Application For Admission To The Citadel School Of Business: Fill & Download for Free

Thanks for the oppt’y to answer your question, Catherine!Kudos to you for considering an officer’s career in the U.S. military, and your interest in flying for the Air Force. I will thank-you in advance for your willingness to serve! Your personal traits of intelligence, athleticism, and educational achievement are exactly what the military is looking for…so, don’t stop now.In terms of fear-of-death, the only kind of person that other service members avoid being around when death is a possibility, are those who either claim verbally, or act like their not scared. Anyone who expresses lack-of-fear is lying to themselves, and the troops around them. False bravado indicates a lack of maturity, and immaturity in any combat operation is what gets someone needlessly killed. The reason why others keep their distance from guys claiming their “fearless,” is a needless combat death often occurs to others who happen to be in lethal proximity to the braggart. Sometimes you will hear guys talk about their pseudo-fearless teammates with comments, like: “hey, if he’s stupid enough to say/act that he’s fearless, and wants to get himself killed, he can knock himself out!” In reality, everyone is saying/thinking: “if he doesn’t respect fear, and the false bravado gets him killed, I’m gonna be pissed-off, because we still have a job to do, and now we have to do it one-man-down!”My suggestion is to maintain a healthy respect for not wanting to die, but, don’t let your concern about dying define who you are.As for flying USAF transport planes, which is the platform I flew aboard as an airman, and as a civilian flight test engineer, it is a false sense of security to think transport crews are at reduced risk of dying because they are not in the munitions-delivery business, the AC-130 gunship, notwithstanding. Granted, bombs & bullets can encourage the enemy to throw some back at you, but, your risk of death while flying a C-130 Hercules cargo plane can be manifested in other ways. You are flying a plane that is three-to-four times larger than a fighter jet, and at maximum airspeed, you are three-to-four times slower, too. Being unable to defend yourself while flying a large, slow target, can mean a greater opportunity for the enemy to shoot you down. In most cases, if a cargo plane goes down while on a combat mission, it is more likely to occur as a result of an operational risk than enemy weaponry. By this I mean, C-130 crews are routinely scheduled to fly missions to small, remote airstrips, make air-drops, fly at night over unfamiliar terrain, conduct nap-of-the-earth sorties, fly in bad weather, etc. As a C-130 aircraft commander, you have the potential of losing a lot more lives if you go down than a fighter pilot.I am not mentioning all of this to scare you, or deter you from a transport pilot’s career. It’s just that a transport pilot’s mode-of-death is different, but, it’s still there. Your personal strengths noted above, and a healthy respect for not dying needlessly, tells me you have a great opportunity to serve with honor, and develop the reputation of an excellent pilot that gets the job done, AND gets themselves, their crew, and others on-board, home safely to live & fly another day. Don’t deprive yourself and others who need a great leader, from pursuing an Air Force cargo pilot’s career!Shifting gears a bit…I previously wrote a Quora article for a reader who asked about attending a service academy. That article, and this one, goes for any young adult considering a military-related university. Notice that I did not say “service academy.” My generic description is intended to include the Air Force Academy, Naval Academy (Annapolis), the U.S. Military Academy (West Point), U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, and such august civilian universities that operate just like a military service academy, which includes: Norwich University, Virginia Military Institute, The Citadel, and several others. All of these schools have extremely tough entrance requirements, in general, and what it takes to get in, is actually far greater than the written policies. Each of these schools often receive 10–15 times as many applicants, as slots available. In order to come out high on the candidate’s list, you have to demonstrate experience in extracurricular activities, such as: student government, community volunteer activities, summer internships in public service, working on a political campaign, be a member of your school yearbook staff, church youth activities, and other pursuits. Another key factor is your willingness to, and comfort with, engaging regularly with influential adults. Most teenagers view “hanging-out with the adults,” as boring, wasted time. The vast majority of an officer’s military career is spent in the company of older, higher-ranking adults. Your ability to maneuver in these circles, and your skill in understanding & acting upon “leader-speak” is crucial.I also noted previously, that getting admitted to one of these schools has a higher probability if you start your quest in the 7th or 8th grade. Not only are the admissions gatekeepers looking for a list of accomplishments, they also are looking for year-over-year participation & achievements. They are interested in seeing if you are the “one-and-done” sort of person, or are you the type who demonstrates a track record of sticking-to something; it’s an indicator of maturity, and not a quitter. In a nutshell, demonstrating to the gatekeepers your ability to plan-out, and carry through with it, over an extended period. This is difficult to achieve if you are only starting your military school quest in 11th grade. I hope you are well down-the-road in your preparatory years, and actions.Good luck with your Air Force career, and circle back to me anytime you’d like for more info, or just to chat. You can send me a message through Quora, if you like.Ciao!

If I could, I'd give every college student a copy of the enduring essays "What Are You Going to Do With That?," by William Deresiewicz and "The Case for Breaking Up With Your Parents," by Terry Castle, stay with them until they read both essays completely, and tell them to re-read them on a yearly basis (I do), because I think that's almost all of what they need to hear. Scratch that, I'd pass copies to everyone and anyone:What Are You Going to Do With That?The question my title poses, of course, is the one that is classically aimed at humanities majors. What practical value could there possibly be in studying literature or art or philosophy? So you must be wondering why I'm bothering to raise it here, at Stanford, this renowned citadel of science and technology. What doubt can there be that the world will offer you many opportunities to use your degree?But that's not the question I'm asking. By "do" I don't mean a job, and by "that" I don't mean your major. We are more than our jobs, and education is more than a major. Education is more than college, more even than the totality of your formal schooling, from kindergarten through graduate school. By "What are you going to do," I mean, what kind of life are you going to lead? And by "that," I mean everything in your training, formal and informal, that has brought you to be sitting here today, and everything you're going to be doing for the rest of the time that you're in school.We should start by talking about how you did, in fact, get here. You got here by getting very good at a certain set of skills. Your parents pushed you to excel from the time you were very young. They sent you to good schools, where the encouragement of your teachers and the example of your peers helped push you even harder. Your natural aptitudes were nurtured so that, in addition to excelling in all your subjects, you developed a number of specific interests that you cultivated with particular vigor. You did extracurricular activities, went to afterschool programs, took private lessons. You spent summers doing advanced courses at a local college or attending skill-specific camps and workshops. You worked hard, you paid attention, and you tried your very best. And so you got very good at math, or piano, or lacrosse, or, indeed, several things at once.Now there's nothing wrong with mastering skills, with wanting to do your best and to be the best. What's wrong is what the system leaves out: which is to say, everything else. I don't mean that by choosing to excel in math, say, you are failing to develop your verbal abilities to their fullest extent, or that in addition to focusing on geology, you should also focus on political science, or that while you're learning the piano, you should also be working on the flute. It is the nature of specialization, after all, to be specialized. No, the problem with specialization is that it narrows your attention to the point where all you know about and all you want to know about, and, indeed, all you can know about, is your specialty.The problem with specialization is that it makes you into a specialist. It cuts you off, not only from everything else in the world, but also from everything else in yourself. And of course, as college freshmen, your specialization is only just beginning. In the journey toward the success that you all hope to achieve, you have completed, by getting into Stanford, only the first of many legs. Three more years of college, three or four or five years of law school or medical school or a Ph.D. program, then residencies or postdocs or years as a junior associate. In short, an ever-narrowing funnel of specialization. You go from being a political-science major to being a lawyer to being a corporate attorney to being a corporate attorney focusing on taxation issues in the consumer-products industry. You go from being a biochemistry major to being a doctor to being a cardiologist to being a cardiac surgeon who performs heart-valve replacements.Again, there's nothing wrong with being those things. It's just that, as you get deeper and deeper into the funnel, into the tunnel, it becomes increasingly difficult to remember who you once were. You start to wonder what happened to that person who played piano and lacrosse and sat around with her friends having intense conversations about life and politics and all the things she was learning in her classes. The 19-year-old who could do so many things, and was interested in so many things, has become a 40-year-old who thinks about only one thing. That's why older people are so boring. "Hey, my dad's a smart guy, but all he talks about is money and livers."And there's another problem. Maybe you never really wanted to be a cardiac surgeon in the first place. It just kind of happened. It's easy, the way the system works, to simply go with the flow. I don't mean the work is easy, but the choices are easy. Or rather, the choices sort of make themselves. You go to a place like Stanford because that's what smart kids do. You go to medical school because it's prestigious. You specialize in cardiology because it's lucrative. You do the things that reap the rewards, that make your parents proud, and your teachers pleased, and your friends impressed. From the time you started high school and maybe even junior high, your whole goal was to get into the best college you could, and so now you naturally think about your life in terms of "getting into" whatever's next. "Getting into" is validation; "getting into" is victory. Stanford, then Johns Hopkins medical school, then a residency at the University of San Francisco, and so forth. Or Michigan Law School, or Goldman Sachs, or Mc­Kinsey, or whatever. You take it one step at a time, and the next step always seems to be inevitable.Or maybe you did always want to be a cardiac surgeon. You dreamed about it from the time you were 10 years old, even though you had no idea what it really meant, and you stayed on course for the entire time you were in school. You refused to be enticed from your path by that great experience you had in AP history, or that trip you took to Costa Rica the summer after your junior year in college, or that terrific feeling you got taking care of kids when you did your rotation in pediatrics during your fourth year in medical school.But either way, either because you went with the flow or because you set your course very early, you wake up one day, maybe 20 years later, and you wonder what happened: how you got there, what it all means. Not what it means in the "big picture," whatever that is, but what it means to you. Why you're doing it, what it's all for. It sounds like a cliché, this "waking up one day," but it's called having a midlife crisis, and it happens to people all the time.There is an alternative, however, and it may be one that hasn't occurred to you. Let me try to explain it by telling you a story about one of your peers, and the alternative that hadn't occurred to her. A couple of years ago, I participated in a panel discussion at Harvard that dealt with some of these same matters, and afterward I was contacted by one of the students who had come to the event, a young woman who was writing her senior thesis about Harvard itself, how it instills in its students what she called self-efficacy, the sense that you can do anything you want. Self-efficacy, or, in more familiar terms, self-esteem. There are some kids, she said, who get an A on a test and say, "I got it because it was easy." And there are other kids, the kind with self-efficacy or self-esteem, who get an A on a test and say, "I got it because I'm smart."Again, there's nothing wrong with thinking that you got an A because you're smart. But what that Harvard student didn't realize—and it was really quite a shock to her when I suggested it—is that there is a third alternative. True self-esteem, I proposed, means not caring whether you get an A in the first place. True self-esteem means recognizing, despite everything that your upbringing has trained you to believe about yourself, that the grades you get—and the awards, and the test scores, and the trophies, and the acceptance letters—are not what defines who you are.She also claimed, this young woman, that Harvard students take their sense of self-efficacy out into the world and become, as she put it, "innovative." But when I asked her what she meant by innovative, the only example she could come up with was "being CEO of a Fortune 500." That's not innovative, I told her, that's just successful, and successful according to a very narrow definition of success. True innovation means using your imagination, exercising the capacity to envision new possibilities.But I'm not here to talk about technological innovation, I'm here to talk about a different kind. It's not about inventing a new machine or a new drug. It's about inventing your own life. Not following a path, but making your own path. The kind of imagination I'm talking about is moral imagination. "Moral" meaning not right or wrong, but having to do with making choices. Moral imagination means the capacity to envision new ways to live your life.It means not just going with the flow. It means not just "getting into" whatever school or program comes next. It means figuring out what you want for yourself, not what your parents want, or your peers want, or your school wants, or your society wants. Originating your own values. Thinking your way toward your own definition of success. Not simply accepting the life that you've been handed. Not simply accepting the choices you've been handed. When you walk into Starbucks, you're offered a choice among a latte and a macchiato and an espresso and a few other things, but you can also make another choice. You can turn around and walk out. When you walk into college, you are offered a choice among law and medicine and investment banking and consulting and a few other things, but again, you can also do something else, something that no one has thought of before.Let me give you another counterexample. I wrote an essay a couple of years ago that touched on some of these same points. I said, among other things, that kids at places like Yale or Stanford tend to play it safe and go for the conventional rewards. And one of the most common criticisms I got went like this: What about Teach for America? Lots of kids from elite colleges go and do TFA after they graduate, so therefore I was wrong. TFA, TFA—I heard that over and over again. And Teach for America is undoubtedly a very good thing. But to cite TFA in response to my argument is precisely to miss the point, and to miss it in a way that actually confirms what I'm saying. The