A Black administrator, a white campus, and social change

“Why are you guys in the bathroom during classes?”

It was 1967 and Phillip Jones, a Black south side Chicagoan, had just started teaching physical education and psychology at a high school in Flint, Michigan. As a hall monitor, Jones noticed that Black boys would spend first period in the boys’ restroom, and one day he went in and asked them why. A student he coached answered:

“'Doc Jones,’ he said using a nickname his teammates had dubbed me within the training room, ‘The teachers lock us out when the bell rings.’

‘Why were you late for class in the first place?’ I countered.

‘I work nights and it’s hard for me to get up for school at 8 o’clock in the morning,’ one guy said, initiating a cascade of excuses. Others blamed the teachers for what they perceived as a prejudice against the Black male students. I was surprised to learn there were high school boys working full-time at the Buick plants. I explained I understood their feelings but impressed the importance of showing a responsible attitude and the value of putting forth their best effort to do well in school.”

To his predominantly white colleagues at the next teachers’ meeting, however, Jones condemned the lockout. The response? “No one said a word.” This is a pivotal moment for Jones who realized “it is more important to win than simply to raise hell.”

Within months of that exchange, he will live through Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, a Flint police arrest the next day as he tried to calm a group of youths (to the cops, despite his suit, “I was just another Black man in the criminal ‘just us’ system”), and a fresh start at the University of Iowa, where he was to spend a forty-year career as a recruiter and dean of students. Along the way, Jones helped thousands of Black students, along with Native Americans, Latinos, and Asians from small towns, urban neighborhoods and beyond, to matriculate and “win” as undergraduate and graduate students.

Nothing Beats a Failure But a Try is a memoir not only of a distinguished career, but of the art, for a Black man in the higher echelons of a large bureaucracy, of navigating the world of what W.E.B. Du Bois calls “dual consciousness”: the Black vernacular of his hard-scrabble upbringing by his mother, and the white insider status quo. Jones finds peace in this “double existence” by leading equal opportunity programs as an “extension of the protest movement to create social change, developed outside the veil in concert with whites.”

Working within the system, he constantly navigates, often precariously, the line between serving as an advocate for students with whom he relates, his own belief that one must strive for excellence regardless of obstacles (“nothing beats a failure but a try” was his mother’s admonition), and the white-defined hurdles to professional success. This is evident in his desire to compromise when students confront him during the anti-Apartheid divestment movement of the 1980s, and the 2002 sweatshop movement against contracting with exploitative companies to produce campus swag.

He also describes at length being the highest ranking administrator on campus during a harrowing school shooting by a disgruntled Chinese student in 1991, bringing calm to a fearful and grief-stricken campus while quelling xenophobia.

But his gift was in persuading the administration and at least one major donor, Roy G. Carver, that bright students could be found in factory towns and Native settlements. They could and should be held to the same rigorous standards as those from resource-rich schools. Jones and his colleagues in the EOP vanguard also recognized that admissions and scholarships were essential but insufficient to ensure that low-income undergraduate or graduate students of color would thrive. They needed supportive faculty who recognized the hurdles they leapt to get there: “residential red-lining, housing discrimination, unemployment, low wages, job discrimination, underfunded, ill-equipped, inadequately staffed schools, and low social expectations.”

Today’s common practice of summer orientation originated as an EOP initiative. Health care was essential too. “Soon after EOP students arrived on campuses, directors began to hear complaints from students about their eyes, teeth, hearing, and breathing.”

Jones invokes the now-ubiquitous term “social distance” in its original context. Black and Asian students drank far less than whites, and when they did, social distanced in their dorms in part to avoid racial harassment by whites in local bars. In 1998, Jones, now Dean of Students at Iowa, helped develop the Stepping Up Project, a “campus-community coalition” to raise awareness of the race and class dimension of the binge drinking culture and develop alternatives.

Jones guided the redevelopment of the Iowa Memorial Union on campus, which decades before had excluded Black students from its programs. Renovations between 1989 and 2004 brought Black students – and ultimately all types of students excluded from the mainstream – from margin to center into an inclusive “town square” school community. Black alumni chose IMU for a Black Hall of Honor. A life-sized bronze sculpture of a woman, “Stepping Out,” by celebrated artist Elizabeth Catlett, is the focal point for a wing named for Philip Hubbard, research engineer and “the first Black vice president in the Big Ten.” With a supportive University president, Mary Sue Coleman, the IMU project even won funding over a renovated football stadium.

“It is the glorious opportunity of this generation to end the one huge wrong of the American Nation,” asserted President Lyndon Johnson to the graduating class of Howard University, the historically Black college, at the height of the civil rights movement in 1965. That wrong was the Nation’s centuries of “hobbl[ing] by chains” African Americans in every conceivable way. The remedy, the President said, cannot stop at bestowing equal rights but establishing “equality as a fact and equality as a result.”

But over time affirmative action veered away from that aim of “remedying centuries of black disadvantage to that of promoting diversity, which, one might argue, could be achieved in the complete absence of blacks,” historian Orlando Patterson wrote recently in The New York Times. Jones did not allow this to happen under his watch and remained a tenacious advocate for Black students even as his scope broadened to the “human rights of all.”

Phillip Jones’ fascinating life is essential reading for those who seek a first-person account from a member of that generation who seized the opportunity to end the one huge wrong for Blacks in the sphere of education.