Race or Merit: The Rosenwald Fund and Paternalism's New Mask in the American Academy

Using archival research from the Rosenwald Fund Records and various university records, this presentation explores the Rosenwald Fund’s faculty desegregation letter writing campaign. In 1945, Fred Wale, Rosenwald director of Education, wrote over 600 college and university presidents asking them to consider hiring qualified African American applicants. He included a list of qualified African American candidates, most of whom were current or former fellows of the Rosenwald Fund’s fellowship program (1929-1949). About one third of the presidents replied, and the campaign resulted in only a handful of faculty hires despite the critical need for additional faculty resulting from the GI Bill. The records of this attempt reveal that much of the language surrounding both the acceptance and rejection of the Rosenwald scholars appealed to the concept of meritocracy, sometimes in conflicting ways.

The implications of this tension between notions of meritocracy, that one should be qualified regardless of race, and an expectation of specialized knowledge based on race, is explored in the latter half of the presentation. Doing so establishes how the Fund officers, university administrators, and the scholars themselves conceptualized diversity and in relation to rhetoric regarding meritocracy in important ways well before Regents of the University of California vs. Bakke affirmed diversity as a justifiable basis for affirmative action and before the politics of Black Studies departments led to contentious debates on college campuses. This episode also suggests how paternalism historically specific to university administrators and Fund officers set enduring limitations on future attempts to desegregate faculty.