| In seeking to expand Burton Clark's earlier study of organizational saga, I set out to examine the role of race and pragmatism in the emergence of the sagas (or stories) of three Midwestern academic institutions of higher learning---North Park University, Oberlin College, and the University of Evansville. Although their histories share Protestant idealism, each academic organization experienced its own racial and ideological evolution that dictated the extent to which the sagas would evolve against the backdrop of the so-called "Negro problem.";Adopting a qualitative approach that included interviews, document analyses, and observations, I found a significant amount of tension between idealism and pragmatism in the emergence of organizational saga. I drew from John Dewey's brand of pragmatism to explore this tension and found that, in the face of prevailing anti-Black sentiments, a more vulgar (undemocratic) pragmatism and expediency---rather than Christian idealism and principles---served the ideological and cultural self-interest of the universities. In varying degrees, the Negro became both a symbolic and real threat to the "community" life of the university. Consequently, he was inextricably linked to and inevitably calculated (or miscalculated) in the natural rhythm of academic organizations. So, in a real sense, the saga of the university is the saga of the Negro.;As a social system, an organization owes much of what it has become to the environment that spawned it. As such, given the prevalence of race in American social discourse and consciousness, sagas cannot be understood apart from the racial dynamics that legitimize the respective versions. So, whether s/he is deliberately excluded or included, the Negro occupies a unique, although seldom acknowledged, place in the academic organization. Such findings have implications not only for the critical nexus between higher education and other social systems, but also for the pursuit of an integrative framework to account for and remedy certain educational outcomes among African Americans. In the final analysis, I suggested the importance of revisiting John Dewey's educational philosophy not only to explain the pragmatic impulse of universities, but also to unveil the undemocratic tendencies and paradoxical idiosyncrasies that lie beneath their public veneer. |