problem with TFA—or rather, the problem with the way that TFA has become incorporated into the system—is that it's just become another thing to get into.In terms of its content, Teach for America is completely different from Goldman Sachs or McKinsey or Harvard Medical School or Berkeley Law, but in terms of its place within the structure of elite expectations, of elite choices, it is exactly the same. It's prestigious, it's hard to get into, it's something that you and your parents can brag about, it looks good on your résumé, and most important, it represents a clearly marked path. You don't have to make it up yourself, you don't have to do anything but apply and do the work­—just like college or law school or McKinsey or whatever. It's the Stanford or Harvard of social engagement. It's another hurdle, another badge. It requires aptitude and diligence, but it does not require a single ounce of moral imagination.Moral imagination is hard, and it's hard in a completely different way than the hard things you're used to doing. And not only that, it's not enough. If you're going to invent your own life, if you're going to be truly autonomous, you also need courage: moral courage. The courage to act on your values in the face of what everyone's going to say and do to try to make you change your mind. Because they're not going to like it. Morally courageous individuals tend to make the people around them very uncomfortable. They don't fit in with everybody else's ideas about the way the world is supposed to work, and still worse, they make them feel insecure about the choices that they themselves have made—or failed to make. People don't mind being in prison as long as no one else is free. But stage a jailbreak, and everybody else freaks out.In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce has Stephen Dedalus famously say, about growing up in Ireland in the late 19th century, "When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets."Today there are other nets. One of those nets is a term that I've heard again and again as I've talked with students about these things. That term is "self-indulgent." "Isn't it self-indulgent to try to live the life of the mind when there are so many other things I could be doing with my degree?" "Wouldn't it be self-indulgent to pursue painting after I graduate instead of getting a real job?"These are the kinds of questions that young people find themselves being asked today if they even think about doing something a little bit different. Even worse, the kinds of questions they are made to feel compelled to ask themselves. Many students have spoken to me, as they navigated their senior years, about the pressure they felt from their peers—from their peers—to justify a creative or intellectual life. You're made to feel like you're crazy: crazy to forsake the sure thing, crazy to think it could work, crazy to imagine that you even have a right to try.Think of what we've come to. It is one of the great testaments to the intellectual—and moral, and spiritual—poverty of American society that it makes its most intelligent young people feel like they're being self-indulgent if they pursue their curiosity. You are all told that you're supposed to go to college, but you're also told that you're being "self-indulgent" if you actually want to get an education. Or even worse, give yourself one. As opposed to what? Going into consulting isn't self-indulgent? Going into finance isn't self-indulgent? Going into law, like most of the people who do, in order to make yourself rich, isn't self-indulgent? It's not OK to play music, or write essays, because what good does that really do anyone, but it is OK to work for a hedge fund. It's selfish to pursue your passion, unless it's also going to make you a lot of money, in which case it's not selfish at all.Do you see how absurd this is? But these are the nets that are flung at you, and this is what I mean by the need for courage. And it's a never-ending proc­ess. At that Harvard event two years ago, one person said, about my assertion that college students needed to keep rethinking the decisions they've made about their lives, "We already made our decisions, back in middle school, when we decided to be the kind of high achievers who get into Harvard." And I thought, who wants to live with the decisions that they made when they were 12? Let me put that another way. Who wants to let a 12-year-old decide what they're going to do for the rest of their lives? Or a 19-year-old, for that matter?All you can decide is what you think now, and you need to be prepared to keep making revisions. Because let me be clear. I'm not trying to persuade you all to become writers or musicians. Being a doctor or a lawyer, a scientist or an engineer or an economist—these are all valid and admirable choices. All I'm saying is that you need to think about it, and think about it hard. All I'm asking is that you make your choices for the right reasons. All I'm urging is that you recognize and embrace your moral freedom.And most of all, don't play it safe. Resist the seductions of the cowardly values our society has come to prize so highly: comfort, convenience, security, predictability, control. These, too, are nets. Above all, resist the fear of failure. Yes, you will make mistakes. But they will be your mistakes, not someone else's. And you will survive them, and you will know yourself better for having made them, and you will be a fuller and a stronger person.It's been said—and I'm not sure I agree with this, but it's an idea that's worth taking seriously—that you guys belong to a "postemotional" generation. That you prefer to avoid messy and turbulent and powerful feelings. But I say, don't shy away from the challenging parts of yourself. Don't deny the desires and curiosities, the doubts and dissatisfactions, the joy and the darkness, that might knock you off the path that you have set for yourself. College is just beginning for you, adulthood is just beginning. Open yourself to the possibilities they represent. The world is much larger than you can imagine right now. Which means, you are much larger than you can imagine.The Case for Breaking Up With Your ParentsShall I be ashamed to kill mother?—Aeschylus, The Libation BearersTime: last year. Place: an undergraduate classroom, in the airy, well-wired precincts of Silicon Valley University. (Oops, I mean Sun-Kissed-Google-Apps-University.) I am avoiding the pedagogical business at hand—the class is my annual survey of 18th-century British literature, and it's as rockin' and rollin' as you might imagine, given the subject—in order to probe my students' reactions to a startling and (to me) disturbing article I have just read in the Harvard alumni magazine. The piece, by Craig Lambert, one of the magazine's editors, is entitled "Nonstop: Today's Superhero Undergraduates Do '3000 Things at 150 Percent.'"As the breaking-newsfeed title suggests, the piece, on the face of it, is anecdotal and seemingly light-hearted—a collegiate Ripley's Believe It or Not! about the overscheduled lives of today's Harvard undergraduates. More than ever before, it would appear, these poised, high-achieving, fantastically disciplined students routinely juggle intense academic studies with what can only seem (at least to an older generation) a truly dizzy-making array of extracurricular activities: pre-professional internships, world-class athletics, social and political advocacy, start-up companies, volunteering for nonprofits, research assistantships, peer advising, musical and dramatic performances, podcasts and video-making, and countless other no doubt virtuous (and résumé-building) pursuits. The pace is so relentless, students say, some plan their packed daily schedules down to the minute—i.e., "shower: 7:15-7:20 a.m."; others confess to getting by on two or three hours of sleep a night. Over the past decade, it seems, the average Harvard undergraduate has morphed into a sort of lean, glossy, turbocharged superhamster: Look in the cage and all you see, where the treadmill should be, is a beautiful blur.I am curious if my Stanford students' lives are likewise chockablock. Heads nod yes; deep sighs are expelled; their own lives are similarly crazy. They can barely keep up, they say—particularly given all the texting and tweeting and cellphoning they have to do from hour to hour too. Do they mind? Not hugely, it would seem. True, they are mildly intrigued by Lambert's suggestion that the "explosion of busyness" is a relatively recent historical phenomenon—and that, over the past 10 or 15 years, uncertain economic conditions, plus a new cultural emphasis on marketing oneself to employers, have led to ever more extracurricular add-ons. Yes, they allow: You do have to display your "well-roundedness" once you graduate. Thus the supersize CV's. You'll need, after all, to advertise a catalog of competencies: your diverse interests, original turn of mind, ability to work alone or in a team, time-management skills, enthusiasm, unflappability—not to mention your moral probity, generosity to those less fortunate, lovable "meet cute" quirkiness, and pleasure in the simple things of life, such as synchronized swimming, competitive dental flossing, and Antarctic exploration. "Yes, it can often be frenetic and with an eye toward résumés," one Harvard assistant dean of students observes, "but learning outside the classroom through extracurricular opportunities is a vital part of the undergraduate experience here."Yet such references to the past—truly a foreign country to my students—ultimately leave them unimpressed. They laugh when I tell them that during my own somewhat damp Jurassic-era undergraduate years—spent at a tiny, obscure, formerly Methodist school in the rainy Pacific Northwest between 1971 and 1975—I never engaged in a single activity that might be described as "extracurricular" in the contemporary sense, not, that is, unless you count the little work-study job I had toiling away evenings in the sleepy campus library. What was I doing all day? Studying and going to class, to be sure. Reading books, listening to music, falling in love (or at least imagining it). Eating ramen noodles with peanut butter. But also, I confess, I did a lot of plain old sitting around—if not outright malingering. I've got a box of musty journals to prove it. After all, nobody even exercised in those days. Nor did polyester exist. Once you'd escaped high school and obligatory PE classes—goodbye hirsute Miss Davis; goodbye, ugly cotton middy blouse and gym shorts—you were done with that. We were all so countercultural back then—especially in the Pacific Northwest, where the early 1970s were still the late sixties. The 1860s.The students now regard me with curiosity and vague apprehension. What planet is she from.But I have another question for them. While Lambert, author of "Nonstop," admires the multitasking undergraduates Harvard attracts, he also worries about the intellectual and emotional costs of such all-consuming busyness. In a turn toward gravitas, he quotes the French film director Jean Renoir's observation that "the foundation of all civilization is loitering" and wonders aloud if "unstructured chunks of time" aren't necessary for creative thinking. And while careful to phrase his concerns ever so delicately—this is the Harvard alumni magazine, after all—he seems afraid that one reason today's students are so driven and compulsive is that they have been trained up to it since babyhood: From preschool on, they are accustomed to their parents pushing them ferociously to make use of every spare minute. Contemporary middle-class parents—often themselves highly accomplished professionals—"groom their children for high achievement," he suspects, "in ways that set in motion the culture of scheduled lives and nonstop activity." He quotes a former Harvard dean of student life:This is the play-date generation. ... There was a time when children came home from school and just played randomly with their friends. Or hung around and got bored, and eventually that would lead you on to something. Kids don't get to do that now. Busy parents book them into things constantly—violin lessons, ballet lessons, swimming teams. The kids get the idea that someone will always be structuring their time for them.The current dean of freshmen concurs: "Starting at an earlier age, students feel that their free time should be taken up with purposeful activities. There is less stumbling on things you love ... and more being steered toward pursuits." Some of my students begin to look downright uneasy; some are now listening hard.Such parental involvement can be distasteful, even queasy-making. "Now," writes Lambert, parents "routinely 'help' with assignments, making teachers wonder whose work they are really grading. ... Once, college applicants typically wrote their own applications, including the essays; today, an army of high-paid consultants, coaches, and editors is available to orchestrate and massage the admissions effort." Nor do such parents give up their busybody ways, apparently, once their offspring lands a prized berth at some desired institute of higher learning. Lambert elaborates:Parental engagement even in the lives of college-age children has expanded in ways that would have seemed bizarre in the recent past. (Some colleges have actually created a "dean of parents" position—whether identified as such or not—to deal with them.) The "helicopter parents" who hover over nearly every choice or action of their offspring have given way to "snowplow parents" who determinedly clear a path for their child and shove aside any obstacle they perceive in the way.•Now, as a professor I have had some experiences with "hel­icopter" parents, and were weather patterns on the West Coast slightly more rigorous, I'm sure I would have encountered "snowplow" parents as well. Indelibly etched on my brain, I tell the class, is a phone call I received one winter break from the aggrieved mother of a student to whom I had given a C-minus in a course that fall. The class had been a graduate course, a Ph.D. seminar, no less. The woman's daughter, a first-year Ph.D. student, had spoken nary a word in class, nor had she ever visited during office hours. Her seminar paper had been unimpressive: Indeed it was one of those for which the epithet "gobsmackingly incoherent" might seem to have been invented. Still, the mother lamented, her daughter was distraught; the poor child had done nothing over the break but cry and brood and wander by herself in the woods. I had ruined everybody's Christmas, apparently, so would I not redeem myself by allowing her daughter to rewrite her seminar paper for a higher grade? It was only fair.While startled to get such a call, I confess to being cowed by this direct maternal assault and, against my academic better judgment, said OK. The student did rewrite the essay, and this time I gave it a B. Generous, I thought. (It was better but still largely incomprehensible.) Yet the ink was hardly dry when the mother called again: Why wasn't her cherished daughter receiving an A? She had rewritten the paper! Surely I realized ... etc. One was forced to feign the gruesome sounds of a fatal choking fit just to get off the phone.Did such hands-on parental advocacy—I inquired—trouble my students? My caller obviously represented an extreme instance, but what did they think about the wider phenomenon? Having internalized images of themselves (if only unconsciously) as standard-bearers of parental ambition—or so Lambert's article had it—their peers at Harvard didn't seem particularly shocked or embarrassed by Ma and Pa's lobbying efforts on their behalf. According to one survey, only 5 to 6 percent of undergrads felt their parents had been "too involved" in the admission process. Once matriculated (there's an interesting word), most students saw frequent parental contact and advice-giving as normal: A third of Harvard undergraduates reported calling or messaging daily with a parent.Yet here it was—just at this delicate punctum—that I found myself reduced (however briefly) to speechlessness. Blindsided. So how often do my students—mostly senior English majors, living in residential dorms—text or talk to their parents? Broad smiles all around. Embarrassed looks at one another. Whispers and some excited giggling. A lot. Well, how much exactly? A lot. But what's a lot? They can't believe I'm asking. Why do I want to know? I might as well be asking them how often they masturbate. And then it all comes tumbling out:Oh, like, every day, sometimes more than once.At least two or three times a day. (Group laughter.)My father e-mails me jokes and stuff every day.My mother would worry if I didn't call her every day. (Nodding heads.)Well, we're always in touch—my parents live nearby so I go home weekends, too.Finally, one student—a delightful young woman whom I know to be smart and levelheaded—confesses that she talks to her mother on the cellphone at least five, maybe six, even seven times a day: We're like best friends, so I call her whenever I get out of class. She wants to know about my professors, what was the exam, so I tell her what's going on and give her, you know, updates. Sometimes my grandmother's there, and I talk to her too.I'm stunned; I'm aghast; I'm going gaga. I must look fairly stricken too—Elektra keening over the corpse of Agamemnon—because now the whole class starts laughing at me, their strange unfathomable lady-professor, the one who doesn't own a television and obviously doesn't have any kids of her own. What a freak. "But when I was in school," I manage finally to gasp, "All we wanted to do was get away from our parents!" "We never called our parents!" "We despised our parents!" "In fact," I splutter—and this is the showstopper—"we only had one telephone in our whole dorm—in the hallway—for 50 people! If your parents called, you'd yell from your room, Tell them I'm not here!"After this last outburst, the students too look aghast. Not to mention morally discomfited. No; these happy, busy, optimistic Stanford undergrads, so beautiful and good in their unisex T-shirts, hoodies, and J.Crew shorts; so smart, scrupulous, forward-looking, well-meaning, well-behaved, and utterly presentable—just the best and the nicest, really—simply cannot imagine the harsh and silent world I'm describing.