This column shares reflections or thoughtful opinions on issues of broad interest to the community. This month's issue discusses the importance of the insights that are gained through neuroscience research.

This article begins by asking readers to make a modest supposition: HBCUs are, perhaps, one of the last frontiers for sustained feminist praxis-administratively and pedagogically. The authors write that they struggle with the situation, and find it both lamentable and paradoxical, since many HBCUs were originally founded and/or administered by…

St. Philip's College is the only community college in the nation that is both a Historically Black College (HBCU) and a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI). The college has a long history of evolving to serve the local population in San Antonio, Texas. Currently, more than 50 percent of St. Philip's students are Latinx, 29 percent are White, and 12…

In this interview, Beverly Daniel Tatum, President Emerita of Spelman College, shares her views of higher education. She notes the historical importance of historically black colleges and universities to our current leadership in all areas of society, their importance in rural areas or other places with limited educational options, and their need…

Postsecondary student demographics are dramatically shifting in the state of Texas, resulting in an increased need for state government resources to ensure college access affordability in the state. It is critical that lawmakers prioritize higher education to allow Texans from all backgrounds access to afford higher education. This editorial is an…

This commentary brings together the topics of geographically-oriented diversity, minority-serving institutions, and educational leadership programs. The geospatial context for this discussion about school administrator quality focuses on Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs) and historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the United…

At many HBCUs, students have invested time and energy into keeping their online and print publications afloat or reviving them from dormancy. However, at other schools the results are often less fruitful. "The Meter" at Tennessee State was an award-winning weekly just three years ago with a website that was updated frequently for…

The American system of higher education is a diverse mosaic of institutions offering broad access and a great deal of choice. In the two decades from 1984 to 2004, the minority student population in the United States grew by 146 percent to about 5 million, or one-third of all college students. To accommodate this population growth, an increasing…

With the "counterhegemonic figured communities" of HBCUs as our lens, our idea(l)s are shaped within specific rewritings of race, access, and education that move us toward a new framework. Alongside teaching narratives, we foreground collaborative revisions of identity, critical mentoring, and coalition-work as an alternative theory of pedagogy…

The author interviews four presidents of historically Black institutions, two public and two private: (1) Dr. James Ammons, of Florida A&M University in Tallahassee; (2) Beverly Wade Hogan, of Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi; (3) Dr. Marvalene Hughes, of Dillard University in New Orleans, Louisiana; and (4) Dr. Melvin Johnson, of…

A larger scale context for power teaching includes ideas from Duane Elgin, Lester Brown, Al Gore and many others. Collectively, they say the convergence of systems level global problems without national borders place before humankind a choice the species has never encountered in 195,000 years of life on "Spaceship Earth." In Elgin's…

Dr. Jane Buck, who spent almost her entire career teaching psychology at Delaware State University, the only historically Black college in Delaware, is the outgoing president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Having grown up in a family of civil rights activists in Reading, Pennsylvania, it seems appropriate that Buck…

Few scholars have achieved the level of recognition and respect among the wider public as Howard Zinn. This should not come as a surprise, given the "unconventional" ways that Zinn embodied and enacted his scholarship. He often took his teaching and writing into those seemingly restricted spaces of popular protest, converting words into…

Success for minority students in higher education has become a critical issue in higher education academia. Strategies for minority student retention have been developed as a result of the utilization of organizational theories and models which identify factors that influence student attrition in higher education. In particular, Tinto's attrition…

Historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) constitute only 3 percent of U.S. colleges and universities, yet they enroll 28 percent of all African American students in higher education and educate 40 percent of the black Americans who earn doctorates or first professional degrees. Just fifteen HBCUs accounted for half of the institutions…