This address concerns the initial integration of African American scholars into the American academy. It traces an interesting and unusual national campaign that first opened the doors of northern white universities to African American scholars. The primary focus is on what this campaign reveals about the interrelationship of race and meritocracy in mainstream American higher education during the immediate post-World War II period. It is also a story about a select pool of highly qualified African American scholars and their opportunities for employment at northern white universities. Finally, this is also a history of a particular process of institutional racism. One underlying purpose is to explore the usefulness of the social science concept of institutional racism for framing and explaining the formation and development of specific types of racial exclusion or discrimination in educational systems that operate with explicitly race-neutral or “color-blind” laws, procedures, and policies.

The question of whether high school students should follow a uniform academic program or choose from options in a differentiated curriculum has reemerged in the 1980s as one of the most crucial issues facing American public education. In its latest incarnation, brought to life by the publication of A Nation at Risk and subsequent proposals and manifestos, the debate has been framed as one between educational excellence, on the one hand, and equality of educational opportunity, on the other. In response to increasing demands for excellence throughout the 1980s, many states and local districts adopted minimum academic competency exams for high school graduation or for passing from the eighth grade into high school, and set or raised the minimum level of academic performance required for participating in extracurricular activities. Yet many of these efforts were met with a chorus of criticism from educators, liberal politicians, and minority leaders who argued that such changes would have a disproportionate effect on black and Hispanic youths, blocking their participation in athletics and other activities, raising their already high dropout rates, and in countless other ways stunting their aspirations for entry into the academic mainstream. These criticisms echoed a very old idea in American education, a definition of equal educational opportunity, which we believe has done immeasurable damage over the years to the educational experience of American youth in general, and African American youth in particular.

The publication of An Educational War on Poverty: American and British Policy-making, 1960-1980 (Cambridge University Press, 1991), by Harold and Pamela Silver, offers educational historians a rare opportunity: to debate the potential of comparative study, to assess the origins and impact of recent wars on poverty on both sides of the Atlantic, and to revisit policy questions that continue to fascinate many scholars. Like previous symposia published in the HEQ, this scholarly exchange aims to enliven discussions about history, policy, and scholarship.

We are grateful to Harold and Pamela Silver, of Oxford, England, and their distinguished critics. They are Dennis Dean of the Institute of Education, University of London, Clyde Chitty of the University of Birmingham, Robert Lowe of the National-Louis University, and Hugh Davis Graham of Vanderbilt University.