•At the time, I wasn't sure why this conversation left me dumbfounded, but it did. It stayed with me for weeks, and I told numerous pals about it, marveling again at the bizarreness of contemporary undergraduate life. One said she talked to her mother five times a day! In the moment, the exchange had awakened in me a fairly dismal psychological sensation I'd sometimes felt in classes before (one hard to acknowledge, so out of step with official norms does it seem): namely, that teaching makes me feel lonely. Not all the time, but enough to notice. Lecturing before students, I will suddenly feel utterly bereft. A cloud goes over the sun. Though putatively in charge, I'm estranged from my charges—self-conscious, alone, in a tunnel, the object of attention (and somehow responsible for everything taking place) but unable to speak a language anyone understands. I feel sad and oppressed, smothered almost, slightly panicky. It's a sensation one might have in an anxiety dream—the sort in which you feel abandoned and overwhelmed and without something you desperately need. They've gone away and left me in charge of everything. At least in my own head, it's the sensation of orphanhood.One rallies, of course. Professor Freakout soldiers on and the feeling dissipates. The business of the day returns. But the psychological cloud can remain for a while, like a miasma. By asking my students a lot of intrusive and impertinent questions, I concluded afterward, I'd obviously brought this grisly mood on myself. Their charming, fresh-faced, matter-of-fact responses—yes, they were just as busy as their Harvard counterparts, but, yes, they also managed to stay in (surprisingly) close touch with parents (i.e., they loved and were loved in return)—had somehow triggered my orphan-reflex. I had only myself to blame. I chastised myself for having temporarily forgotten that students today—not just those at Harvard or Stanford, of course—live in a new, exciting, exacting "24/7" world, one utterly unlike (mentalité-wise) the one I inhabited as an undergraduate. They seem reasonably content with their lot; in fact appear to take the endless "connectivity" for granted—the networking, blogging, Skyping, Facebook posts, Twitter feeds. And why shouldn't they? Have they ever known anything else? None of it made me happy, but neither was I particularly happy with myself.Now, lest one wonder, I should say upfront I am not an orphan—or at least not in the official sense. At the time of writing, both my parents are still alive—in their mid-80s, but frail, beginning to fail. They don't live together. In fact, despite residing less than a mile apart, they haven't laid eyes on one another for almost 40 years. Not even by accident in the Rite Aid store. Don't ask. They've had five rancorous marriages between them. I haven't seen my father more than 10 or 12 times over the past decade. That my recurrent sense of psychic estrangement—not to say shock at my students' hooked-in, booked-up, seemingly bountiful lives—might be in some way connected with these Jolly Aged P's is a topic that would no doubt require a posse of shrinks to explore thoroughly. But even without reference to private psychodrama, I think I now at least half-grasp the reason why my students' overscheduled lives, so paradoxically conjoined (I felt) with intense bonds with parents, discombobulated me so thoroughly.Unsurprisingly, orphanhood—that painful thing—has everything to do with the case. Orphanhood conceived, that is, in the broadest sense: as a metaphor for modern human experience, as symbol for unhappy consciousness, as emblem of that groundwork—that inaugural experience of metaphysical solitude—that Martin Heidegger deemed necessary for the act of philosophizing. About orphanhood conceived, in other words, as a condition for world-making—as both the sorrow and creative quintessence of life.Now that's a bit of a mouthful, I realize, so let me explain it in simpler terms. If you teach the history of English and American literature (as I've done most of my life), it's safe to say you will end up, among other things, a state-of-the-art Orphan Expert. Not that it's that hard. You don't need to go back very far in literary history, after all, to find a plethora of orphaned or quasi-orphaned protagonists. At the outset of the play bearing his name, Hamlet, poor mite, might best be understood, after all, as a sort of half-orphan—indeed, a half-orphan with an unconscious wish to become a full-service orphan. If not downright matricidal, he seems aggrieved enough by his mother's perceived betrayals to wonder if hastening her demise might not make life at Elsinore Castle rather more enjoyable for everybody concerned.And what is Milton's Paradise Lost if not one of Western culture's great parables of self-orphaning? Along with the Oresteia and the Oedipus plays, it's a sort of poetical primer on how to forfeit the love and care of one's Creator in a few outrageous, easy-to-follow steps. Satan's not really to blame for the mess: He's just a figment, the kid who sticks chewing gum on the table leg. Adam and Eve know perfectly well what they are doing when they eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They want to eat it. And when they are seen, misery-ridden, leaving life in the Garden behind ("They, hand in hand, with wand'ring steps and slow,/ Through Eden took their solitary way"), they carry with them all the pathos of suddenly abandoned children. They have no mother, presumably, and their Father is dead to them. Worse yet, they are wise orphans; they recognize their own culpability in their loss. Cosmically amplifying their sorrow is the sickening, banal, no-way-back knowledge that they've brought their banishment on themselves. Daddy took the T-Bird away. But we should never have been driving it in the first place.Yet for English speakers, it's in classic Anglo-American fiction—in the novel, say, from Daniel Defoe, Aphra Behn, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding to Dickens, Eliot, Twain, James, Woolf, Hemingway, and the rest—that the orphaned, or semi-orphaned, hero or heroine becomes a central, if not inescapable, fixture. Something about the new social and psychic world in which the realistic novel comes into being in the late 17th and early 18th centuries pushes the orphan to the foreground of the mix, makes of him or her a strikingly necessary figure, a kind of exemplary being. (By "orphan" I likewise include those characters—call them "pseudo-orphans"—who believe themselves to be orphans, but over the course of the narrative discover a mother or father or both.) So memorably have these "one of a kind" characters been drawn, we often know them by a single name or nickname: Moll, Tom, Fanny, Becky, Heathcliff, Jane, Pip, Oliver, Ishmael, Huck, Dorothea, Jude, Isabel, Milly, Lily, Lolly, Sula.Even if you haven't read the books in which these invented beings appear, you've probably heard of them and their stories; may even have a rudimentary sense of what they are like as "people" (self-reliant, footloose, attractive, curious, quick-thinking, lucky, tricky, a mischief-maker, the proverbial black sheep ... and so on). Alarmingly enough, orphaned protagonists appear regularly in stories written explicitly for children: Witness Little Goody Two-Shoes, Pollyanna, Heidi, Little Orphan Annie, Kim, Mowgli, Bilbo, Frodo, Anne (of Green Gables), Dorothy (she of Toto and Auntie Em), Peter (as in Pan), Harry (as in Potter). And needless to say, these parentless juveniles are usually the heroes or heroines of the books in which they appear. They may be wounded or fey or uncanny (what do we make of the vacant circles that Little Orphan Annie has for eyes?), yet they are also resilient, charismatic, oddly powerful.•Thus the first of two big lit-crit hypotheses I'll advance here: More than love, sex, courtship, and marriage; more than inheritance, ambition, rivalry, or disgrace; more than hatred, betrayal, revenge, or death, orphanhood—the absence of the parent, the frightening yet galvanizing solitude of the child—may be the defining fixation of the novel as a genre, what one might call its primordial motive or matrix, the conditioning psychic reality out of which the form itself develops.Now, even though I've made a talking point of it, what's important here is not merely the frequency with which orphaned heroes and heroines appear in fiction since the 18th century. Yes, from Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel onward, the phenomenon has inspired some brilliant commentary. In one of the most profound books on fiction ever written, Adultery in the Novel, Tony Tanner associates the orphan trope with the early novel's tendency toward diagetic instability—its ambiguous, unsettled "ongoingness" and resistance to closure:The novel, in its origin, might almost be said to be a transgressive mode, inasmuch as it seemed to break, or mix, or adulterate the existing genre-expectations of the time. It is not for nothing that many of the protagonists of the early English novels are socially displaced or unplaced figures—orphans, prostitutes, adventurers, etc. They thus represent or incarnate a potentially disruptive or socially unstabilized energy that may threaten, directly or implicitly, the organization of society, whether by the indeterminacy of their origin, the uncertainty of the direction in which they will focus their unbonded energy, or their attitude toward the ties that hold society together and that they may choose to slight or break.Like the Prostitute or Adventurer, the Orphan embodies the new genre's own picaresque "outlaw" dynamism.Precisely because the 18th-century orphan-hero is usually untried, unprotected, disadvantaged (not to mention misinformed or uninformed about his or her parentage), he or she can function as a sort of textual free radical: as plot-catalyst and story-generator—a mixer-upper of things, whose search for a legitimate identity or place in the world of the fiction at once jump-starts the narrative and tends to shunt it away from didacticism and any predictable or programmatic unfolding of events.A flagrant example of such jump-starting occurs in Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722). Here it is precisely the eponymous heroine's putative orphanhood (she knows only that her mother, whom she presumes to be dead, was a thief and gave birth to her in Newgate Prison) that catalyzes, among other scandals, one of the novel's most titillating (if outlandish) episodes: Moll's shocking marriage-by-mistake to her own brother. (Only well into their marriage, after she and her brother have several children, will Moll realize that her chatty mother-in-law, his mother, is also her mother—long ago transported to America, but still alive and flourishing.) Defoe purports to moralize in Moll Flanders—in his Preface he describes his narrative as free of "Lewd Ideas" and "immodest Turns"—a work "from every part of which something may be learned, and some just and religious inference is drawn." Yet bizarrely, through some inscrutable narrative magic, the very mystery in which Moll's birth is shrouded triggers one of the novel's most perverse and sensational incidents. What on earth are we meant to "learn" from it? Don't ever get married, in case your spouse is really your long-lost brother or sister?Yet Moll Flanders also illuminates a perhaps more profound aspect of the orphan narrative: its austere embedding of a certain hard-boiled psychological realism. Even when the hero or heroine recovers a lost parent, that person can shock or mortify. The "orphan mentality" can persist, alas, post-reunion. Thus Moll finds out that, yes, as she's been told, her mother is a raddled old Newgate jailbird, with the livid mark of the branding iron on her hand. Now, for most of us, such a revelation—even barring incestuous ramifications—would be disillusioning, to say the least. Imagine: After years of loneliness, of longing for a tender maternal embrace, you finally, miraculously, locate your birth mother: She turns out to be a convicted felon. A whore. A liar and check-kiter. A crystal-meth addict. No help there; she's way worse off than I am.•Freud famously described the "family romance" as the childhood fantasy that one's parents aren't,in actuality, one's real parents—that one was switched in the cradle, left in a basket on the doorstep, found under a cabbage leaf or the like, and that one's real father and mother are persons of great wealth, beauty, and high station, a king and queen, perhaps, who will someday return to reclaim you and love you in the way you deserve. He thought such fantasies especially likely to develop at the birth of a sibling, when anger at the parents—for introducing a presumably odious rival into the family circle—is at a height. Real parents are disparaged; imagined parents idealized. The scenario in Moll Flanders reads like a sendup of the Freudian romance: almost a spoof on it. It's not simply that the lost-and-found parent turns out to be disappointingly "trashy." She's quite shockingly trashy—sneaky, disingenuous, a terrible old crone with false teeth, sleazier than you even thought possible. But you're stuck with her, it seems, for life, unless you can find a way to write her back out of your story.If one wanted to be fancy, one might dub this familial antiromance the "emotional drama of the post-Enlightenment child." Moll does not cease to be "orphaned" having rediscovered her mother; on the contrary, she abandons her (and the brother-husband), and resumes her solitary adventuring. And while she will re-encounter the brother later—indeed inherit the Virginia plantation he and the mother have established—Moll never sees her mother again. The maternal reappearance alters little or nothing in the heroine's inner world: Psychologically speaking, Moll is as alone at the end of the fiction as she was when she started. She's what you might call a self-orphaner, an orphan by default. Evasive, secretive, deeply intransigent—one of life's permanentorphans.In the broad, even existential, sense of the term I deploy here, orphanhood is not necessarily reducible to orphanhood in the literal sense. At least metaphorically, virtually any character in the early realist novel might be said to be an orphan—including, paradoxically, many of those heroes and heroines who have a living parent (or two), or end up getting one, as Moll Flanders does. A feeling of intractable loneliness—of absolute moral or spiritual estrangement from the group—may be all that it takes. You don't need to have been abandoned by a parent in the conventional sense, in other words, to feel psychically bereft.Indeed, from a certain angle—and thus my second big lit-crit hypothesis—the orphan trope may allegorize a far more disturbing emotional reality in early fiction: a generic insistence on the reactionary (and destructive) nature