Talk:Frelinghuysen University

This review is transcluded from Talk:Frelinghuysen University/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Premeditated Chaos (talk · contribs) 22:18, 8 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Dibsing. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 22:18, 8 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

A small preface about my reviewing style: I typically review in the unstructured top-to-bottom manner of an FA review. Any of my suggestions are open to discussion, except for things that would cause the article to fail the GACR. I tend to focus on prose style and clarity.

Lead

• Efns still need refs. They also normally go under their own Notes subsection

  Ref'd the EFN, and placed it in its own section called footnotes, below references and notes. Is that correct?

• Slight context for the Lawsons? Even "activists" will do (asking for context for people will be a running theme)

  Done

1906-1927

• Context for Kelly Miller

  Done

• Do you need 4 refs for those 2 sentences?

  The refs cover different parts, e.g. Rosetta Lawson's part in the founding, the base date of founding, the schools that were originally founded and merged.

• Not sure the detail about Frelinghuysen being Sec. of State under Arthur is super necessary, but I won't die on the hill if you want to keep it in

  Wanted to have some context there to cover how prominent a politician he was. Wasn't just some guy, was at the top diplomatic position in the nation.

• It feels odd that the other schools are mentioned in the early history (1906-1927) but without context to when they were founded. (The phrase "During the time the university was open" especially suggests that this covers more than just the early years). Feels like maybe this belongs under "Academics and activism"?

  I went with this phrasing because there is no sourcing for the dates of most of the specific schools being named, just years in which they already had those names. It links well to the newspaper article cited in the sentence before which goes over the naming scheme for the schools.

• The mention of the NRHP feels out of place, as it (naturally) wasn't listed on there during this time.

  CE'd to make it more clear that it happened later. Seems worth noting that the first building became a historical site. I can remove this if you feel strongly about it.

1928-1940

• Did they have any interim president between Lawson dying & Cooper being elected? I guess not given that they fell into financial disarray. Speaking of this, it feels odd that these don't get mentioned until after Cooper shows up.

  This is where sourcing issues start getting more prominent, as there's not a great timeline established in sources for a small black university. There is a single source I could find about a president between Lawson and Cooper, and they aren't mentioned even in the primary sourced Decennial. There is this article from 1928 naming Dr. W. D. Battle, a name I couldn't find any detail on anywhere, as president. In the official history written in the first Decennial by Cooper, she writes "Mr. Lawson died November 5, 1927. I was elected to succeed him in 1929..." All modern sources refer to her as the second president, after Lawson. I don't know what happened with Battle, and I was up in the air about an EFN covering that, but I figured since none of my best modern sources, or the Decennial covered it, it was best to leave it out.

  All of the discussion of financial troubles in the sources start with Cooper's presidency. They mention that she inherited the problem, but it's not clear if it had been a long running issue or happened after Lawson's death. Maybe W. D. Battle stole all the money and ran? Basically, without any sourcing for the issues earlier, I kept them in the same context as I found them in the sources.

  That makes sense.

• Context for Karen A. Johnson?
• I assume "In Service" is a book; can you put the year in-text? Also, you can usually just use the main title when you're discussing a book inline, no need for the subtitle.

  In 2009, I don't know what her context was. She's now PhD and an assistant professor at the University of Alabama. The work is a paper that was in African American Review. I added that the paper was published in African American Review, with the year, so at least there's some context as to why we should care about what she has to say about Cooper and Frelinghuysen.

  Normally I look for a word or two like "historian" or "cheeseburger seller" so the reader knows who this person is and why their opinion matters. I looked at Johnson's CV and she's one of those academics who's irritatingly hard to sum up succinctly. "African-American theorist" feels like it could be read ambiguously. Since it's a paper and not a book, the title shouldn't be italicized, but placed in quotes...actually, it might help removing the title entirely, since a paper is less likely to be individually significant to the reader than a book. How do you feel about In a 2009 paper for the journal African American Review, Karen A. Johnson describes Cooper's practice of "decolonizing pedagogy": and then right into the block quote from there? I think it establishes Johnson contextually as an academic without having to worry about exactly what kind, and moves the reader into the meat of her thoughts quicker.

  All set.

• So far you're pretty good about this but the sentence that starts "By implementing a plan..." feels wordy. It could be simplified to something like "Cooper stabilized the university's finances with budgeting and oversight, leading to a credit on the balance sheet by June 1931."

