April 4–6, 2003
The Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College developed and hosted Negotiating Success: Workshops for Black Men in Liberal Arts Colleges, a unique meeting of Black men in academia. This event brought together 53 African-American male students (20 from Wabash) from 11 liberal arts colleges, along with 13 faculty or staff delegates from 10 schools. Students from Wabash’s Malcolm X Institute largely ran this weekend of "energy [for exploring] topics of concern to Black men in liberal arts," as one participant put it. The focus was on ways that Black students, both in historically Black as well as in predominantly white institutions, negotiate their survival and success in liberal arts colleges. Two institutions represented at Negotiating Success, Morehouse College and Tougaloo College, are historically Black colleges.
Featured activities at the Friday–Sunday event included a keynote address by Dr. Lee Jones, president of the Brothers of the Academy, and a plenary lecture by John Aden, Wabash College professor of history. Students spent most of their time in small and large group workshops, discussing such issues as strategies used in achieving academic success, Black male identity development, intra-group differences and similarities, and the responsibilities of leadership (in the tradition of W. E. B. DuBois) at liberal arts colleges. The faculty and staff who accompanied the visiting students, and a number of Wabash College faculty and staff, led these workshops.
Each college team left with an action plan for institutional, personal, and community change, which should help guide activities at participants’ home campuses in coming semesters. Participants considered the workshops a success, and expressed a strong desire to continue similar, more expanded programs in the future. In workshop evaluations, participants affirmed how valuable they found the "brother to brother interaction" in discovering and sharing "effective ways to lead and learn."
Negotiating Success was the first student conference sponsored and organized by the Center of Inquiry. Among its most significant accomplishments for the students involved was the opportunity it provided for serious discussions, about a number of issues, with students from other campuses and other parts of the country. For many, the chance to talk about their own experiences on campus, and to hear similar stories echoed from other students on other campuses, was itself a cathartic exercise. Virtually every student made the discovery that "I am not alone in this," with respect to his struggles or successes. Many of the rewards of this conference, it seems, came from the reciprocal storytelling, and the opportunities that it provided for each student to reflect on his own behavior, and to see his own campus from the perspectives of others. This process of discovering confidence in one's voice constitutes an important first step in the dialogues about the circumstances of Black men at liberal arts colleges nationwide.