of parent/child ties. The more one reads, the more one confronts it: Whatever their status in a narrative (alive, dead, absent, present, lost, found), the parental figures in the early English novel are, in toto, so deeply and overwhelmingly flawed—so cruel, lost, ignorant, greedy, compromised, helpless, selfish, morally absent, or tragically oblivious to their children's needs—one would be better off without them. You might as well be an orphan.Julia Kristeva remarks somewhere (my wording may not be exact) that "in every bourgeois family group there is one child who has a soul." And thus we meet them, in novel after novel: not only those who go literally motherless and fatherless, but also the children "with souls" who, for precisely that reason, will be persecuted by their foolish parents or parental stand-ins; ostracized, abused, made to submit to some hellish moral and spiritual reaming-out. Ruthlessly, imperviously, the realistic novels of the 18th and 19th centuries compulsively foreground this "orphaning" of the psyche; shape it into parable, and in so doing (I think) dramatize the painful birth of the modern subject—that radically deracinated being, vital yet alone, who goes undefined by kinship, caste, class, or visible membership in a group.Witness, for example, the predicament of the eponymous heroine at the outset of Samuel Richardson's august and appalling masterwork, Clarissa. (Published in 1748, Clarissa, for those of you who haven't read it, is the greatest novel ever written in any language.) Now although the young and virtuous Clarissa Harlowe has grown up, presumably happily, at Harlowe-Place surrounded by her "friends"—i.e., both of her parents, two siblings, and several uncles—as the novel opens, she's just been "orphaned" in the emotional sense: profoundly, inexplicably, and shatteringly rejected. (Ironically, the word "friend" in the 18th century can not only mean someone outside the family circle whom one likes or loves, but also a member, simply, of one's immediate family circle.) When Clarissa refuses to marry the man of her father's choice, a rich and grasping Gollum-like creature named Solmes (one always imagines him with webbed feet), her "friends" morph abruptly, and nightmarishly, into domestic dungeon-masters. They revile Clarissa and threaten to disown her; they lock her up in her room for days and refuse to see her or read her letters; they forbid her contact with anyone who might help her; her father curses her. As they prepare to marry her off to Solmes "by force," she seems ever more like one of the victim-children in fairy tales, the designated family sacrifice.Now Richardson critics over the past few decades have tended to skate past these terrifying opening scenes in order to concentrate on Clarissa's sufferings later at the hands of Lovelace, the charming sociopath and would-be rescuer who seduces her. Yes, Lovelace's depredations later are spectacular and obscene—he kidnaps her, drugs her, rapes her while she is drugged, and ultimately hounds her to death. Yet even before Lovelace enters the novel (or so I have always felt), Richardson has already saturated the novelistic mise-en-scène with an even more unnerving and absolute kind of horror. "Home" is the primordial horror-show in this novel—a place of dehumanization and soul-murder from which the child, to save herself, must somehow escape. Count the Harlowes, likewise, among the ghastliest fictional parents outside Greek tragedy—all the more so because they speak the language of sentimental bourgeois feeling. Even as they subject their daughter to unspeakable torments, they "love" Clarissa, they say; that is why she must be so brutally forced to obey.Yet one finds these dire mamas and papas everywhere in early fiction—even comic fiction. They are omnipresent in works by Fielding, Smollett, Burney, Horace Walpole, Mary Shelley, and Ann Radcliffe. Even Jane Austen, arguably, offers an indictment of parents as harsh as that in the Gothic fiction of Shelley or Radcliffe. Witness the foolish, manipulative, greedy, or otherwise profoundly unsatisfactory mothers and fathers in Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion. Austen typically veils the inadequacy, even malice, of her fictional parent-figures by festooning them with comic trappings: We laugh at the absurd Mrs. Bennet, the whinging Mr. Woodhouse, even the monstrous Sir Walter Elliot—the vain, pomaded, rank-obsessed father of Anne Elliot, heroine of Persuasion. (Mothers are often long-dead in Austen, and as in many other works by women from the period, the heroine is obliged to live with a cold, oppressive, or dissociated father.)In real life, having any of these narcissistic nongrown-ups for a parent would be a nightmare come true. They induce bewilderment and a sense of genetic incommensurability. How can Emma—brilliant, coruscating, kind—be the child of the dull, mewling, psychotically self-centered Mr. Woodhouse? Austen's heroines, in particular, are often especially changeling-like—sleek, witty, perceptive misfits, who appear oddly unintegrated into whatever (usually reduced) version of the family unit the novelist has devised for them.What to do with the parents who fail us so abysmally? Perhaps the most drastic solution is to imagine a fictional world from which parents have simply been erased—psychically blanked out—absolutely, and long in advance of any narrative unfurling. Charlotte Brontë's books are a terrifying case in point. They project worlds in which estrangement, loss, and silence about the past seem the precondition for narrative itself. Brontë omits the "back story"—or provides only a fatally impoverished one. Neither of her best-known narrators, Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe, has a living father or mother: Jane's parents have died of typhus; of Lucy's we know nothing at all. Both heroines seem to emerge out of, and continually slip back into, an amorphous, staggering, irrevocable loneliness. One senses in their aphasia about the past some suppressed horror. Reading Lucy's glassy-eyed narrative, in particular, is like listening to someone who's had a head injury, or suffers from post-traumatic amnesia.We quickly learn not to expect any answers; some submerged trauma is itself the given, the starting point. Crucial information will never be forthcoming. For these are orphan-tales, drawing us, ineluctably, into a domain of emptiness and pain. Yes, Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe may know their own names—first and last both. (Many fictional orphans don't.) But, affectively speaking, everything else has gone blank. The system crashed long ago. Not only have they no parent or guardian to point to, they seem to have no idea—emotionally, spiritually—what words like "mother" and "father" might mean.•So what—you may be wondering—has all this gloomy business to do with my frantic, ambitious, madly multi-tasking students? With helicopter Moms and Dads? With so-called Velcro parents? The ones who keep messaging 24/7? Surely I don't wish to link all the ultra-depressing things one encounters in literature—O, the horror, the horror, etc.—with the banal, addictive, anodyne back-and-forth of contemporary student life? Hello, you have 193 new messages. Checking for software updates. Your start-up disk is almost full. Hey, it's Mom. I was just wondering if you'd had time yet to. ...Or do I?My answer must be both circumspect and speculative. I don't wish, on the one hand, to sound like someone nostalgic for pain—a relic, a loneliness-junkie, a cheerleader for real-world orphanhood, or (when you get right down to it) a proponent of Orestes-style matricide or patricide. (Not usually, anyway.) On the other hand, I can't help but wonder if we haven't lost the thread when it comes to understanding part of what a "higher education" ideally should entail. Pious college officials yammer on about the need for students to develop something they (the officials) call "critical thinking" and thereby gain intellectual autonomy: a foothold on adulthood. But I'm wondering if it isn't time to reaffirm an idea that "critical thinking" begins at home, or better, withhome—which is to say, that each of us at some point needs to think (dispassionately, daringly) about the "homes" from which we emerge and what we really think of them.Do you owe your parents your obedience? Your deference? Your love? Your phone calls? The questions sound harsh because they are. But our Skype-ridden times may require a certain harshness.Some of the primal myths of our culture—as the greatest artists and writers have always intuited—seem to authorize violence, real or emotional, between the human generations. Francisco Goya's sublime and horrific masterpiece, "Saturn Devouring His Son" (ca. 1819-23), depicts a shocking event in Greek mythology—the cannibalistic murder by the primeval Titan god Kronos (Saturn, in the Roman version) of one of his children. Having received a prophecy that he will be overthrown by one of his own offspring, Kronos devours each of his five children at birth. His wife Ops manages to save their sixth child, Zeus, only by hiding him away on Crete and feeding Kronos a stone in swaddling clothes in place of the newborn. Kronos is fooled and later, this same Zeus, father of the new Olympian gods, overthrows his father, as predicted.An image to shock and awe, undoubtedly, but also one of the great paintings made in that period we call the Enlightenment: that revolutionary era (say, roughly, 1660-1820) during which—for better or for worse—Western culture began to shake off some of the more baleful and stultifying aspects of the Judeo-Christian past and reimagine itself as "modern."The central insight of the period? It's so familiar to us, perhaps, that we have lost sight of its momentousness: that individual human beings are endowed with critical faculties and powers of moral discernment, and as a result, have a right, if not the obligation, to challenge oppressive, unjust, and degrading patterns of authority. Over the course of the 18th century and into the 19th, more and more educated men (and a few brave women) felt intellectually empowered enough to criticize previously sacrosanct "received ideas": traditional religious beliefs, established forms of government, accepted modes of social, legal, and economic organization, the conventional dynamics of family life, relations between men and women, adults and children—all those cognitive grids through which we customarily make sense of the world.At its most potent, the critique was severe—world-changing. A host of Enlightenment freethinkers—Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Hume, Mary Wollstonecraft, Adam Smith—articulated it in passionate and various ways: that the venerable cognitive models human beings had mobilized over the centuries to explain "the nature of things" were often nothing more than self-reinforcing and barbaric "superstition." Taken for dogma, these man-made belief systems had produced a host of ills: savage religious and political strife, the commercial exploitation of the many by the few, the enslavement and genocidal killing of masses of people, the degradation of women, children, animals, and the natural world—century upon century, in fact, of unfathomable global suffering.In his iconic essay of 1784, "What is Enlightenment?" Immanuel Kant put it thus:Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!Not that Kant imagined any cultural enlightenment to be easy or bloodless—especially given the seemingly intractable human proclivity for business as usual:Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large proportion of men, even when nature has long emancipated them from alien guidance, nevertheless gladly remain immature for life. For the same reasons, it is all too easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians. It is so convenient to be immature! If I have a book to have understanding in place of me, a spiritual adviser to have a conscience for me, a doctor to judge my diet for me, and so on, I need not make any efforts at all. I need not think, so long as I can pay; others will soon enough take the tiresome job over for me.I confess: I first read those words over 25 years ago, and they have never ceased to thrill me.I understand the orphan-narratives of literature the same way I do Goya's painting and Kant's exhortation: as imaginative vehicles designed to shock us into "critical thinking" about those Titan figures we call our parents, and the larger psychosocial forces they so often (wittingly or unwittingly) represent. The intimate authority of parents is, after all, the first kind of authority most of us experience; the parental command the first utterance we recognize as that which must be obeyed. Pain and suffering, we soon learn, will result from our disobedience.And soon enough, most of us become adept at shaping our wishes according to a system of superimposed demands. We learn as young children to control the way we eat, drink, and eliminate waste; we learn to clean our own bodies; we learn under what circumstances it is appropriate to yell or scream or cry, and when we must be silent. Later on, "adult" society will impose further, ever more complex demands. Thus we internalize all those second-order codes of behavior associated with the educational, political, religious, and economic domains within which we all attempt to function, with lesser or greater success.Yet might it not be the case that true advances in human culture—the real leaps in collective understanding—typically result from some maverick individual action—some fundamentaldisobedience on the part of the individual subject? Such maverick actions often disturb—precisely because they need to get our attention. We have to be jolted out of complacency. The greatest artists invariably disrupt and disturb in this way. Like many of the novelists I've been describing, Goya gives us a shocking scene of intergenerational violence—but he does so, precisely, I wager, to force us to confront some of the deepest and hardest feelings we have—about parental authority and its rightful scope, about family violence, about the power of the old over the young, about the role of paternalism in society and government, about whether or not, indeed, those people we designate as "fathers" (priests, doctors, political leaders, scientists) or "mothers" (nurturers, apple-pie makers, self-sacrificing soccer moms, iPhone FaceTime partners, Mama Grizzlies, Tiger Mothers) really Know Best, about whether it is incumbent upon us to exert ourselves against them.You don't have to be a professor, I think, to see Goya as a radical naysayer—a human being horrified by a certain bestial and soul-destroying kind of parental authority. The focus in the "Saturn" painting is on paternal despotism; but elsewhere in Goya's oeuvre we find, too, a frightful bevy of murderous mothers—notably in Los Caprichos (1799), a suite of fantasy-engravings depicting monstrous witches, crones, goats, and owls engaged in child-torture of different sorts. The questions Goya raises remain awful and unremitting, more than 200 years later. Is the rule of life eat or be eaten, even if what you consume is your own child? (One of the most terrible things about "Saturn Devouring His Son" is surely the fact that the headless, half-eaten "child" has the proportions not of a newborn infant, but of an adult human being.) Should we resist our creator's authority? When and how and why? Or should we let ourselves be murdered in his name? When and how and why?Such questions lie at the heart of great literature too. What the early novel dramatizes, it seems to me, is nothing less than a radical transformation in human consciousness—the formation of a new idea. For better or worse, the ferocious, liberating notion embedded in the early novel is that parents are there to be fooled and defied (especially in matters of love, sex, and erotic fulfillment); that even the most venerated traditions exist to be broken with; that creative power is rightly vested in the individual rather than groups, in the young rather than the old; that thought is free. The assertion of individual rights ineluctably begins, symbolically and every other way, with the primal rebellion of the child against parent.So where are we today? Are we in the midst of some countertransformation? A rolling back of the Enlightenment parent-child story? Are we returning to an older model of belief—to a more authoritarian and "elder centric" world? The deferential-child model has dominated most of human history, after all. Maybe the extraordinary Enlightenment