Making It on Broken Promises

Sixteen of America's leading scholars offer an uncompromising critique of the academy from their perspective as African American men. They challenge dominant majority assumptions about the culture of higher education, most particularly its claims of openness to diversity and divergent traditions. What is remarkable about the chapters that make up this book--despite the authors' different paths to success, their disparate fields of study, and their distinct voices'is their almost unanimous message that higher education is inimical to African Americans. They take issue with the processes that determine what is legitimized as scholarship, as well as with who wields the power to authenticate it. They describe the debilitating pressures to subordinate Black identity to a supposedly universal but hegemonic Eurocentric culture. They question the academy's valuing of individuality and its privileging of dichotomy over their cultural styles of community, humanism and synthesis. They also range over such issues as culturally mediated styles of cognition, the misuse of standardized testing, the disproportionate burden of service placed on African American faculty and a reward system that discounts it. Given stature of these authors, and their outspoken message, this book demands attention from leaders and faculty in predominantly White institutions, as well as from Black scholars and graduates aspiring to a career in higher education.