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DETOUR: APATHY
The Voice of
Black Womanhood
SPOTLIGHT ON:
Dean Chivers
With a distant look of fondness, and a tinge of
nostalgia, Dean Naomi Chivers reflects upon the
“evolution and revolution” here at Spelmart Col
lege. She has been here since 1961, and sees those
years as being marked by “three distinct periods.”
She describes' the period of the early Sixties as
being a “period of complacency.” During these
years, the women were more academically inclined.
They were concerned with getting out of school,
and with making good grades. Dean Chivers says
that the Student Government Association (SGA)
and other campus organizations were much strong
er then, and attributes this to the fact that there
was “much stronger individual leadership.”
During the period of complacency, the women
were more concerned with affairs within the college
community, and there was little involvement with
city affairs. It is also during this period that there
was much talk of “the Spelman Woman and the
Spelman image.” Quietly, and with a look of pride,
Dean Chivers says “it was very easy to identify a
Spelman Woman-by her decorum, her manners,
and the places that she went. There evolved a pride
in being different, and out of that grew the ‘atti
tude’ or air of speciality.”
The mid-Sixties are described as the “period of
the awakening of the Spelman woman to the po
tential in her Blackness.” With the beginning of the
sit-ins (so distinctive of this period), Spelman came
“out of complacency and into involvement with
the community.” Under the guidance of such
people as Julian Bond, Herschel Sullivan and gra
duate Marian Wright, Spelman women began to
actively participate in CORE, and the Student Non
violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
Dean Chivers sees these years as being a “period
of concern for others, and the freedom to be con
cerned.” There was great participation from the
Morehouse-Spelman community in the sit-ins and
demonstrations, and there was a type of “position
of honor” in being jailed for participation in such
affairs. The Dean says that “at the beginning of the
sit-ins, the thrust was for integration—and at the
end, pure Blackness.”
The Seventies have been labelled as the “period
of desired responsibility.” However, one of the ma
jor characteristics of this period on campus, as well
as nationwide, is apathy. “The students want a
feeling of stability, and along with that they want
fun, and the freedom to move. They want security,
and they expect it from college. These needs are
identical with those they have from the society.”
Dean Chivers feels that our next thrust should
be toward the building of a cultural atmosphere-
she thinks that it is time that we provided it for
ourselves. She feels very strongly about leadership—
“we ought to be awakening to the leadership in
Blackness. As for inspiration, take away the leader,
and it is lost.”
After reflecting on the past, and the present,
Dean Chivers sees a fulfilling future for the Spelman
woman. “With the heritage of Spelman, and the
experience of becoming concerned about the free
doms of Black people, becoming aware of the
strengths and tasks ahead of them, I would say
that the Spelman Woman is on the brink of her
greatest achievement.”
Dean Naomi Chivers, a mellow and pensive voice
of Black Womanhood.
By Ethel N. Watts
“Learning isn’t a duty that we must be
flogged into performing; it’s our birth
right, our very human specialty and
joy. Places to learn are everywhere. So
are reasons to learn. All we need, oc
casionally, is a little help from our
friends.”- Jerry Farber
I am a junior at Spelman, which means I have
been here for two and one-half years, excluding
the summers. I would consider myself to be a fair
ly intelligent person, although if you asked me to
define intelligence, I am afraid I would have to
struggle very hard and long to find the right words
to make up a meaning. As a freshman, I came to
this school with a mixture of feelings. Mainly, I was
scared (no, let’s make that terrified). I had a vague
idea that I was going to college to get a degree so
that I could then proceed to get a good job. That
was the theory. Actually, I was going to college be
cause everyone who expected me to would have
been greatly disappointed if I hadn’t. In short, they
would have made me feel very, very guilty.
After about a semester at this illustrious college,
I began to come to grips with myself. The theory
and the reality were not matching. Classes were
boring or they made me work more than my body
Really getting over?
By J. Edgar Whoover
“I think, therefore I am "—Descartes
Spelman is a small, isolated community with a
surprisingly homogeneous student body. A women’s
school immediately adjacent to all male Morehouse
and several co-ed colleges, Spelman students are ru
mored to be academically sound. Funny how things
work out. I’d like to discuss the most popular means
of graduating—“getting over”: a curious phenome
non characterized by cheating, plagiarizing, faking
and otherwise disguising one’s ignorance of a given
subject matter in a desparate attempt to conjure up
passing grades. In this way Spelman students usually
by-pass the challenge of rigorous academic work.