break with the age-old commandment—honor thy father and thy mother—was temporary, an aberration, a blip on the screen.My own view remains predictably twisty, fraught, and disloyal. Parents, in my opinion, have to be finessed, thought around, even as we love them: They are so colossally wrong about so many important things. And even when they are not, paradoxically, even when they are 100 percent right, the imperative remains the same: To live an "adult" life, a meaningful life, it is necessary, I would argue, to engage in a kind of symbolic self-orphaning. The process will be different for every person. I have my own inspirational cast of characters in this regard, a set of willful, heroic self-orphaners, past and present, whom I continue to revere: Mozart, the musical child prodigy who successfully rebelled against his insanely grasping and narcissistic father (Leopold Moz­art), who for years shopped him around the courts of Europe as a sort of family cash cow; Sigmund Freud, who, by way of unflinching self-analysis, discovered that it was possible to love and hate something or someone at one and the same time (mothers and fathers included) and that such painfully "mixed emotion" was also inescapably human; Virginia Woolf, who in spite of childhood loss, mental illness, and an acute sense of the sex-prejudice she saw everywhere around her, not only forged a life as a great modernist writer, but made her life an incorrigibly honest and vulnerable one.In a journal entry from 1928 collected in A Writer's Diary, Woolf wrote the following (long after his death) about her brilliant, troubled, well-meaning, tyrannical, depressive, enormously distinguished father—Sir Leslie Stephen, model for Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse and one of the great English "men of letters" of the 19th century:Father's birthday. He would have been 96, 96, yes, today; and could have been 96, like other people one had known: but mercifully was not. His life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books—inconceivable. ...The sentimental pathology of the American middle-class family—not to mention the mind-warping digitalization of everyday life—usually militates against such ruthless candor. But what the Life of the Orphan teaches—has taught me at least—is that it is indeed the self-conscious abrogation of one's inheritance, the "making strange" of received ideas, the cultivation of a willingness to defy, debunk, or just plain old disappoint one's parents, that is the absolute precondition, now more than ever, for intellectual and emotional freedom.

There are anectdotes, references to and thin findings of eighteenth century blacks gaining divinity instruction. They would go on to lead black congregations. We also know that the rare white independent astronomer or scientist would bring on black assistants in apprenticeship.Some nineteenth century mixed-race free blacks were invited to audit Harvard and Yale in divinity study. Across the land there were those who found temporary or partial welcome at predominently white colleges such as John Chavis at Washington and Lee University.Typically these few young men were of respected fathers, had excelled in school preparation and came from better than modest means.This group represented the tiniest trickle. We lack details, find the most minimal records of attendance and in fact they were more likely to simply be permitted to sit and listen to lectures rather than be formally enrolled.John Chavis enrolled at Washington and Lee University 1799. Richard Greener left Phillips Andover for Harvard and graduated in 1870. Edouard Bouchet graduated Yale in 1874.Below information from the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (JBHE):Key Events in Black Higher EducationJBHE Chronology of Major Landmarks in the Progress of African Americans in Higher EducationFor most of American history, a majority of the black population in this country was prohibited from learning to read or write. Today African Americans are enrolling in higher education in record numbers. Here are some key events that occurred along the way.1799: John Chavis, a Presbyterian minister and teacher, is the first black person on record to attend an American college or university. There is no record of his receiving a degree from what is now Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.1804: Middlebury College awards an honorary master’s degree to Lemuel Haynes, an African American who fought in the Revolutionary War.1823: Alexander Lucius Twilight becomes the first known African American to graduate from a college in the United States. He received a bachelor’s degree from Middlebury College in Vermont.1826: Edward Jones graduates from Amherst College. Jones is believed to be the second African American to earn a college degree.1826: Two weeks after Edward Jones graduated from Amherst College, John Brown Russwurm graduates from Bowdoin College in Maine. He is the third African American to graduate from college in the U.S.1828: Edward Mitchell graduates from Dartmouth College. He is believed to be the fourth African American to graduate from an American college.1833: Oberlin College in Ohio is founded. From its founding the college is open to blacks and women and has a long history of dedication to African-American higher education.1836: Isaiah G. DeGrasse received a bachelor’s degree from Newark College (now the University of Delaware). DeGrasse appears to be the first African American to graduate from any of the flagship state universities.1837: What is now Cheyney University in Pennsylvania is established for free blacks. It does not become a degree-granting institution until 1932.1837: James McCune Smith is the first African American to earn a medical degree when he graduates from the University of Glasgow in Scotland. Smith returned to the U.S. to be a physician. He also owned two pharmacies.1839: Samuel Ford McGill of Monrovia, Liberia, graduates from Dartmouth Medical School.1844: Oberlin College graduates its first black student, George B. Vashon, who became one of the founding professors at Howard University.1847: African American David J. Peck receives his M.D. from Rush Medical College in Chicago. He practiced in Philadelphia and later in Nicaragua.1849: Charles L. Reason is named professor of belles-lettres, Greek, Latin and French at New York Central College in McGrawville, New York. He appears to be the first African American to teach at a mixed race institution of higher education in the U.S.1850: Lucy Ann Stanton, a black woman, receives a certificate in literature from Oberlin College. She is a graduate of the college but did not receive a bachelor’s degree.1850: Harvard Medical School accepts its first three black students, one of whom was Martin Delany. But Harvard later rescinds the invitations due to pressure from white students.1854: Ashmun Institute (now Lincoln University) is founded as the first institute of higher education for black men. The school, in Oxford, Pennsylvania, later graduates Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall.1855: Kentucky’s Berea College is established, becoming the first interracial and coeducational institution in the South.1856: Wilberforce University in Ohio is founded as the second university solely for black students. Wilberforce was a destination point for the Ohio Underground Railroad.1856: Martin Henry Freeman becomes the first black college president at Avery College.1857: Richard Henry Green is the first African American to graduate from Yale College. Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Creed graduates from the Yale School of Medicine.1862: Mary Jane Patterson, a teacher, graduates with a bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College. She is considered the first African-American woman to earn a bachelor’s degree.1863: Daniel A. Payne, a historian, educator, and minister, becomes the founder and first black president of Wilberforce University in Ohio.1864: The first black female medical student, Rebecca Lee, graduates from the New England Female Medical College.1865: Patrick Francis Healy is the first American black to receive a doctorate, earning a Ph.D. from Louvain University in Belgium.1865: Before the end of the Civil War, approximately 40 blacks had graduated from colleges and universities, all of which were in the North.1866: Fisk University is founded in Nashville, Tennessee.1867: Howard University is founded in Washington, D.C.1867: Morehouse College (originally known as Augusta Institute) in Atlanta, Georgia, and Saint Augustine’s College in Raleigh, North Carolina, are founded.1868: Howard University opens a medical department, becoming the first school to have a medical program for blacks.1868: Hampton Institute (now University) is founded in Virginia.1868: Passing for white, Patrick Francis Healy becomes the first black faculty member at one of the nation’s highest-ranked and predominantly white universities when he joins the Georgetown University faculty to teach philosophy.1869: George Lewis Ruffin is the first black to earn a degree from Harvard Law School. In 1883 Ruffin became Massachusetts’ first African-American judge.1869: Mary Ann Shadd Carey becomes the first black woman student to enroll at Howard University’s law department. She does not graduate until 1884 at the age of 61.1869: Harvard awards its first degree in dentistry to an African American named Robert Tanner Freeman.1870: Harvard College graduates its first black student, Richard Theodore Greener, who goes on to a career as an educator and lawyer. After graduating from Harvard, Greener becomes a faculty member at the University of South Carolina. He is the first known black to be hired to the faculty of a flagship state university.1870: George F. Grant graduates with a degree of dentistry from Harvard. He later serves as its first black instructor at the dental school from 1878 to 1889.1870: John Mercer Langston, who held a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Oberlin College, becomes the founding dean at Howard University Law School.1870: James Webster Smith is the first black student admitted to West Point, though he does not graduate. He is court-martialed and expelled. He was commissioned posthumously in 1997.1870: By this time, approximately 22 historically black colleges and universities are enrolling students in the United States.1872: Charlotte Ray graduates from Howard University Law School in Washington, D.C., becoming the first African-American woman to do so.1872: John Henry Conyers is the first black student to enter the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. A year later he resigned after having academic troubles.1874: Patrick Francis Healy, a former slave who passed for white, is named president of Georgetown University, the first black at any predominantly white higher education institution in the United States.1874: Edward Bouchet, the son of a university janitor, graduates summa cum laude from Yale College.1876: Edward Bouchet becomes the first black to earn a Ph.D. at an American university. He receives his doctorate in physics from Yale.1876: Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, opens as the second medical school for blacks.1877: Henry Ossian Flipper, a former slave, becomes the first black man to graduate from West Point. Flipper was subsequently court-martialed and driven out of the Army on trumped-up charges of embezzlement. He was pardoned posthumously in 1999.1877: Inman Page, a former slave, is elected student body president at Brown University. He is believed to be the first black to be elected student body president at any of the nation’s highest-ranked and predominantly white universities.1877: George Washington Henderson, a student at the University of Vermont, is the first black student elected to the Phi Beta Kappa honorary society.1878: Winfield Scott Montgomery, a student at Dartmouth College, is the second black student elected to Phi Beta Kappa.1879: Wiley Lane, a student at Amherst College, is the third black student elected to Phi Beta Kappa.1880: At this time 45 black colleges and universities are in existence.1881: Howard University School of Dentistry is founded.1881: Spelman College, the nation’s first historically black college for women, is founded in Atlanta, Georgia.1881: Tuskegee Institute is established in Alabama with Booker T. Washington as its first principal.1886: Meharry Medical College establishes a dental school.1887: John H. Alexander becomes the second black student to graduate from West Point.1889: Alfred O. Coffin is the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in biological sciences. He earns his degree from Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington and starts a career as an educator.1890: About 64 black colleges are now enrolling students.1890: Ida Gray is the first black woman to earn a degree in dentistry. She graduates from the University of Michigan Dental School.1892: An Amherst College football player, William Henry Lewis, is named the first black All-American athlete.1892: Robert Robinson Taylor is the first black to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He spent more than 40 years on the faculty of the Tuskegee Institute and designed most of the campus’ buildings.1893: Daniel Hale Williams, a graduate of Chicago Medical College (now Northwestern University Medical School), performs the world’s first successful open heart surgery.1895: W.E.B. Du Bois earns his Ph.D. in history from Harvard, the first black to do so at Harvard.1896: George Washington Carver becomes director of agricultural research at Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute. Carver, a chemist and botanist, was known for developing a system of crop rotation and working with peanuts, soybeans, and sweet potatoes.1896: Booker T. Washington receives an honorary master’s degree from Harvard University.1897: Vassar College graduates its first black student, Anita Hemmings. Hemmings passed for white until she was outed a few weeks prior to graduation. The university expresses outrage at the deception but still grants her a degree.1897: Lutie A. Lytle graduates from the Central Tennessee College Law School. A year later she returns to the school as a member of the faculty.1897: Solomon Carter Fuller, a native of Liberia, graduated from the Boston University School of Medicine and became the nation’s first black psychiatrist.1899: Mary Annette Anderson of Middlebury College becomes the first black woman elected to Phi Beta Kappa.1900: More than 2,000 blacks have earned higher education degrees by this time, approximately 390 from white colleges and universities.1900: There are now 78 black colleges and universities in the United States.1904: The Kentucky legislature passes the Day Law, prohibiting interracial education. As a result, Berea College shuts its doors to blacks for nearly half a century. The college establishes Lincoln Institute for black students.1906: John Hope becomes the first black president of Morehouse College, a college for black men in Atlanta.1906: The first fraternity for black college men, Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, is founded at Cornell University.1907: Alain LeRoy Locke of Harvard University becomes the first black Rhodes scholar. Evidence shows that the Rhodes committee did not know Locke was black when he was offered the scholarship.1907: The University of Chicago graduates Charles Henry Turner, the first black Ph.D. in entomology.1908: The first sorority for black college women, Alpha Kappa Alpha, is founded at Howard University.1912: Carter G. Woodson becomes the second black in the U.S. to earn a doctorate in history. His Ph.D. is from Harvard. He goes on to found the Journal of Negro History in 1916 and inaugurates Negro History Week in 1926.1915: The first black to earn a Ph.D. in physiology is Julian Herman Lewis, who graduates from the University of Chicago. Lewis, an expert on immunology, authored The Biology of the Negro.1916: St. Elmo Brady becomes the first black to earn a doctorate in chemistry. He earns his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois.1920: Francis Cecil Sumner, a prolific contributor to Psychological Abstracts, becomes the first black awarded a doctorate in psychology. He earns his degree from Clark University in Massachusetts.1921: Eva B. Dykes from Radcliffe College, Sadie T. Mossell Alexander from the University of Pennsylvania, and Georgiana R. Simpson from the University of Chicago are the first African-American women to earn doctorates.1921: Thomas Wyatt Turner