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

‘SOMETHING IS AWFULLY WRONG WITH THIS PLACE’

“When I arrived, my impression was that something is awfully wrong with this place,” he recalls. “It was like I was stepping back in time. I was amazed at the absence of black people in every part of the school, in the faculty, in the case studies, in the staff. There were just no black people at the school in any capacity, from the lowest occupation to the highest. It struck me that this was a step back in time where nobody cared about black people.

“It was something that was extraordinarily unusual for me to experience,” he recalls. “At Kellogg, we had black deans. My ex-wife was the dean of admissions, a black man was dean of the executive program, and we had course heads who were black. We had senior black faculty. And then I came here and it was just the opposite of everything I had experienced. The place was reminiscent of 30 to 40 years ago. There was benign neglect. We were invisible.”

There was only one case study in the required curriculum and it was “ten to 15 years old,” he says. “There was an anti-Blackness at the school. I say that because there was diversity on the campus. There was a large community of Southeast Asians but many of them had embraced the same anti-Black practices of their white colleagues.”

TOLD BLACK STUDENTS TO KEEP A DIARY OF THEIR CLASS PARTICIPATION

Rogers also discovered that the African American Student Union was on the verge of disbanding, partly because it could not enlist the help of a faculty advisor. “Nobody who seemed to care and they were struggling,” he says. Rogers volunteered to become the group’s faculty advisor and asked that every member of AASU come to meet with him one-on-one. “What I found was that Black students weren’t getting credit for speaking in class,” he says. At Harvard Business School, where class participation counts for 50% of a student’s grades, that was a significant problem. “So I told certain Black students to keep a diary of every time they spoke along with the words or thoughts they added to a discussion because too many Black students are being told they are not speaking enough in class or that their content is not meaningful. 

“One student came to my office and said, ‘Thank God, you told me to keep a diary.’ I had told students to meet with their professors and ask how they were doing in their classes. He did that and the professor told him, ‘You’re not doing very well. You haven’t spoken enough.’ He pulled out his diary and cited the days he contributed and what he added to the class discussion, and the professor said, ‘Oh, I  had you confused with somebody else,” that diary is like the iPhone for George Floyd. It is the means with which Black students can arm themselves with evidence against what they are being told.”

Nohria, the first Indian-American to lead HBS, had become dean of the school two years earlier. He brought about several big changes, from revising the MBA curriculum to launching a major effort to deal with gender inequality. But like Baker before him, he seemed to have a tin ear for dealing with the absence of African Americans at the school. So Rogers began initiating meetings with Nohria, often once every two months in 30-to-40 minute long sessions to advance a Black Agenda at the school.

‘THE DEAN SEEMED TAKEN ABACK’

“At one meeting, we talked about an incident at the law school where someone defaced the portraits of the Black professors in the lobby of the law school,” remembers Rogers. “I told him you have to speak up. This is not just the law school’s problem. You have to speak strongly and decisively from the business school.” Nohria issued a statement condemning the incident.

At another meeting, Rogers says he raised the issue that there was only one tenured African American professor at the school, Linda Hill, and only one tenure-track professor. Never in its history had the school recruited a tenured Black professor. Every African American faculty member at HBS who was awarded tenure was homegrown. Rogers urged Nohria to change the model. “He seemed taken aback,” recalls Rogers. “I said, ‘You just can’t continue the process you’re going through. You have to get innovative and go outside the school and recruit. This process is not working. We have to do something completely different.’ That obviously didn’t resonate.”

Yet another meeting to address the lack of Black students saw Rogers unsuccessfully making the case that many African Americans found themselves competing for class seats with white students who had advantages that came from their privileged upbringing and their employers who wanted them to get an MBA. “I talked about finding a way to have black applicants be in an apples-to-apples situation with white candidates who come from consulting firms,” says Rogers. “Those firms would actually give their junior consultants a bonus of $6,000 to $10,000 to pay for personal GMAT tutors. I said, ‘We have to find some way to help because there is no way that black people can compete against that.’”

‘THE DEAN DIDN’T NECESSARILY AGREE OR DISAGREE BUT IT DIDN’T GET DONE’

When Rogers asked Nohria about the absence of case studies with Black protagonists, Rogers recalls the dean saying, ‘Steve, I don’t have control over that. The department heads have control over that.’ So I said well I am going to meet with every course head and ask them to include at least one case study in every course with a black protagonist.’ I met with every single course head and said to them, ‘Here’s the problem. I assume that you believe that diversity and to our students to black men and women are important.’ Nobody disagreed. Some were more positive than others. But the result was virtually nothing.”

That was also true, says Rogers, with Nohria. “I could tell by the absence of any progress that there was this passive aggressiveness occurring. The absence of saying no does not mean yes. And that was the situation with Nitin. He didn’t necessarily agree or disagree, but it didn’t get done.”

When the school chose to name a new managing director of admissions in 2016, passing over a highly experienced African-American alum who had years of experience in student recruitment and admissions, Rogers was so incensed that the meetings with Nohria ended and the two became estranged. After Rogers was turned down for a promotion, he left the school in 2019 after seven years.