THE MECCA V HOWARD AS INSTITUTION OF HIGHER EDUCATION

I was born in 1944 in Belmont, Port-of-Spain. Wayne A. I. Frederick, the current president (#17) of Howard University was born at the Port-of-Spain General Hospital in 1971 but spent the first few months of his life at a home in Belmont. It was in 1971 that I first “came to America” to begin doctoral studies at UCLA. Ta-Nehisi Coates, the celebrated author of Between the World and Me and recipient of a MacArthur genius award for 2015, was born in Baltimore in 1975, the very year I earned the Ph.D. in Spanish. In 1977, I joined the Howard University faculty as assistant professor of Spanish.

Coates makes an important clarification: “I was admitted to Howard University, but formed and shaped by The Mecca. These institutions are related but not the same. Howard University is an institution of higher education, concerned with the LSAT, magna cum laude, and Phi Beta Kappa. The Mecca is a machine, crafted to capture and concentrate the dark energy of all African peoples and inject it directly into the student body . . . The history, the location, the alumni combined to create the Mecca—the crossroads of the black diaspora” (40).

There was a period in the 1990s when Wayne Frederick, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ian Isidore Smart were fellow members of the Howard University community. Coates asserts that Howard limited his potential because: “It was still a school, after all. I wanted to pursue things, to know things, but I could not match the means of knowing that came naturally to me with the expectations of professors.” Howard University, the institution of higher learning, failed young Ta-Nehisi. He could not be more clear: “The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests.” Whereas Coates withdrew from Howard University without completing any degree, President Frederick completed the B.S. / M.D., his specialization in surgery, and the MBA at the institution of higher learning.

            In my nearly four decades as a faculty member, I have had as my major goal the bridging of the gap between the library and the classroom, between the Mecca and the institution of higher education. It was with this goal in mind that I founded the Afro-Hispanic Institute Press, the Afro-Hispanic Review and Original World Press. For this would, beyond doubt, facilitate the adoption of textbooks which enable students to experience “the vastness of black people across space-time,” thereby almost ensuring that every class would be an adventure.

            The University has entered a critical phase of its existence; and its board of trustees has taken the bold step of placing the reins of the presidency for the first time in the hands of a “foreign Black.” Indeed, not only is the 17^th president a “foreign Black,” but so too are his provost and the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. As the president moves to chart a course through these troubled waters, he will surely seek to ensure that The Mecca and Howard University, the institution of higher learning, become one and the same, an indivisible union.