Fighting the Brain Drain

The South was the "Sahara of the Bozart"--mediocre, stupid, lethargic. So insisted Supercynic H.L. Mencken. Even Virginia, the "most civilized" state in the South, was an "intellectual Gobi or Lapland," where education "had sunk to the Baptist-seminary level; not a single contribution to human knowledge has come out of her colleges in 25 years."

Since Mencken published his notorious essay in 1920, many oases have bloomed in that Sahara, among them the present-day Universities of North Carolina, Texas and Virginia as well as Duke, Vanderbilt, Rice and Tulane. Nevertheless, when indices of excellence are applied to higher education, the South, in general, comes up short. Slightly more than a quarter of the nation's 3,016 accredited institutions are located there, but a 1970 study showed that the South had only 5% of the nation's best graduate programs and just 8% of the best graduate faculties. In 1975 fewer than 7% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences were associated with institutions in the South.

Why the paucity of an intellectual culture in the South? Historically, according to W. J. Cash in his classic book, The Mind of the South, the causes are in the rural surroundings, which offered few stimulations; the strength of religion, which answered philosophical questions with prayers; and, most of all, the defense of slavery, which "set up a ban on all analysis and inquiry, a terrified truculence toward every new idea." A simple world spawned simple pursuits. "Horses, dogs and guns, not books, ideas and art" were Southerners' "normal and absorbing interests." Or, as Henry Adams wrote in his Education, "Strictly, the Southerner had no mind; he had temperament."

Today, the most distinguished of Southern university presidents, Vanderbilt's Alexander Heard, 59, concurs with Cash on the devastating effect of slavery. In the century since the Civil War, which caused further cultural stagnation, the nation's intellectual ferment has taken place mostly outside the South. Says Heard: "Strength breeds strength. The streams of intellectual creativity coming from Cambridge, Massachusetts, reinforce and regenerate themselves." Centers of intellect, he maintains, are highly concentrated and "tend to be self-perpetuating."

Only in the intellectual fields of history and fiction has the South been brilliantly represented. But most of the luminaries left the South--Robert Penn Warren, Truman Capote, Lillian Hellman, William Styron went to the North to write. Historians C. Vann Woodward, Julian Boyd and David Donald went to the North to teach. Explains one Deep South professor who moved away ten years ago: "Southern universities were not exactly bastions of freedom. Intellectuals could be severely hassled, and professors who held divergent views had to be either gutsy or masochistic to stay. It's difficult to seek or create mental challenges when you have no peace of mind." As recently as 1972, more than half of the colleges the American Association of University Professors censured for not supporting academic freedom and tenure were in the South.

Now, however, Heard and many others believe that higher education in the South is emerging "from the shackles of its inheritance." One major reason: the region is no longer burdened by a polarized biracial society, which Heard feels was the root cause of its economic, cultural and educational problems. The rapid economic growth of the region should also help contribute to its universities' welfare. Says Heard: "Over the long haul, the most important single determinant of academic quality is the financial strength of the institution." The faculty salaries at Southern four-year colleges for all ranks of teachers average $15,500--$2,000 under the national level.

Another plus for today's South, says Heard, is a freer "market of intellectual talent than before. Southerners are moving all over the country and non-Southerners are moving into the South." One intellectual who has returned is Sheldon Hackney, 42, a Southern historian who became provost of Princeton, then moved to New Orleans to become president of Tulane. He and his wife, Hackney says, "always knew we would like to come back to the South and see what we could contribute."

Positive Signs. One way that the South can help to reverse the brain drain to the North, suggest both Hackney and Heard, is to better integrate its universities. At Tulane only 5% of the 5,000 students are black; at Vanderbilt the percentage is even lower: 4% of 6,900 students. At both universities the black students are unwelcome in fraternities and sororities and do not join the mainstream of campus life. Yet even that degree of integration represents a revolutionary change in race relations over the past decade.

One of the ironies of integration is that it has weakened the black colleges. Even though many blacks can now go to white schools, Howard University's James E. Cheek argues that the nation still needs predominantly black institutions "through which blacks can have a means of expression and which can serve as cultural centers for black communities." For seven years the president of the nation's most prestigious largely black university, Cheek, 43, has become something of a Southern chauvinist. He believes that "Southerners are more willing to talk candidly about race and to identify bigotry as bigotry," and adds, "I have always found that a reconstructed white Southerner on matters of race is committed. It's not for show." Like Heard and Hackney, Cheek sees positive signs for education in the South's more open racial dialogue.

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