Harvard Business School Case Study: Why Progress Stalled For African-Americans

‘NO DEAN IN THE HISTORY OF THE SCHOOL HAS BEEN WILLING TO SPEND HUGE AMOUNT OF SOCIAL CAPITAL ON THIS’

With the exception of the race issue, Nohria generally gets high marks for his deanship over the past ten years. .”I thought then and think now that Nitin was the best choice at the time and he has been an excellent dean for the school,” adds Thomas who also could have been chosen by then Harvard President Drew Faust to be dean in 2010. “He brought more change in ten years than I saw in the 20 years before he was appointed. He added things to the first-year curriculum that had been rejected only years before like experiential learning. He raised $1.4 billion and was instrumental in bringing in eight- and nine-figure gifts to other schools besides HBS. He took us online, and he transformed the physical campus. What he did around the gender issue at the college was about as courageous as you could be, and he caught a lot of flak for it early on. He appointed women to powerful roles and in numbers that we hadn’t seen before.

“I know Nitin has struggled with the question of how do we do better on the issue of race,” adds Thomas. “The charge of him not valuing it or seeing it, I don’t think that’s the case. The only thing I think you could say is it’s an area that no dean in the history of the school has been willing to spend huge amounts of social capital to make happen. The leadership at department levels also have not been willing to spend social capital. That is the thing that has been missing. You’ve got to say, it’s not by accident that we don’t have black people at Harvard Business School.”

While Nohria has failed to measurably increase the numbers of Black students, faculty, staff, his own senior leadership team, and case studies with Black protagonists, the dean largely inherited the situation he is now trying to improve before he leaves his deanship by the end of this year. Duff McDonald, who has extensively researched the school’s history for his book The Golden Passport, believes the answer for the school’s dismal record is “pretty straightforward: The ideas that animate HBS and the rest of the MBA Industrial Complex spring straight from the erroneously named Enlightenment in which white men proclaimed that white men know more than others,” he insists. “Not only is that offensive, but such a foundation for a philosophy hardly makes room for anything resembling actual diversity in execution.”

THE HBS AFRICAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE HAS BEEN FRAUGHT WITH DISAPPOINTMENT

In common with so many American institutions, the history of Blacks at the Harvard Business School is fraught with disappointment. Seven years after the founding of Harvard Business School in 1915, Wendell Thomas Cunningham became the first black student to graduate from the institution, one of 27 men in the Class of 1915. Between 1915 and 1968, a span of 53 years, however, there was a sum total 42 black graduates of HBS with many class years having no black graduates at all.

It was only after the five African Americans who entered HBS in 1967 formed an Afro-American Student Union and began to lobby the administration for action that things began to improve. Those five students walked into Dean George Baker’s office to confront him over the paucity of Blacks in the program. It had to take courage for them to do so, because in the midst of the social unrest and upheaval, at HBS it was business as usual. “While sit-ins were taking place in Cambridge, HBS students continued analyzing cases and making decisions for corporations, while coming to class in business attire,” recalls Lambert. “The attitude at HBS seemed to be that only business-related matters had an effect on the school.”

In The Golden Passport, author McDonald portrays Baker as a somewhat reluctant advocate for Blacks whose comments about minority admissions were “tin-eared.”  “In 1968, when the topic of America’s racial inequality could no longer be ignored, even at HBS, he made the preposterous claim that HBS’s involvement in addressing the country’s racial problems ‘has been wide, deep, and unpublicized.’ Of the very specific—and well-publicized—problem of paltry minority admissions, Baker blamed society itself, not HBS, for the school’s poor performance to that point. ‘The school has endeavored for years to increase the number of Black students in its programs,’ he wrote, as if there had been some mysterious impediment to its ability to simply increase the number of Black students in its programs.”

‘WE HAD PROFESSORS WHO ASKED BLACK STUDENTS ‘IS THIS TOO DIFFICULT FOR YOU?’

Caving to both societal pressure and a handful of pro-active African American students, HBS enrolled a record 27 Black students into the Class of 1970. “The best explanation for the sudden shift that Baker could come up with was that ‘the Black community is becoming more aware of the very real opportunities that exist in business for Blacks,’” wrote McDonald.

