[The Federalist] Beyonce’s new Netflix movie about her Coachella performance exposes the audience to the culture of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). HBCUs appeal to people because of their history and tradition.These colleges continue to provide an education to black students, although all races are welcome to attend, that emphasizes being positive members of our community. While people like Beyonce and billionaire Robert Smith shining the spotlight on HBCUs can benefit the institutions, I fear mainstream culture has began to corrode the mission of some of these colleges. That includes my alma mater, Morehouse College, which has been an all-male institution ‐ until now.
Morehouse, the Powerhouse
Morehouse is an all-male college that boasts alumni such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Howard Thurman. The Atlanta-based college, like the city it is located in, has a strong gay male culture. In 2009, students cross-dressing on campus led administrators to create a dress code that explicitly forbade students from wearing women’s clothes.
Despite the dress code, the shifting culture around gender identity brought many young men who consider themselves gender non-conforming. I attended Morehouse with several non-conforming students who are biologically male, and I consider them just as much my Morehouse brothers as any other alumnus.
When Morehouse hired last year its first non-alumni president in five decades, I feared he would bring the sort of corrosive liberal policies that define predominantly white colleges and universities. This fear may have been founded, since the men’s college has recently changed its admissions policy to include the acceptance of transgender people who are biologically female.
The new policy states, "Morehouse will consider for undergraduate admission those applicants who live and self-identify as men, regardless of the sex assigned to them at birth." This makes it clear the agenda of its Ivy League-educated president is to make Morehouse just like the liberal, white campuses that he is accustomed to. The "who live" part of the policy is the most troubling.