Reinvented New Jersey College Embraces Minority Identity

Reinvented New Jersey College Embraces Minority Identity: Bloomfield College, started in the mid-1800s by the Presbyterian Church as a school for German ministers immigrating to the United States, today proudly stands among the nation’s predominantly Black colleges. It’s a status the small private college did not seek and only fully embraced after a painful evolution marked by racial demographic changes in its target commuter population, race riots in its largest nearby city, a court fight with tenured professors and a conscientious decision to embrace diversity—the welfare of the school requiring it.

“I helped the college understand what it had become and that was kind of a sea change,” says Dr. John Noonan, a veteran educator recruited by Bloomfield as president in 1987. “I knew which way the country was moving. Colleges that didn’t aggressively recruit non-White students were going to become anachronistic. It was not that I came and brought something new. All I did was to help people understand why that was occurring.”

It was important to embrace diversity, says Noonan, who retired from his post in 2003, “because that’s who we were by the time I got there. African-American students saved the school,” he says, pointing to the steady enrollment of Black and other minorities that helped offset the loss of White students who began leaving Bloomfield en masse in the early 1970s.