Book excerpt: Meeting the Challenge
The education of our children has always been a moral and social imperative. Today, it is an economic necessity as well. Not simply because the lack of a higher education limits individual opportunity and life-long earnings, but because we face a new world of global economic competition in which goods, services, ideas and wealth can potentially move anywhere. Or as New York Times columnist and writer Thomas Friedman proclaims in his latest book: The World is Flat.
Manual and low-skill jobs that paid middle-class wages left the inner city long ago; now they are leaving the country. Jobs in the knowledge sector are not exempt from global competition either. Computer programming and information technology, marketing and financial services, even certain aspects of teaching and medical care can all be exported or transferred, whether from Boston to Biloxi, or to Bangladesh.
What higher education can offer, whether public or private, predominantly white or historically black, is more than just a body of knowledge or set of professional skills. American higher education must provide tools for critical thinking and resources for finding information and integrating knowledge. No one can predict the exact skill set that the next generation will need to compete and succeed in this new “flat” world. But we know this: we cannot afford to leave anyone behind, certainly not African American men and boys. This is a challenge worthy of us all, black and white, men and women, teachers and learners, members of communities and citizens of a nation.
HBCUs have played a central role in the drama of American education for nearly 200 years. In the word of Ambassador Leonard Spearman, executive director of the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities these institutions, “have been beacons of hope and dreams and sources of academic excellence. They have also served as a collective source of new leadership for the nation.”
As in the past, HBCUs will continue to offer these same qualities of opportunity and excellence for continuing generations of African Americans and other students from diverse backgrounds as we face the new challenges of a new century.
