Negro Digest - Freedom Archives

A Case Study
4 0
A young sociologist, dismissed frorn the nation's leading predominantly-Negro
university for his militant pro-black activities, provides
a first-person account of the events u~lr.ich led to his dismi-ssal
BY NATHAN HARE
OWARD UNIVERSI-
TY spreads like a
complex of cancerous
sores on a breast-like
hill in the heart of one
of the worst sections-by most
criteria-of the District of Columbia
. The university, which is
drably cached in subdued majesty
midway the census tracts heaviest
in "social disorganization," was
founded in hypocritical contradiction
by an ambivalent general,
Oliver Otis Howard, apparently a
"God-fearing" religious fanatic
who forewent his ambition to become
a minister, later a lawyer, to
gain power through military might
and position .t
My office during my first three
years as a professor at Howard was
in a third floor corner of what once
was General Howard's mansion on
the campus . From there I could see
the Washington Monument and the
Capitol Building just beyond the
squalor of Washington's ghetto . On
the way to the office each day I
passed through the confusion and
anguish of students waiting in the
building to gain admission to the
"counseling center" where their
educational fates would be dictated
to them by hostile clerks hoping,
somehow, to piece together the
debris from overly zealous administrative
decrees .
Today, viewing Howard from a
distance of more than a mile, yet
from the vantage point of an intimate
exposure to its inner workings,
I am able to watch it writhe
March 1968 NEGRO DIGEST