"I Weep to You for the First Help": African Youth Apply to American Colleges

"About four miles overlooking lake victoria is situated our crazy hut, thatched of grass but without furniture due to intense poverty. We have neither domesticated animal nor cash crop that can wealth us, so as to aid me in the education sphere. May I add that I have got no elder brother to support me and my father is lame. So this incident combined with chronical poverty imposes upon me an overwhelming barrier which goads me tremendously to weep to you for the first help."

Not the sort of college application you'd generally expect to receive. But the llo'yoke Center-based African Scholarship Program of American Universities -- ASPAU --each year screens some 10,000 applications, many of them like this one, bespeaking a crying thirst for higher education which either may not be available in their country or which is unattainable because of poverty. ASPAU helps.

The idea of the program was originally David Henry's, former Director of Harvard's Admissions Office, and in the six years of its existence, ASPAU has found financing for 1,300 Africans from 33 nations and sent them to 232 American universities.

Richard W. Moll, a recent Assistant Director of Admissions at Yale, directs ASPAU. Coming out of Indian-apolis. Moll attended DePauw University, and then transferred to Duke where he got his B.A. in 1956. While he was choosing yet another generation of Yalies, Moll found time to complete his studies there for a divinity degree in 1961. He took a leave of absence, came to work for ASPAU, and stayed.

He sees his organization trying to fulfill two different and sometimes contradictory purposes: the needs and desires of the member U.S. colleges which want international representation in their student bodies, and the needs of the emerging African nations intent on training students in a limited number of specific technical fields like engineering, agriculture, or animal husbandry. "We keep asking ourselves: Who is our master?" Moll says, "the American colleges eager to educate Africans in a variety of disciplines, or the Africans in a variety of disciplines, or the African nations insisting on specialized technology."

ASPAU is operating at the time of the "Great Interim," according to Moll, "when African higher education cannot yet absorb all of its own secondary school graduates."

"In 1960 when the program began," Moll recounts, "the African nations were not very sophisticated in appraising their manpower needs, and so we would sweep in and pick up the best and brightest students in any subject.

"Since independence, however, the Africans have become very mature in appraising their short-run manpower needs. The African authorities are very picky about what kinds of people they will send abroad for training. We have to pass up some awfully good history majors to get down to the lad wanting fisheries. It pains our soul. It sort of runs against the grain of the American tradition in education which lets everybody choose for himself. But the young applicant for a scholarship is really an impersonal part of this big thing called African socialism," Moll says.

It may run against the American grain, but it isn't very hard to appraise manpower needs like these: at Independence, the Congo had only 16 university graduates; Malawi (population three and a half million) had two doctors and one engineer. Most African nations have made great strides in higher education, since then, and while this is one of the reasons ASPAU is shrinking its program this year, the needs of the Great Interim still remain pressing.

One hundred Africans will come to American universities under ASPAU's asupices this September, considerably less than last year's number. But applicants keep rising. In 1966, 2,960 Nigerians put in for the program; 14 were accepted. The student's government pays for his transportation; the college pays for his tuition out of its regular scholarship fund; and our State Department -- entirely in the open -- pays his maintenance allowance which usually amouts to about $2500 annually.

And so they arrive in the United States. ASPAU has arranged through the Experiment in International Living for a month's "homestay" with an American family--usually about 100 miles from the college they will attend--before actual registration. The homestay is designed to help the student get his bearings on American society and serve as a buffer against the reactions of Americans to a black foreigner.

A goodly portion of Africans studying here find Americans outgoing and eager to help, but sometimes in a gnawingly superficial way. One Ivy League student analyzed our reaction this way: "The Americans are friendly and the most accommodating group you'll ever meet. But, this willingness to associate with others--a legacy of their informality -- lacks African warmth and European depth. The African looks for progressive personal understanding, which in many cases means asking too much."

At a midwestern state university, another student took up the theme: "Nothing is more trivial and frustrating than: 'Hi. Where are you from?' 'Zambia.' 'Oh, I met a guy the other day from Japan. Well, nice meeting you.'"