  Done

• I don't think you need to repeat that finances had stabilized right after the sentence that says they were stabilized

  The context here, which was present in the source, was that although they had stabilized the finances they still had outstanding debt they were unable to pay off, so although they were no longer bleeding money, they were unable to make any headway on paying off the several months back mortgage they owed. I can change this if you'd like.

  You could probably safely shorten it to "despite this" or similar phrasing.

  Done

• Do we know who accredited them?

  No clue. At this point there was no governmental oversight into university accreditation. It was that kind of slapdash accreditation that led to the reforms in the 30s.

• "In the 1930s, educators and consumer advocates..." in DC? In the states overall?
• Which Board of Education?

  Sources don't specify. If I were on Jeopardy I'd say "what is the District of Columbia Board of Education?" and probably be right, but I can't be sure. There's a lot of WP:OR and WP:SYNTH traps here because it's a federal district, so technically Congress makes their laws. It may have been the federal board of education, it may have been a local board of education. One of the newspaper sources says "Under an act of congress, the Board of Education is authorized to pass on the qualifications of educational institutions awarding degrees." Is that the federal board, or the district board? I just don't know. Same with the advocates and educators. It's not detailed in the sources.

• "this led to Cooper being unable to", more wordiness - "Cooper was unable to"

  Done

• I'm on the fence about the relevance of the sentence about black colleges losing accreditation in general.

  I think it is an interesting fact that provides context for the accreditation issues for black colleges at the time. It also shows that this was not an unusual situation for one of these universities to find itself in.

• Did the Langston school apply for accreditation separately?

  Apparently, according to sources. This is pure OR/SYNTH, but it looks like Cooper tried to use her contacts and following the normal paperwork route to get accreditation back, and was working in general for the entire college. Because many of the people who taught at the law school were Howard educated lawyers, they tried a lawsuit for their school in particular. That is pure OR/SYNTH though. Some more SYNTH based on a newspaper articles from around the time, it was strongly based on race and class, as the only thing worse than having to accredit a Black university like Howard was having to accredit a poor Black university. There was even an article about the parks department getting a pile of money for city beautification and parks improvement, and the commissioner saying he wouldn't use any of that money on the parks around Frelinghuysen University (which he called out by name) due to the "character of the neighborhood."

  I think that bit about the parks belongs in the article, especially given that he called them out by name. The rest, totally understand, I hate being hamstrung by sources but it is what it is.

  I don't think there's enough there. It's a single sentence in a long article without much context, and I don't think it fits in any of the current sections. Here is the article. I guess I could do a line under campus regarding it, but there's really not much there.

• As unwieldy as it is, I think the alternate name adopted in 1940 should be boldly noted in the lead, especially since it covers the school for almost the entire latter half of its existence

  I added that to to the paragraph about the decline. Although by length of time it was half of the existence, sources paint a picture of an institution in decline throughout the 40s, with one saying "it faded to oblivion in the 1940s." Also, even in the 1950 Second Decennial they refer to themselves as Frelinghuysen University: A Group of Schools for Employed Colored Persons.

• Wondering if it might be better to split history at the name change, rather than waiting till 1941 and then only having a small paragraph to cap it off

  I split the history here because I was working generally off the presidents for the dates. I actually got a bit of a feeling of melancholy at this point of writing, since after all that had come before when Cooper retired the school just faded away. I think it's a good cut-off because of that, as once she was gone things "faded to oblivion."

• Context for Carter G. Woodson? How did the student get a master's if the school can't grant degrees?

  Added context. No idea how he got his degree either, but my OR/SYNTH says that he took that student that was going to Frelinghuysen and got him under the umbrella of one of the other universities where he taught, but the source doesn't say.

  Ahh, hamstrung by the sources again. C'est la vie.

• Context for Adolpuhs A. Birch?

  I wish I had some :( He's a reverend, which is in the Second Decennial, but he doesn't write a detailed introduction as Cooper did.

  Reverend is enough! Just so we know who he is.

  Added that he was an Episcopal Priest, which is in the current source.

• I'm not sure the footnote is necessary here - unlike in the lead, you have the room to expand if you want. Or you could just let the statement speak for itself accompanied by the citations.

