Xavier University in New Orleans is the same institution that produced the lauded and widely admired Surgeon General, Dr. Regina Benjamin, who headed a non-profit health clinic in rural Alabama. A must-read article in the New York Times describes how the tiny powerhouse of a university–the only Catholic HBCU–produced not only compassionate leaders like Dr. Benjamin, but it produces more black students who apply to and graduate from medical school and more who graduate with degrees in biology and physics than other, better endowed schools. With limited resources,
but committed professors, Xavier is one of the top four colleges producing black pharmacists, and third in the nation producing black graduates who later earn doctorates in science and engineering. How do they do it?[Related: White House Names 2015 HBCU All-Stars]
Read the excerpt here:
Norman Francis was just a few years into his tenure as president of Xavier University of Louisiana, a small Catholic institution in New Orleans, when a report that came across his desk alarmed him. It was an accounting of the nation’s medical students, and it found that the already tiny number of black students attending medical school was dropping.
It was the 1970s, at the tail end of the civil rights movement. Francis, a black man in his early 40s, had spent most of his life under the suffocating apartheid of the Jim Crow South. But after decades of hard-fought battles and the passage of three major civil rights laws, doors were supposed to be opening, not closing. Francis, the son of a hotel bellhop, had stepped through one of those doors himself when he became the first black student to be admitted to Loyola University’s law school in 1952.
Francis believed he was in a unique position to address the dearth of black doctors. Xavier served a nearly all-black student body of just over 1,300. At the time, most of Xavier’s science department was housed in an old surplus Army building donated to the college by the military after World War II. It had no air-Âconditioning, and the heater was so loud in the winter that instructors had to switch it off to be heard. But the science program had always been strong, if underfunded, and began producing its first medical-Âschool students not long after the university was founded in 1925.
Today, Xavier’s campus is mostly wedged between a canal and the Pontchartrain Expressway in Gert Town, a neighborhood in the western part of New Orleans. It has some 3,000 students and consistently produces more black students who apply to and then graduate from medical school than any other institution in the country.
Read more at the New York Times.