. . . AT SHAW UNIVERSITY

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

(This letter was addressed to Marion E. Bodian.)

I can not appreciate your article in view of the fact that it lacks truth to a great extent and that it reflects the opinion of the average middle-class white who is usually ignorant as to what is going on in the Black community and who spends his time condemning and finding fault with a system that he indirectly built and continues to perpetuate instead of attacking his own.

I was not enrolled in summer school. The same is true for two-thirds or more of the total Black population at Shaw. But since you insist on writing your article without precision, clarity, and intensity--as if intensifiers and qualifiers do not exist in the English language--I must respond.

Your article reflects and does several things. First, it reflects the extremely inflated opinion that you took to Shaw--an opinionated view of the typical middle-class white who talks, criticizes, and does absolutely nothing--and the attitude you brought back to Harvard. I refuse to believe you developed a "know-what-is-best-for-you" attitude as a result of your efforts to help students academically. Consider an example of your own words which illustrate your attitude before the learning process began:

In the classroom, we were anxious to compensate for the fifteen years of dreary teaching most of the Shaw students had gotten. But we were well aware that simple drill was not going to achieve miracles.

Please pay close attention to "we were anxious to compensate for the fifteen years." You were so sure you could do it that you did not even bother to insert "attempt to compensate." Moreover, fifteen years is a tremendous overstatement. It, too, reflects that inflated opinion of yourself.

Secondly, your article seems to support David Riesman and Christopher Jencks' article in the Harvard Education Review. What you, Riesman, and Jencks are unable to perceive is that each of those Black--and I might add there are some white, too--"purveyors of super-American, ultra-bourgeois prejudices and aspirations," "academic disaster areas," and "fourth-rate institutions at the tail end of the academic procession" are attempting to do something that those first-rate institutions on the summit of the academic procession refuse to do: they are going into disaster areas and attempting to help students who have been denied a chance to learn and develop their mental capacities because of some reason beyond their control, i.e., cultural-separatism.

Thirdly, your article demonstrates to us that you, almost nine months later, have not determined your purpose for being there, which may further explain why the program may have been a failure. It does not seem clear to me, however, that you were invited or hired to prove "Shaw is doing something; that Shaw is not just another Negro College." Time will tell that, not Harvard and Radcliffe students. Furthermore, I can not share your idea that "it was hoped that the tutors would be favorably impressed with Shaw and that Shaw would thus be vindicated by a second set of Harvard eyes." This, too, is another example of your inflated opinion of Harvard students.

I also question your not mentioning tutors from M.I.T. and even Shaw University. I might point out to you that no one from M.I.T. or Shaw University wrote an Educational Review. You may, therefore, consider yourselves invited for the same reason that students from our own Black institution were invited, and that was to TUTOR.

Fourthly, your article suffers from invalid information. Your brief stay at Shaw and your interaction with less than one-third of the students and a few faculty members and administrators do not give you the right to make any generalizations about Shaw in its entirety, its methods of teaching or its most respected faculty.

In conclusion. I should like to point out to you and to any other Harvard student, faculty member, or administrator that you were not invited to repudiate Riesman or Jencks, that Shaw University realizes that students are caught up in "a cycle of miseducation and deprivation," and that Shaw University is attempting to do something about it. Shaw is not a black school with white ideas; it is a Black school with Black Ideas. Black people think, too! Major James Davis Jr.   Shaw University '68