Former Dean Monro Raps Critics of Negro Colleges

Former Dean of the College John U. Monro '34 has issued a strongly-worded defense of the Negro colleges against the "smart alecks from New York and Washington" who would like to do away with them.

Monro, now director of freshman studies at predominantly Negro Miles College in Birmingham, Ala., says in this week's issue of U.S. News and World Report that the idea of merging Negro colleges with white ones or phasing them out completely is "idiocy."

"We are taking students that no one else will take," Monro said, "and we're designing programs for the whole spread of students--remedial programs, reinforcement programs, enrichment programs, special curricula in black history, black culture, black problems. The University of Alabama isn't going to do this. Harvard isn't going to do this."

Monro left Harvard for Miles last spring. He said in the copyrighted interview that he believes whites should not accept a job as president or dean of a Negro college. "Those jobs, and this institution, really belong in the hands of the black community."

Monro said that Harvard sociologists David Riesman and Christopher Jencks' recent characterization of Negro colleges as "academic disasters" was "the cruelest kind of phrase-making." "The violence of that rhetoric . . . added up to a kind of inhumanity and insensitivity which is all too characteristic of the way white people deal with the Negro people anyway." Monro acknowledged however that Reisman and Jencks "were trying to stir things up, and get people moving toward change."

Negro colleges, Monro said, are in the process of becoming centers of black power. He promised "redirection of the curriculum so that young people become aware of the background of institutional power in this country--and how black people can attack the problem."

The recruitment of top Negro students by prestige universities has not greatly changed the situation in the Negro colleges, Monro said, and "we are glad the new opportunities are opening up." "No matter what Purdue or Harvard does," he said, "we are not even beginning to tap this intelligent manpower and womanpower."