Pourquoi?
I imagine most people are aware of the fierce
competition that faces anyone on the job market.
Perhaps this article may serve to remind students
here that when one is Black and female one doesn’t
need to add un(der) educated in order to render
oneself unemployable. Of course, there are those
radical idealists who refuse to compromise their
social lives for the “boring, irrelevant garbage that
passes for classroom instruction here.” For these,
I have nothing but admiration. Their over-riding
assumption that some fine nigger in ^a flashy car is
gonna ride up after graduation to deposit them in
carefree, idle luxury, is one of the rare flashes of
imaginative fantasy in evidence at Spelman. Right
on! You secure optimists can ignore this article.
Others may be curious to know what the acade
mic climate at other schools is like. Those people
do not play.
I don’t intend to outline the diverse ways that
this was brought home to me; a single example
should suffice. Out of a class of 68, Meharry gradu
ated 17 white doctors. Emory last year had one
Black senior, no Blacks in its junior class and one or
two in each of the other two classes. White people
do not go to Black schools if they get into White
ones; white schools rarely accept Black students if
there are qualified whites. If seventeen white stu
dents graduated from Meharry, at least seventeen
Blacks were denied admission anywhere. Competi
tion is fierce. There are no places reserved for us.
People who expect to swindle their way into sol
vency would serve a more meaningful apprentice
ship with the Mafia. Any degree from Spelman will
be subjected to comparison with those from thou
sands of other schools, where the students are seri
ous. Further, if one goes on to grad school, one has
to get over the GRE; if one wants to work, well,
there are any number of successful students ahead
of you.
would have preferred. Teachers were boring, au
thoritarian, cold and demanding. Students were
silly, babyish, grown cold and mean. And so I pro
ceeded to ask myself—WHY AM I HERE? WHERE
AM I GOING? WHAT DO I WANT TO DO WITH
MY LIFE? HOW COULD I MAKE THIS COLLEGE
EXPERIENCE MEANINGFUL TO ME? If you stop
to think about it, those questions are really un
answerable, but unfortunately, that doesn’t stop
millions of people from asking those same questions
day after day for the rest of their lives.
Now, “the powers that be,” who asked me to
write this article, have hinted around that this arti
cle is supposed to be pertaining to the very contro
versial subject of apathy. Apathy is a very emotion
al word. One cannot be apathetic unless she is also
capable of showing feelings. A rock could not have
the label of being apathetic because a rock feels
nothing, neither joy, sadness, anger, love-nothing.
We are not rocks.
I believe that apathy on a college campus, in a
community or in a society—anywhere where people
are trying to progress together—is a very danger
ous emotion. What causes apathy? Fear? If a stu
dent has a complaint, what does she do? First, she
must determine if it is a social or an academic com
plaint. Each situation has necessary steps to follow
in order to gain results. I am going to assume that
the complaint is academic. At Spelman College, the
first step for the student would be to talk to the
teacher about the complaint. Now, a great per
centage of the time that is the first and only step
taken. This is as it should be if both parties (stu
dent and teacher) are satisfied. But, if one or both
has not been satisfied, there are several alternatives.
I can only speak on the part of the student because
that is my experience. First of all, the student can
go to the head of the department and listen to his
advice. Under certain circumstances, going to the
department head may be a difficult or impossible
step to take, so, the second step would be to go to
the Dean of Instruction, and depending on the re
sults, continue to go up the chain of command. The
other alternative is just to forget the whole thing
and sit out the rest of the semester counting the
days and cursing the teacher under your breath
(in that order).
Now the last alternative may be called one thing
to one person and another thing to another per
son, but I call it APATHY. I realize that life is a
give and take situation-no one ever gets everything
that she wants. In fact, a lot of the time what she
thinks she wants she finds later she doesn’t want.
There are times, however, when a student feels that
she does have a legitimate complaint that deserves
being justly dealt with. This does not mean being
told “Well, we’ll see what we can do.” It means
seeing meaningful actions taking place to correct
the problem. Some people may think I am being
too dramatic-may be. But if education is supposed
to help a person become 1) an intelligent indivi
dual, 2) a functioning individual, and 3) a THINK
ING INDIVIDUAL, then apathy is a dangerous de
tour to take. There comes a time in most people’s
lives when they must face up to certain realities.
Life is not a rose garden, as the song goes. When
you were a child, you thought as a child, but now
you are a woman and you must think as a woman.
Or, you face the deadly problem of APATHY
which is not to think and not to take any action at
all.