Onesmo Moiyoi, an ASPAU junior in Winthrop House from Tanzania, disagrees: "Americans are not necessarily superficial," he says. "I think most Africans believe that, but I think it tells more about them than about the Americans. The African student finds it difficult to adjust to the intricacies of American life, and while he is adjusting, he is lonely and wants to be treated like a person.

"Until you have developed the possibility for free communication, there are bound to be individual psychological problems. I don't think you can generalize."

But the ASPAU students have to adjust as Negroes as well as individuals. Director Moll indicated there did not seem to be any strong geographic pattern to racial prejudice encountered by African students in the United States. Some campuses, like the University of Kansas at Lawrence -- "not a place you'd expect to be particularly cosmopolitan," says Moll--give the Africans a "marvelous" reception. Students have also commented favorably on the atmosphere in Atlanta, while there are "real social problems" in Oregon, he says.

And Harvard? There is a space on the ASPAU application form for the student's preference among American universities, and fully 98 per cent of West Africans list Harvard. Actually, Harvard with its 21 ASPAU scholars over the past six years ranks fourth among the 232 American colleges which have participated in the program. Purdue with 39, California at Berkeley with 24, and Princeton with 22, are higher. With increased emphasis on specific technical fields, more and more students will be attending schools like Tuskegee and U. Mass. in the future. Southern Illinois Univercity, where studies in soil chemistry are excellent, for instance, has requested 14 ASPAU students in the coming academic year.

Moll says he is perplexed about the social problems which Harvard and Radcliffe raise for the African student.

"In a liberal college community like this," he explains, "Africans are popular, but sometimes popular for the wrong reasons rather than for the right ones. Africans are often 'used' here; they tend to become status symbols. Cliffies especially treat them as symbols of their own worldliness and liberalism. Some feel that to be seen walking or dating one impresses the local community, and the fact that he is an African may just add more glamor to it. Free speech, free this, free that, is expected here, but it can throw curve balls, too."

"It's fun, but a little mysterious," comments a Harvard senior from West Africa. "They (girls) seem to think that being seen with me will make points with everyone else."

The mammoth task of selecting ASPAU scholars begin in the fall of each year when newspaper advertisements and radio spots invite applications. Preliminary processing is handled by field representatives of the African-American Institute who weed out applicants who have not attained a minimum standard in local high schools. The Institute also administers a specially designed College Board examination which further narrows the field.

In the spring, a team of 10 American ASPAU representatives spends a month in Africa, traveling in pairs to interview students in the capital city of their country. (Moll left the day before yesterday.) The two ASPAU admissions officers, plus one representative from the Agency for International Development, sit on a board with about a dozen African government officials and educators of the particular nation. This board interviews two or three times as many applicants as there are places available and makes recommendations to the final selection committee in America.

Back in Cambridge, a subcommittee of the ASPAU Board of Trustees makes the final decision after looking over the students' interests and prospective majors. It assigns them to universities best suited to their needs.

"We are filling only one-third of the places offered us by our member colleges," Moll says. There is certainly no lack of applicants, but the bottle-neck comes in trying to find money for living expenses since the U.S. government is budget-cutting on ASPAU. Moll is beginning to cast about for supplementary sources.

This will probably mean private foundation support, which in light of the recently disclosed CIA adventures raises some questions. Moll says his program is "pure," that its connection with the government is open and above board, but he is nevertheless disturbed about the impact of the CIA link with associate organizations.

"When they (African students) first come over here they are terribly suspicious," Moll says. "They cannot believe that there are no strings attached, that we do not want to get anything out of them. We had been making progress in relaxing those suspicions. Then all of a sudden--Boom! Things have changed a bit. It tears us up. We've been set back." One of the main questions he will be asking while in Africa this month is how great the impact of the CIA disclosures has been on African government officials formerly friendly to American scholarship programs.

Moll finds ASPAU so exciting "because practically every person we have here will count in the higher administration of an African nation." While noting that well over half of ASPAU scholars maintain grades in American institutions, Moll recounted the story of an African student who flunked out of a "not so competitive" Western university (he was one of only five per cent), returned home, and was immediately appointed his country's representative to the United Nations.

"It frightens us," says Moll

"It frightens us," says Moll