Making It on Broken Promises Review

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Making It on Broken Promises ReviewWhile Cornel West writes the introduction for this book, his contribution adds little and it is really just a way for him to symbolically bless this text. In 2001, the new president of Harvard ridiculed Professor West's scholarship and implied that he had better meet with him weekly to prove that he is creating work worthy of Harvard. Further, while it was okay for the Harvard president to have served on Clinton's campaign committee, this guy condemns West for working on Al Sharpton's forthcoming presidential bid. As a result, West and the openly gay African scholar Anthony Appiah left Harvard and relocated to Princeton. At a time when Brown University has become the first Ivy League to have an African-American president, black folk are getting dissed at Harvard. The editor of this anthology tries to use West's tragedy as a jumping off point for discussing black men in the halls of tertiary education. However, he never details what happened to West. Anyone not up on what happened to West in 2001 wouldn't understand Jones' point in the slightest.
This anthology attempts to ask what keeps black men from going to college and tries to answer how we can get them to attend, finish, and possibly go on to graduate school. This project is wonderful, but as the example above illustrates, I am uncertain about the results here.
Cornel's forward aside, one of the book's best accomplishments is demonstrating that Cornel West is not the only brother out there.Each contributor has a page showing his photograph and listing his many accomplishments and publications. This is one strategy that is going to show brothers they can make it because others have paved the way for them.
This book is a huge gray area. On the one hand, there are incredible chapters here. For example, Skip Ellis describes how he became the first black man to get a Ph.D. in computer science. However, Irving McPhail has a long confusing chapter that is supposed to discuss black men in community colleges and it doesn't do so until the very end of his chapter. The book tries to explore the tragic paucity of black men in higher education in an exhaustive manner. Nevertheless, much of what is mentioned here could have been discussed in a quick journal article, rather than a 15-chaptered book. On the one hand, this book has a great diversity of writing styles. On the other hand, it's incredibly hodgepodge.
Additionally, this books focus on gender seem undirected. Many authors emphasize why they are focusing on black men; other authors stress that what they discuss applies to all genders of African-descent people. I am not sure if this incongruence celebrates multiple views or illustrates a lack of focus. And finally, this book is not much different from the editor's last book "Brothers of the Academy." I kinda don't know why he bothered to compile a second work after reading this.Making It on Broken Promises OverviewSixteen of America's leading scholars offer an uncompromising critique of the academy from their perspective as African American men.They challenge dominant majority assumptions about the culture of higher education, most particularly its claims of openness to diversity and divergent traditions.What is remarkable about the chapters that make up this book--despite the authors' different paths to success, their disparate fields of study, and their distinct voices-is their almost unanimous message that higher education is inimical to African Americans.They take issue with the processes that determine what is legitimized as scholarship, as well as with who wields the power to authenticate it. They describe the debilitating pressures to subordinate Black identity to a supposedly universal but hegemonic Eurocentric culture. They question the academy's valuing of individuality and its privileging of dichotomy over their cultural styles of community, humanism and synthesis. They also range over such issues as culturally mediated styles of cognition, the misuse of standardized testing, the disproportionate burden of service placed on African American faculty and a reward system that discounts it.Given stature of these authors, and their outspoken message, this book demands attention from leaders and faculty in predominantly White institutions, as well as from Black scholars and graduates aspiring to a career in higher education.

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