is the first African American awarded a Ph.D. in botany. He receives his degree from Cornell University.1921: Amherst College graduate Charles Hamilton Houston becomes the first black editor on the Harvard Law Review.1921: Jasper Alston Atkins becomes the first black editor on the Yale Law Review.1925: Clara Burrill Bruce becomes the African-American editor in chief on the Boston University Law Review.1925: Elbert Frank Cox becomes the first black Ph.D. in mathematics, earning his degree from Cornell University.1926: Howard University in Washington, D.C., appoints its first black president, Mordecai Wyatt Johnson. Johnson, an educator and pastor, was an inspiration for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s initial interests in nonviolence.1926: Charles R. Drew graduates from Amherst College. He goes on to establish the procedure for storing and transfusing blood plasma, saving thousands of lives. He later chaired the department of surgery at Howard University.1926: Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander is elected associate editor of the Pennsylvania Law Review.1926: Oberlin College awards an honorary doctorate in music to R. Nathaniel Dett, a black composer and conductor.1930: The University of Chicago awards the first doctorate in anatomy to a black, Roscoe Lewis McKinney. McKinney established the anatomy department at Howard University’s medical school.1931: Arnold Hamilton Maloney, the discoverer of the antidote for barbiturate poisoning, is the first black to graduate with a Ph.D. in pharmacology. He earned his degree from the University of Wisconsin.1931: Jane Matilda Bolin is the first black woman graduate of Yale Law School. She becomes the nation’s first black woman judge in 1939.1932: At this time there are 117 historically black institutions of higher education, 36 public and 81 private. Seventy-four are affiliated with religious organizations. Five are devoted to graduate level education.1932: E. Franklin Frazier, credited with building Howard University’s sociology department, publishes The Free Negro Family.1932: Frederick Douglass Patterson becomes the first black Ph.D. in bacteriology when he graduates from Cornell University. Patterson was a professor, then president, at Tuskegee Institute.1932: Columbia University awards the first doctorate to an African American in bacteriology, Hildrus Augustus Poindexter.1932: Samuel Milton Nabrit, former president of Texas Southern University, is the first black to be awarded a Ph.D. in embryology. He receives his degree from Brown University.1932: Robert Steward Jason becomes the first black to earn a Ph.D. in pathology. He studied at the University of Chicago.1932: The Journal of Negro Education begins publication at Howard University.1933: Harvard Business School graduates its first black MBA student, H. Naylor Fitzhugh, the founder of Howard University’s marketing department.1934: George Maceo Jones, an architecture professor, is the first black to earn a Ph.D. in civil engineering. He completed his doctorate at the University of Michigan.1934: Paul Bertau Cornely, a medical school administrator, is the first black to earn a Ph.D. in public health. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan.1935: Major Franklin Spaulding, a former professor at Tennessee A&I State College, is the first black to earn a Ph.D. in agronomy. Spaulding studied at Massachusetts State College.1936: The Maryland Court of Appeals rules that the University of Maryland Law School must admit black applicant Donald Gaines Murray after previously denying him admission based on his race.1936: Flemmie Pansy Kittrell, a home economics and nutrition professor, becomes the first black to earn a Ph.D. in nutrition. She received her Ph.D. from Cornell University.1938: Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada is decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. The ruling required the state to either allow Lloyd Lionel Gaines to attend the University of Missouri School of Law or create another school that would provide the same education for him. In response, the university builds a black law school. Three months after the ruling, Lloyd Gaines left his apartment to buy some postage stamps. He was never seen again.1941: A Harvard University black lacrosse player, Lucien V. Alexis Jr., is forced to sit on the sidelines in a game against the U.S. Naval Academy, which refused to allow blacks on its field. Protests erupted at Harvard, resulting in the university’s stating it would ban any games with similar requirements.1941: Lucille Bluford v. the University of Missouri is decided by the Missouri State Supreme Court. The university is ordered to admit Bluford to its journalism school only if the historically black Lincoln University does not admit her. As a result, Lincoln creates a journalism program.1941: The “Cocking Affair” in the University of Georgia system leaves two white professors, Dean Walter D. Cockling and Dr. Marvin S. Pittman, without jobs for promoting equality.1942: After the NAACP threatens to file suit on behalf of Charles Eubanks, who wanted to attend the engineering program at the University of Kentucky, the Kentucky State Board of Education votes to start a civil engineering program at the Kentucky State College for Negroes in Frankfurt.1942: Catholic University awards the first black Ph.D. in geology to Marguerite Thomas Williams.1943: Harry James Green Jr. becomes the first black to earn a doctorate in chemical engineering. He received his degree from Ohio State University.1944: The United Negro College Fund is established to raise money for private historically black colleges. Frederick Douglass Patterson is the founder.1945: Adelaide Cromwell becomes the first black faculty member at a highly selective liberal arts college when she joins the sociology department at Smith College, her alma mater in Northampton, Massachusetts.1946: Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, names Charles Spurgeon Johnson its first black president.1946: Alain LeRoy Locke becomes the first black to lead the American Association for Adult Education.1947: W. Allison Davis, a professor of education at the University of Chicago, becomes the first black faculty member to be appointed to a tenured position at one of the nation’s highest-ranked universities.1947: Don Barksdale of UCLA is the first African American to be named an All-American in college basketball.1947: John Leroy Howard, Arthur Jewell Wilson Jr., and James Everett Ward are the first black students to graduate from Princeton University. Princeton is the last Ivy League institution to admit black students.1948: Edwin D. Driver joins the sociology department at the University of Massachusetts. Ruby Pernell is hired at the University of Minnesota. It appears that they are the first black faculty members hired by any state flagship university in the twentieth century.1948: The U.S. Supreme Court rules in Sipuel v. University of Oklahoma that Ada Sipuel be admitted to the law school at the University of Oklahoma. The ruling states that blacks have the right to a legal education of the same quality as whites.1949: Wesley A. Brown becomes the first black to graduate from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. Brown survived ridicule during his college years and served in the Navy’s civil engineering corps for 20 years.1949: Sherrill D. Luke of UCLA becomes the second black to serve as student body president at a top university.1950: Ralph J. Bunche, officially a member of the Harvard University faculty although he never taught there, is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the 1948 Arab-Israeli peace settlement, becoming the first black to receive this distinction.1950: In Sweatt v. Painter the University of Texas School of Law is ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court to admit Heman Marion Sweatt. Sweatt enrolls but eventually drops out of the University of Texas School of Law after receiving poor grades.1950: The Supreme Court rules in McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education that black students admitted to the previously all-white graduate institution must not be segregated within the institution and must receive equal treatment in all aspects of the education process.1950: Kentucky’s Day Law is amended to allow black and white students above high school level to be educated together. Berea College is the first in the state to readmit black students.1950: The U.S. Court of Appeals requires the University of Virginia School of Law to admit Gregory Swanson, a practicing lawyer. Swanson, the first black admitted to UVA, did not complete his studies due to the inhospitable treatment he received.1950: The American Medical Association accepts black members for the first time.1950: The first Ph.D. in metallurgy is awarded to a black, Frank Alphonso Crossley, at the Illinois Institute of Technology.1951: The first black student is admitted to the University of North Carolina School of Law.1951: Princeton University awards its first honorary degree to an African American, Ralph Bunche.1952: The first black student is admitted to the University of Tennessee.1952: Joseph T. Gier, an engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley, is the second black faculty member to become tenured at a predominantly white university.1953: Walter N. Ridley, a psychology professor at Virginia State University, becomes University of Virginia’s first black graduate, receiving a doctorate in education.1953: Spelman College names Albert Edward Manley as its first black president.1953: The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania graduates its first black woman MBA student. Today, Wharton is unsure of the identity of the student.1953: Howard Thurmann was appointed dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University, the first African American dean at a major predominantly white university.1954: The University of Florida is ordered to admit black students by the Supreme Court.1954: In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that racial segregation in schools is unconstitutional.1955: Martin Luther King Jr., a graduate of Morehouse College, earns a Ph.D. in theology at Boston University.1956: Autherine Lucy is the first African American to enroll at the University of Alabama. After riots engulfed the campus, she is expelled for “her own safety.”1956: Lila Fenwick graduates from Harvard Law School, the first black woman to do so. Fenwick later led the United Nations’ Human Rights Division.1956: The University of Florida College of Law is ordered to admit Virgil Darnell Hawkins following a U.S. Supreme Court decision in Florida ex rel. Hawkins v. Board of Control. Hawkins withdraws his application as a condition by which Florida agreed to integrate the law school.1957: Legislation is passed in Tennessee requiring the desegregation of state universities.1958: The University of Florida law school admits its first black student, George Starke Jr.1960: Four black students from North Carolina Agricultural & Technical College hold a sit-in at the lunch counter of an F.W. Woolworth in Greensboro, North Carolina. This spurs a series of sit-ins in the South to demand racial equality.1960: Charles Edward Anderson becomes the first black to earn a doctorate in meteorology. He earned his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.1961: The term “affirmative action” is coined by Hobart T. Taylor Jr., a black Texas lawyer, who edits President Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925, which created the Presidential Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity.1961: Riots and protests by white students greet the University of Georgia’s first black students, Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes, when they arrive on campus to register. Hunter and Holmes are suspended until court orders allow their return.1961: Ernie Davis, a Syracuse University student and football player, becomes the first black to earn the Heisman Trophy signifying the best player in college football.1961: Harvey Washington Banks is the first black to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy. He studied at Georgetown University.1962: Riots erupt at the University of Mississippi when James Meredith arrives as the school’s first black student. Federal troops and U.S. marshals are sent in by President Kennedy to ensure Meredith’s entry. Two people are killed in the rioting on the Ole Miss campus.1962: Harry Lee Morrison becomes the first black faculty member at the U.S. Air Force Academy, joining the physics department for three years.1963: President Kennedy sends troops to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa to ease the admission of its first two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood.1963: Joseph Stanley Sanders and John Edgar Wideman become the first black Rhodes Scholars since Alain LeRoy Locke first received this honor in 1907.1963: Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes graduate from the University of Georgia.1963: James Meredith graduates from the University of Mississippi.1963: The first three black students graduate from the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. They are Charles Vernon Bush, Isaac Sanders Payne IV, and Roger Bernard Sims.1963: New Orleans’ Tulane University admits its first black students, five students in all.1964: John Hope Franklin joins the history department at the University of Chicago.1965: Vivian Malone becomes the first black graduate of the University of Alabama.1966: Texas Western University’s (now the University of Texas at El Paso) basketball team with all black players wins the NCAA tournament, becoming the first predominantly black team to do so.1966: The U.S. Coast Guard Academy graduates its first black student, Merle J. Smith Jr., who later becomes a lawyer and investment banker.1966: The Citadel admits its first black student, Charles DeLesline Foster. The university asks the media not to make a fuss about the event.1966: U.S. military schools hire their first black faculty members. Samuel P. Massie Jr. joins the chemistry department at the U.S. Naval Academy, eventually becoming its chair and founding the school’s black studies program. West Point appoints James L.E. Hill to the chemistry department and Reginald L. Brown to teach economics and government.1966: The Charles R. Drew Postgraduate Medical School in Los Angeles is founded and named after the blood plasma expert and Amherst College graduate. In 1987 the school is renamed the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science.1968: Students at Howard University stage a sit-in in the school’s administrative offices to demand a more black-oriented curriculum.1968: Boston University administration building is shut down by a student sit-in demanding a black history major and better treatment for black students.1969: Major M.M. Adams, a professor of military science, is hired by The Citadel, becoming its first black faculty member.1969: Vaughn Charles Williams serves as the first black president of a law review journal at a top law school. He is named to head the Stanford Law Review.1969: Armed black students at Cornell University demand an African-American studies program. The “Willard Straight Hall Takeover of 1969” evolved into larger arguments over equality. Administration officials gave in to the students’ demands. Pictures of the armed students exiting the building grace the covers of major magazines and newspapers.1969: National Guard troops kill one student when riots over a local high school election spill over to North Carolina A&T University.1969: Black students at Brandeis University take over the ad-ministration and communications building.1969: Clifton R. Wharton Jr. becomes the second black president of a predominantly white school, Michigan State University.1969: The African-American studies program is established at Harvard.1969: William M. Boyd III, a Massachusetts lawyer, is named a trustee at Williams College. At Yale University, Leon A. Higginbotham Jr., a Harvard Kennedy School professor and U.S. Court of Appeals judge, is named a trustee.1969: A suit is filed in Tennessee against the racial segregation in public higher education.1970: Protests are held by students at Ohio State University to demand the enrollment of more black students. The National Guard is called in to restore order.1970: Black students at Jackson State University in Mississippi protest racial incidents, leading to two deaths and 12 injuries.1970: Yale University Corporation has its