To his credit, Dean Baker went to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and requested $1 million to support a five-year fellowship program for African Americans attending Harvard Business School. The Sloan Foundation offered him $5 million, to be funded over five years, if Baker took the lead and organized a fellowship fund for African Americans who attended the graduate schools of business administration at ten universities. He did just that and over what was termed “loud and sustained protest from some members of the HBS faculty,” the number of black graduates increased from 5 in 1969 to 27 in 1970 and to 58 in 1971. The improvement would occur as the African American Student Union became more aggressive in advocating for Blacks, holding a strike in 1970, openly calling the school racist, and sending 52 demands to the administration.

Yet, for both African Americans and women, acceptance at a largely white and male school was hardly a given. According to a 1971 alumna, “At the beginning of the first year, there was a feeling on the part of some of the men enrolled that the school had bent its standards to let under-qualified African Americans and women in and that therefore, because of us, ten white guys per section didn’t get in. It seemed that the white males resented the Blacks more than they resented the women in terms of chair space. But we were all sort of tokens, perceived that way.” A 1973 alumna would add that the reception from the professor was no less hostile. “We had professors who, in the middle of a class, would look at the women and the African Americans and say, ‘Is this too difficult for you?’”

‘THE NUMBER OF BLACK STUDENTS HAS LARGELY REMAINED STUCK IN THE FIFTIES FOR THREE DECADES’

The improvement in enrollment also would prove ephemeral, and the Sloan fellowship fund would later collapse among disagreements from the involved schools. It also would take more than a decade before the first African American faculty member at HBS would gain tenure in 1985 with the promotion of Jim Cash. After reaching that early high of 58 MBA Grads in the Class of 1971, there would follow a steady decline to 54 in 1972, 49 in 1973, and 45 in 1974 (see chart below). The following year, in 1975, the numbers would crash, plunging to just 28 graduates in 1975. It would take 20 years for Black representation in a Harvard class to exceed that early 1971 record. In the Class of 1991, there were 62 African American grads.

Ever since, the numbers of African-American MBA students at Harvard have gone up and down, as high as 74 in 2009 and as low as 39 in 2006. But as Dean Nohria would concede in his mea culpa in early June, “The number of Black students in our MBA program has largely remained stuck in the fifties for three decades, and the number of Black students in our Doctoral program–a pipeline for developing future faculty members–is low to nonexistent in any given year. We have too few Black staff, and even fewer Black colleagues in leadership positions. Cases and research featuring Black protagonists and racial challenges are woefully underrepresented.”

Yet, his prescription for resolving the challenge seemed wanting. He proposed a website page of HBS resources, a diversity training program for staff and faculty, an annual report on the school’s objectives and progress toward racial equity, and an effort to identify new ways of recruiting and retaining Black students, faculty and staff. There were no concrete goals set to improve the percentages of students, faculty or staff, not even a vague promise to increase case studies with Black protagonists.

‘THERE IS STILL AN INTERNAL MINDSET OF CIRCLING THE WAGONS’

“He’s given no numbers,” says Rogers. “Nothing definitive. I personally believe that the mindset of the school is, this will blow over with time. Let’s keep saying we’re working on it. There is still an internal mindset of circling the wagons and saying, ‘No, we are right.’ That is the arrogance we see relative to this general issue around Black lives issues in general. It doesn’t matter what you say. We are not going to change, and if we do, it will be on our own timeline and when we feel like it.”

The bitterness evoked by Rogers contrasts greatly with the early optimism he brought to the campus as a senior lecturer in 2012. Rogers had earned his MBA at Harvard in 1985 when there were just 35 Blacks in his graduating class. He had been teaching entrepreneurial finance at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management for 17 years when he was in Boston on a consulting assignment. On a lark, he went to the dean’s office and left a memo indicating that he was interested in coming back home. The very next day, Rogers was contacted by Frances Frei, then the newly named senior associate dean for faculty development and recruiting. “She was in the beginning stages of her own recruitment effort for Black faculty,” recalls Rogers. “So I dropped in her lap.”

He leaped at the chance to join his alma mater as a senior lecturer in 2012. No one would mistake him for a radical. Rogers was on the board of directors of several companies, including SuperValue and S.C. Johnson. Rogers was named one of the top twelve entrepreneurship professors at graduate business schools in the U.S. by BusinessWeek in 1996. The following year, he was named one of the fourteen “New Stars of Finance” by BusinessWeek. Yet, he was appalled by what he experienced when he arrived back on campus.