Experts Cite Strides, Struggles for Blacks in Higher Education Since Juneteenth - Higher Education: PHILADELPHIA ― Historically Black colleges and universities continue to be relevant in the 21st century, according to the director of a center that emerged in response to a history of inequality and lack of minority access to higher education at the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Marybeth Gasman, head of the Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions and professor of higher education in the Graduate School of Education, refutes the notion that HBCUs are not an integral part of American higher education.
“Perfect students on paper do not always translate to perfect students,” Gasman said at The Library Company of Philadelphia’s annual Juneteenth Freedom program. “We have to stop comparing HBCUs to Ivy League institutions unfairly.”
The seminar theme, “Freedom and its Aftermath: Black Education from Emancipation to the Present,” commemorated one of the oldest known celebrations for the end of slavery in the United States by highlighting the overarching HBCU significance since 1865, and the fight for equal education post Brown v. Board of Education.