first elected black woman, Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund.1971: Over 2,000 students at the University of Florida, Gainesville protest to demand the admission of more black students. The administration’s refusal to meet demands results in 100 black students leaving the university.1972: Kellis E. Parker, who was one of the five Black students to racially integrate the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, became the first full-time African American professor at Columbia Law School. Professor Parker, who graduated at the top of his class at the Howard University School of Law and was editor-in-chief of the Howard Law Journal, was granted tenure at Columbia in 1975.1974: Eight states, mainly in the South, submit plans to desegregate their state universities. The Department of Health, Education and Welfare accepts plans from Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Plans from Mississippi are rejected and Louisiana is sued for not presenting a plan.1975: W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research is established at Harvard University as a center for studying black history, culture, and social institutions.1975: Eileen J. Southern is the first black woman tenured as a full professor at Harvard University.1976: The U.S. Naval Academy admits women for the first time. Janie L. Mines is the sole black out of the 81 women.1976: Marian Wright Edelman is named to Spelman College’s board of trustees.1978: Regents of the University of California v. Bakke rules that while race can be used as a factor in university admissions, quotas are not allowed. Race can be used only as a factor in admission when all other factors are equal.1978: Morehouse Medical College in Atlanta enrolls its first class of students.1979: Sir Arthur Lewis, a black economics professor at Princeton University, wins the Nobel Prize in economics.1980: The first annual Black College Day is held in Washington, D.C., attracting 18,000 students who aim to increase attention to black colleges and universities.1980: President Jimmy Carter signs Executive Order 12232, a federal program to strengthen HBCUs and increase funding.1980: Howard University’s WHMM-TV becomes the first public broadcasting television station in the U.S. operated by African Americans.1980: The United Negro College Fund holds its first annual telethon, raising $14.1 million to support HBCUs. To date the telethon has raised more than $200 million.1981: President Ronald Reagan signs Executive Order 12320 which creates the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities and encourages federal support for HBCUs.1982: The Reagan administration launches a failed attempt to allow tax-exempt status to segregated private schools, including the Bob Jones University.1982: Faced with losing its accreditation, President Reagan approves a $55.6 million aid package to Meharry Medical College.1982: Annette Gordon becomes the first black woman editor on the Harvard Law Review.1983: Federal government sues the state of Alabama in an effort to force more desegregation in its system of higher education.1984: The U.S. Supreme Court rules in the case of Grove City College v. Bell that even though it is a private institution, it has to abide by antidiscriminatory laws since students receive federal financial aid. As a result, the school ends its participation in federal financial aid programs.1984: John Thompson of Georgetown University becomes the first black coach to lead a basketball team to the NCAA championship.1985: Grambling State University’s football coach, Eddie G. Robinson, breaks a college record with his 324th victory.1987: Johnnetta Betsch Cole becomes the first black woman president of Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia.1988: Some 200 students take over the New Africa House at the University of Massachusetts to protest racial incidents on campus. After six days, the university administration establishes new procedures to expel students who are found guilty of racial violence and to promote a more diverse curriculum.1988: Bishop College, a historically black institution in Dallas, Texas, closes due to financial problems.1988: Bill and Camille Cosby make the largest contribution from a family donor to any black college when they donate $20 million to Spelman College.1988: Sylvia A. Boone is the first black woman to become a tenured faculty member at Yale University.1989: Lee Atwater, the white chairman of the Republican National Convention, resigns as a trustee of Howard University after a sit-in by students.1990: The United Negro College Fund receives its largest donation ever of $50 million from Walter Annenberg.1990: Marguerite Ross Barnett is named president of the University of Houston, making her the first black woman to lead a major university.1990: Harvard’s first black law professor, Derrick Bell, protests the law school’s lack of a black woman faculty member by taking an extended leave of absence. He never returned.1990: The site of the former Bishop College becomes the new home for Paul Quinn College, another HBCU, which relocated from Waco, Texas, to Dallas.1990: A group called the Harvard Law School Coalition for Civil Rights files a suit against Harvard Law School saying it does not comply with Massachusetts law in its hiring women and minorities.1990: Michael L. Williams, the assistant secretary of education for civil rights, notifies organizers of the Fiesta Bowl that college scholarships set aside for black students at the two universities participating in the football game were in violation of U.S. civil rights law.1990: Barack Obama is elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.1992: In United States v. Fordice, the Supreme Court orders 19 states to take immediate action to desegregate their public higher education systems.1993: Princeton University professor Toni Morrison becomes the first African American to win the Nobel Prize for literature.1993: Condoleezza Rice is appointed provost at Stanford University, making her the first black chief academic officer at Stanford.1993: Barbara Ross-Lee, sister of Diana Ross of The Supremes, becomes the first black to head a predominantly white medical school in the U.S. when she is appointed dean of the medical school at Ohio University.1994: A desegregation plan is imposed on the state of Louisiana by a federal judge. Plan calls on the state to increase academic program offerings at historically black Southern University and to upgrade facilities at Southern campuses in Baton Rouge, Shreveport, and New Orleans. Plan also calls for increase in white students at Southern University and the number of black students at Louisiana State University.1994: Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals rules that the Benjamin Banneker Scholarship Program at the University of Maryland is unconstitutional because the state-sponsored program is limited to black students.1995: Ward Connerly, an African American and regent of the University of California, pushes through a ban abolishing all racial preferences in admissions to the university. Ban takes effect for graduate programs in 1997 and for undergraduates in 1998.1995: Ruth J. Simmons is elected president of Smith College making her the first black woman in this position at a highly selective liberal arts college.1995: Federal judge orders Alabama to set up a trust fund to pay for improvements in infrastructure and academic programs at its two predominantly black public universities, Alabama State University and Alabama A&M University.1996: In Hopwood v. State of Texas, Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals rules that the University of Texas School of Law cannot consider race as a factor in its admissions decisions. Ruling has the effect of law in the states of Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. As a result of the ruling, Texas attorney general suspends race-sensitive admissions at all state-operated institutions of higher education.1996: The esteemed sociologist William Julius Wilson leaves the University of Chicago and joins the Harvard University faculty.1996: California’s Proposition 209 is passed by California voters, banning the use of race in admissions to state universities. As a result, the number of black freshmen accepted at the University of California at Berkeley is down 57 percent in 1998, the first year the ban goes into effect.1997: In an effort to offset the effects of the Hopwood decision outlawing race-sensitive admissions, the Texas state legislature passes a law that automatically qualifies the top 10 percent of all high school graduating classes for admission to the University of Texas. By 2001, blacks are 3.5 percent of the entering class, up from 2.5 percent in 1997.1998: Proposition 200 is approved by Washington State voters, banning racial preferences in admissions decisions at public universities. One year later, black applicants to the University of Washington are down 17 percent.1998: The Shape of the River, by William G. Bowen and Derek Bok, a landmark study examining the use of race in college and university admissions, is published.1998: Federal judge in Ohio rules that minority set-aside program at Cuyahoga Community College is unconstitutional. Ruling warns college trustees that they may be personally liable if they continue to practice racial preferences.1999: Fearing lawsuits, the state of Oklahoma eliminates college scholarships earmarked for black and other minority students.1999: Florida governor Jeb Bush issues an executive order banning the consideration of race in admissions at state universities in Florida. The One Florida plan also contains a provision so that any Florida students graduating in the top 20 percent of their high school class will be automatically qualified for admission to Florida state universities.1999: California enacts policy that automatically qualifies students in the top 4 percent of their high school graduating class for admission to the state university system.1999: After threats of litigation, the University of Virginia admissions office ends a six-year-old scoring system that gave two bonus points (on a scale of eight) to black applicants. As a result, black enrollment in the freshman class drops from 11.2 percent in 1999 to 9.9 percent in 2004.2000: The University of Massachusetts announces a new admissions policy that uses a point system which downplays race and SAT scores and puts greater emphasis on a student’s high school grade point average.2000: Mount Holyoke College drops requirement for SATs in admission, causing a 50 percent increase in black applications and first-year enrollments.2001: Affirmative action admissions program at the University of Georgia is ruled unconstitutional by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. The next year black applicants drop by 20 percent.2001: University of Texas Law School decides not to use LSAT scores as the “primary factor” in determining admission. As a result, black enrollments increase but not up to pre-Hopwood levels.2001: A federal judge approves a five-year plan to further racial desegregation at the historically black Tennessee State University.2001: Ruth J. Simmons becomes president of Brown University. She becomes the first African American to lead an Ivy League institution.2001: The U.S. Supreme Court rules that states, including their public colleges and universities, cannot be sued for policies that may have a discriminatory effect. The ruling requires plaintiffs to show a deliberate attempt to discriminate against blacks or other minorities.2001: In a private meeting, Harvard president Lawrence Summers questions the academic scholarship of African-American professor Cornel West. West and Professor K. Anthony Appiah leave Harvard for Princeton.2002: New law school at the historically black Florida A&M University admits its first class of students.2002: State attorney general Jerry Kilgore of Virginia sends a memo to the presidents of state-operated colleges and universities urging them to give as little consideration to race as possible in the admission process to avoid potential legal challenges.2002: Thirty years after Jake Ayers Sr. sued the state of Mississippi claiming that the state’s black colleges and universities were underfunded, a federal judge approves a $503 million settlement in the case.2002: Seven black women are the first African-American women to earn diplomas from The Citadel.2003: In Gratz v. Bollinger, the U.S. Supreme Court outlaws the race-sensitive admissions policy at the University of Michigan that used a numerical formula which gave extra points to black applicants. But in the companion case Grutter v. Bollinger, the Supreme Court upholds an affirmative action program at the University of Michigan Law School, thus affirming the 1978 Bakke ruling that race can still be considered in admissions decisions. The Court says that only “narrowly tailored” affirmative action plans will be acceptable and hinted that in 25 years’ time, such race-sensitive admissions plans should no longer be necessary.2003: Immediately after the Supreme Court’s decisions in the Gratz and Grutter cases, the Center for Equal Opportunity sends letters to a large number of colleges and universities threatening to file complaints with the Office for Civil Rights if they continue to use race-based admissions programs that do not fall under the Supreme Court’s new “narrowly tailored” guidelines.2003: University of Georgia decides not to reinstate a race-sensitive admissions program after the Supreme Court ruled affirmative action admissions are constitutional.2003: After the Grutter ruling Rice University reinstates race-sensitive admissions, leading to a 60 percent increase in incoming black freshmen in the fall of 2003.2003: Ohio State University revamps admissions procedures in response to Gratz ruling. Minority students are no longer given extra points. Applicants are required to write short essays to better help admissions staff in their decisions. Black enrollments drop as a result.2003: National Association of College Admission Counseling survey shows that 33 percent of all colleges and universities use race as a factor in the admissions process.2004: Colorado Civil Rights Act, which called for banning race-sensitive admissions to Colorado state colleges and universities, is defeated by one vote in state Senate.2004: A lawsuit is filed by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund filed against California Polytechnic University at San Luis Obispo stating its admissions policy discriminates against black and Latino applicants.2004: The Center for Individual Rights files a motion in federal district court in Detroit seeking damages for white and Asian students denied admission to the University of Michigan undergraduate school from 1995 to 2003.2004: Using the Freedom of Information Act, the conservative group, the National Association of Scholars, presses public universities in 20 states for specific data on their race-sensitive admissions data.2004: Brown University president Ruth Simmons establishes a committee to investigate Brown’s former ties to slavery and determine if it needs to make reparations.2004: Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights publishes report listing race-neutral alternatives to increase racial diversity in higher education. Subsequently, many of the outreach programs highlighted in the report see their funding slashed by the Bush administration.2004: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issues report highly critical of the Bush administration’s record on equality and educational opportunity.2004: Right-wing National Association of Scholars files a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education challenging the affirmative action admissions programs at the University of Virginia, North Carolina State University, the University of Maryland at Baltimore School of Medicine, and the law school at the College of William and Mary.2005: Bush administration changes the formula for Pell Grant eligibility. About 89,000 low-income students will no longer receive a Pell Grant.2005: Bush administration proposes to eliminate the Perkins loan program for low-income students. Congress rejects the proposal and funds the program.2006: Michigan Civil Rights Initiative to ban affirmative action in the state wins a place on the November 2006 ballot.2006: After 15 years, Henry Louis Gates Jr. steps down as chair of the African and African-American studies department at Harvard University.2006: Black literary scholar Houston A. Baker