually. So I don’t want to be too critical of the attempts to find a fair way to deal with a much larger group of students. But in doing that, you do miss something.

Q: In your first convocation speech at Morehouse last fall, you made special mention of “the reemergence of race as a powerful political issue in the U.S.” What impact does that have on the role of traditionally black colleges?

A: I think it’s going to mean that these colleges are going to be more important than they have been, perhaps since prior to the civil-rights movement. We are finding that students are coming to Morehouse who maybe, 15 years ago, would have gone to majority-white schools.

Q: Is the UC Board of Regents’ decision a year ago to rollback affirmative action making black students feel less welcome at UC and other schools where the student body is mostly white and Asian?

A: I’m speculating that that will happen . . . . Morehouse recruits heavily in California--especially in Southern California. When I’m visiting parents and students, that is certainly a factor--something they are concerned about. They’re concerned about what the climate will be like for minorities on campuses in California.

I think it’s pretty obvious that it’s going to have an effect, especially for students who have a choice. Why would students who have a choice want to subject themselves to an environment which already, in their minds, is not optimal? Places like UCLA and Berkeley probably won’t be affected that much. They have history and tradition and UCLA, especially, has always been thought of as a very hospitable environment. But I worry about places like [UC] Riverside and Santa Cruz and Davis.

Someone has to tackle this issue that Claude Steele, the Stanford social psychologist, is addressing head-on. That is: What is the reason behind this persistent differential between scores on standardized tests--the gap between whites and Asians and blacks, in particular? The gap is persistent. So if you use objective scores [in admissions], without considering why that gap is there, you’ve already decided that a large percentage of black students are not going to make it. So, either we’ll have a different standard for blacks--and you don’t want that--or we’ll have the kinds of [affirmative-action] programs that UC had, which incorporated a lot of factors and realized that scores are not always the most important things.

The studies Steele has done corroborate what I’m saying. When he tests black students in a situation where they’re not threatened and feel like they’re not being judged by the color of their skin or their background, and when he makes it clear that the test itself is not testing them on who they are as a minority, but on their skills, they do just as well as whites and Asians. White kids know if they fail a test, nobody is going to think it’s because they’re white. [When you give black students the same assurance], the data is dramatic.

Moreover, what research shows, and what places like Morehouse show, is that that gap on the standardized tests is not a predictor, at all, of future success. And I don’t mean just success in the business or social world. It’s not a predictor of success in the academic world.

Q: Do you think traditionally black schools stand to gain in this environment?

A: People have asked me, “What’s that [UC decision] going to mean for Morehouse?’ My wife smiles and says, “We’re going to get more students.” But, seriously, we only take 800 students a year. And if you lumped all the historically black schools together, we couldn’t satisfy the need. So this is not a good thing for the nation or for blacks or for anybody.

California has always set an example for the rest of the nation. I said in my parting comments [to the UC board] that I hoped they would keep that in mind. But one of the most interesting surprises for me, coming to California, was how insular the state is. I thought the leaders of California, of UC, would think, “We not only have to think of ourselves, but we have to be cognizant of the fact that what we do will have a ripple effect.” I found much less of that than I expected.

It’s like what I say to Morehouse students: When you’re in a position of leadership, you carry a lot of responsibilities that go beyond yourself.*