Jr. is highly critical of the Duke University administration for its handling of allegations about a sexual assault on a young black woman by members of the Duke lacrosse team. Weeks later, Baker announces he is leaving Duke for Vanderbilt University.2006: Blacks slightly close the racial gap on the SAT college admissions test. But the test comes under increasing criticism due to scoring errors and the reliability of the new writing segment in predicting student performance in college. Dozens of colleges and universities drop the requirement that applicants take the SAT.2006: Harvard University, Princeton University, and the University of Virginia end their early admisssions programs. It is generally agreed that this development will help black students increase their enrollments at these institutions as early admissions give an advantage to applicants from families with high incomes.2006: Princeton University establishes the Center for African-American Studies. It is projected that within five years, Princeton undergraduates will be able to earn a bachelor’s degree in black studies.2006: Parties agree to settle the 25-year-old racial desegregation case concerning the higher education system in the state of Alabama.2006: Walter F. Massey announced his retirement as president of Morehouse College in Atlanta. Massey, Morehouse’s ninth president, is the former head of the National Science Foundation.2006: The Geier Scholarship program is discontinued at the University of Memphis. The university’s legal counsel decides that the black-only scholarship program is no longer permissible. At the time 193 black students were receiving Geier scholarships.2006: The Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice issues a report detailing the university’s past ties to slavery. The committee stops short of issuing an apology but offers recommendations on steps the university can take to make amends.2006: Henry Louis Gates Jr. was named the Alphonse Fletcher Jr. University Professor at Harvard University. Gates is one of 21 scholars who hold a University Professorship, Harvard’s highest faculty position.2006: By a margin of 58 percent to 42 percent, voters approved a public referendum in the state of Michigan banning the use of racial preferences by any agency of the state government. The referendum mandates that the University of Michigan and other state-operated colleges and universities abandon the use of race as a positive factor in the admissions process.2007: Researchers at Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania find that 40 percent of all black students at the eight Ivy League colleges had at least one parent who was born outside the United States.2007: Julianne Malveaux, an economist, author, and syndicated newspaper columnist, was named president of Bennett College, the historically black college for women in Greensboro, North Carolina.2007: At Harvard University there were 32 varsity coaches. Not one of these 32 coaches was black. Furthermore, there had not been a black head coach in any sport at Harvard for the previous 15 years.2007: Danielle Allen, a member of the faculty of the University of Chicago since 1997, is the first African American to be appointed to the permanent faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.2007: Natasha Trethewey, associate professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta, was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.2007: Two African-American students were among the 32 students slain by a lone gunman at Virginia Tech.2007: The board of visitors of the University of Virginia issued a formal apology for the university’s use of slave labor in the period from 1819 to 1865.2007: Walter Kimbrough, president of Philander Smith College in Little Rock, Arkansas, calls for all black colleges and universities to withhold ranking information from U.S. News & World Report. Kimbrough stated that the rankings are inherently unfair to black colleges and universities.2007: For the first time in the school’s 238-year history, Dartmouth College graduated its first set of triplets. The three graduates are African-American sisters from San Diego, California.2007: Caroline M. Hoxby, a highly regarded African-American economist, left Harvard University for Stanford University. Hoxby decided to make the move to Stanford after Harvard denied tenure to her husband Blair Hoxby, a scholar of the theater during the Renaissance period. Stanford offered both Hoxbys tenured positions.2007: Karen Morris, a 44-year-old African American from Pennsylvania, became the first grandmother of any race to earn a degree from Yale Medical School.2007: The College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Kentucky hires 64 new faculty members. Not one is black.2007: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision in the case Parents Involved in Community School v. Seattle School District No. 1 et al. that school districts in Seattle and Louisville could not use the factor of race to assign students to public schools.2007: Elijah Anderson, a sociologist and one of the nation’s leading authorities on issues of urban inequality, was named William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Sociology at Yale University. Dr. Anderson was the Charles and William L. Day Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has been a faculty member since 1975.2007: James L. Sherley, an African-American associate professor of biological engineering at MIT, did not have his contract renewed. The locks on his laboratory were changed and police were stationed outside the facility. Professor Sherley was denied tenure in 2005. He contended that the decision to deny him tenure was driven by racist views among his departmental colleagues.2007: A new report from the Southern Regional Education Board found that there are 1.1 million blacks enrolled in colleges and universities in the 16-state region. This is a very large 52 percent increase from a decade ago.2007: Ted DeLaney was named chair of the history department at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. Founded in 1782, Washington and Lee is the ninth-oldest institution of higher education in America. Professor DeLaney is the first African American ever to chair an academic department at the institution.2007: Brittney Exline of Colorado Springs enrolls as a freshman student at the University of Pennsylvania. At age 15 she is the youngest African-American female ever to enroll at an Ivy League university.2007: The U.S. Census Bureau reports that there are three times as many African Americans housed in prisons as there are blacks who live in college dormitories. The study found that in 2006 there were 846,735 African Americans incarcerated in adult correctional facilities in the United States. But there were only 270,018 African Americans who lived in college dormitories.2007: Alicia Jillian Hardy becomes the first African-American woman to achieve a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.2007: The Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine, located across the street from the Apollo Theater in Harlem, is the first new medical school to open in New York State in the past 30 years.The Touro medical school states that it “was founded to improve medical care in the Harlem community and increase the number of minorities practicing medicine.”2007: John Payton, the attorney who represented the University of Michigan in the two affirmative action cases that reached the Supreme Court, was named director-counsel and president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.2008: Evelynn Hammonds, the Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science, professor of African-American studies, and senior vice provost for faculty development and diversity, was named dean of Harvard College. She is the first woman and the first African American to be named dean of the undergraduate college.2008: Jean Leonard Touadi, a native of the Congo who is a lecturer in political science at Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata, was elected to the Italian parliament.2008: Sidney A. Ribeau is appointed the 16th president of Howard University. He previously served as president of Bowling Green State University in Ohio.2008: According to the U.S. Department of Education, in the year 2006 blacks earned 142,420 four-year bachelor’s degrees from American colleges and universities. The number of blacks earning bachelor’s degrees increased more than 4 percent from the previous year, 2005. In 2006 the number of African Americans earning bachelor’s degrees was the highest in this nation’s history. The figure was more than double the number of bachelor’s degrees earned by blacks in 1990.2008: The U.S. Department of Education reports that blacks earned 6,223 professional degrees in 2006. They made up 7.1 percent of all professional degrees awarded in the United States that year. Included are degrees in medicine, law, dentistry, and several other fields. Since 1985 the number of blacks earning professional degrees each year has more than doubled.2008: According to the U.S. Department of Education, blacks have made striking progress over the past 20 years in increasing the number of master’s degrees earned. In 1985, 13,939 African Americans were awarded master’s degrees from U.S. universities. During the 2005-06 academic year this figure had more than quadrupled to nearly 59,000. The percentage of all master’s degrees earned by blacks increased from 5 percent in 1985 to 9.9 percent in 2006.2008: A new report by the Council of Graduate Schools finds that African Americans continue to make strong progress in enrollments in master’s and doctoral degree programs. The data shows that in 2007 there were 170,167 African Americans enrolled in graduate education in the United States. They made up 13 percent of all graduate students. This equals the black percentage of the U.S. population.The progress has been steady and significant. From 1997 to 2007 black enrollments in graduate education have increased an average of 8 percent each year. This compares to an overall increase in graduate school enrollments of 2 percent a year.2008: New data compiled by the National Collegiate Athletic Association shows that the graduation rate for black students increased one percentage point this year. This is the seventh consecutive year in which we have seen a one percentage point increase in the college graduation rate for both black men and black women.2008: Data from the U.S. Department of Education shows total enrollments of 248,800 African Americans at the nation’s historically black colleges and universities. Of this total, black women account for 62.2 percent of all African-American enrollments.2008: By a margin of 58 to 42 percent voters in Nebraska approve a public referendum that bans the consideration of race in admissions decisions at state-operated universities. A similar measure is narrowly defeated in Colorado.2008: Barack Obama is elected president of the United States on a platform that promises significantly increased financial aid for low-income college students, increased support for historically black colleges and universities, and continued support for affirmative action in higher education.2008: The National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago reports that 1,821 African Americans earned doctoral degrees at U.S. universities in 2007. This is an increase of 10 percent from 2006 and nears the all-time high set in 2004.2008: Norman Francis celebrates his 40th anniversary as president of Xavier University in New Orleans. He accepted the offer to become president of Xavier University on the day Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Dr. Francis is the longest tenured college president in the United States.2008: The U.S. Department of Education reports that in 2007 there were 37,862 black faculty members at degree-granting institutions in the United States. Black faculty accounted for 5.4 percent of the total faculty at all degree-granting institutions. Blacks have made snail-like progress in winning greater faculty positions. More than a quarter-century ago, in 1981, blacks were 4.2 percent of all faculty in higher education.2009: Elizabeth Alexander, professor of African-American studies at Yale University, reads a poem at the inauguration of Barack Obama as president of the United States.2009: Johnnetta Cole, the anthropologist who served as president at both Spelman College and Bennett College for Women, was named director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art.2009: Economic stimulus bill passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama includes nearly $7.2 billion in extra funds for the Pell Grant program for low-income college students. This is a huge 40 percent increase in funds allocated to the program for the next fiscal year.2009: Yale University announces that it is phasing out its ethnic counselor program for incoming freshmen. At the time there were 90 residential counselors and 13 ethnic counselors whose responsibility was to help black and other minority students adjust to campus life.2009: Education Department reports that over 4.5 million living African Americans now have four-year college degrees. More than 100,000 living African Americans hold doctorates.2009: John Hope Franklin, the nation’s preeminent African-American historian, dies at the age of 93.2009: Benjamin F. Payton, only the fifth president of Tuskegee University since its founding in 1881, announced his retirement. Dr. Payton has led Tuskegee since 1981.2009: Department of Education reports that more than 2.2 million African Americans are currently enrolled in higher education. This is the highest number of blacks enrolled in higher education in U.S. history.2009: Claude Steele is named provost at Columbia University. Steele, known for his theory of stereotype vulnerability, has served on the faculty at Stanford University since 1991. Two years later, Dr. Steele returned to Stanford as dean of the School of Education.2010: Theodore Lamont Cross, the founder of The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education and author of the books Black Capitalism and The Black Power Imperative, dies at the age of 85.2010: The National Science Foundation reports that in 2009, 2,221 Black Americans earned doctorates, an all-time high.2011: Manning Marable, the M. Moran Weston and Black Alumni Council Professor of African-American Studies and professor of history and public affairs at Columbia University, died from complications of pneumonia at the age of 60. Dr. Marable’s biography, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, was published three days after Professor Marable’s death.2011: Ruth Simmons announces that she is stepping down as president of Brown University. In 2001, she was named the first African American president of an Ivy League university.2012: Spelman College, a highly rated liberal arts college for women in Atlanta with a predominantly Black student body, has announced that it will end all intercollegiate sports and focus instead on a new “Wellness Revolution.”2012: Fisk University in Nashville reached a final agreement to share some of its art collection with a museum in Arkansas. Under the agreement, Fisk will receive $30 million.2013: Rodney Bennett was selected as president of the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg. He is the first African American president of any of the five predominantly White state universities in Mississippi.2014: Michael V. Drake was appointed the first African American president of Ohio State University.2014: The U.S. Supreme Court rules that voters in Michigan have the right to ban race-sensitive admissions at state-operated colleges and universities.The JBHE research department would like to thank Caldwell Titcomb, professor emeritus at Brandeis University, for his assistance in the preparation of this timeline.Without regard to who you think would best be able to beat Donald Trump in the general election, which of these Democratic presidential candidates would you rather see as President of the United States?Deval PatrickKamala HarrisCory BookerJoe BidenArchives Select Month December 2019 (12) November 2019 (333) October 2019 (448) September 2019 (187) August 2019 (94) July 2019 (100) June 2019 (86) May 2019 (99) April 2019 (97) March 2019 (95) February 2019 (89) January 2019 (95) December 2018 (92) November 2018 (93) October 2018 (99) September 2018 (89) August 2018 (97) July 2018 (97) June 2018 (92) 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