  Expanded a bit. I don't have much in the way of context on the authors, unfortunately. I could take or leave the expansion, and just go back to the original wording.

  Your call, I'm happy either way.

Remainder

• "that would push wages higher and increase respect" - I assumed this was the objective; did it work? If we don't have confirmation that it worked, we may want to rephrase to make it clear that it was a goal and not a result

  Clarified

• "transitioned from speculative housing for middle class White residents to a leading neighborhood for African American residents" this is the first mention of White middle class people, where do they come in? If it's the area around Vermont Ave, that should maybe be mentioned there.

  Unfortunately it's not covered in much detail, and doesn't outline which neighborhood, other than "neighborhood." From the source "illustrative of neighborhood social change, as the city's foremost African-American neighborhood assimilated speculative housing built for middle-class whites"

  Ah, I'm dumb and was reading things wrong. Disregard, from the context it obviously means the Shaw neighborhood. However, I think you may have it a bit backwards - that passage says that the neighborhood started off Black, and then whitey started moving in. The Shaw neighborhood article backs that up, calling it a historically Black area.

  I think the reading is actually that before the influx of freed slaves it was speculative housing for the working class. What happened is when the freed slaves moved north they settled in this area, and the speculative housing for white working class became an neighborhood populated by primarily African Americans. The African American community assimilated the housing build primarily for working class whites. See this brochure: Shaw was settled by individuals who constructed their own single dwellings of frame and brick, which were later infilled with small rows of developer-built speculative housing... Initially an ethnically and economically diverse neighborhood, Shaw was home to European immigrants and free African Americans, and, during and after the Civil War, increasing numbers of southern Freedmen flooding to cities in search of work... It was not until the first decade of the 20th century that Shaw became the solidly African American community it is known as today. The purchase of the building to be used for an African American university demonstrated the change to the neighborhood from working class immigrants to a top-tier African American locale.

  There's also This NRHP document that supports that reading: During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, legislation and the humanitarian efforts of social organizations and individuals improved the welfare of the alley inhabitants, eventually eradicating alley dwellings altogether. This prompted northward migration to the nearby U Street neighborhood, which was emerging as the center of Washington's African American community. And from the U Street NRHP document: The Greater U Street Historic District is also significant as the center of Washington's African-American community between c. 1900-1948. While always racially and socio-economically diverse, the area was predominately white and middle class until the turn of the century. As Washington became increasingly segregated, the neighborhood emerged as a "city within a city" for Washington's African-American residents

Overall a thorough and well-researched article. My comments are more nitpicks-towards-perfection than serious concerns for quality. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 05:51, 9 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I appreciate the review, and I hope that you don't mind that I replied in-line above, just to keep everything easier to follow. If you'd prefer I can pull it down below and separate it from your comments. The biggest challenge I had with the article was the lack of precision and disagreement in sources. As an early African American college a lot of the history and context is just lost, never recorded or studied in detail. That led to a lot of the imprecision, e.g. Adolphus Birch, W. D. Battle, and the closing date. If I were a scholar writing in a journal and was allowed the benefit of original research, I'm sure I could fill some of the gaps, but I can't do that here. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 13:52, 9 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

In-line is definitely better. I totally understand the sourcing issues - there's nothing more frustrating than being hamstrung by what your sources say, and naturally I won't hold it against you. Anything I didn't respond to above is fine as-is, I responded to a few things but we're pretty much ready to roll. Images look fine, no copyvio/close para issues that I can tell, spot checks are checking out (aside from the slight error noted above about the Shaw neighborhood). ♠PMC♠ (talk) 10:12, 10 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I fixed everything you listed, except the neighborhood. I'm pretty sure my reading is correct, and I provided some more context around that reading above. I also provided the link to the article that mentioned not working on parks around the university. I didn't add anything because the only bit in that article related to the university was By way of illustration he mentioned a group on Vermont Avenue near Frelinghuysen University. It is not the policy of his office, he said, to fix up nice parks in outlying sections out of all proportion to the character of the surrounding developments. It's interesting for context, but I don't think there's much there to add other than "governments hated Black neighborhoods in 1921." ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 15:10, 10 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, with your additional context I see what you mean about the neighborhood. Fair enough about the park; I still think it's interesting but not a hill I'll hold the GA up over (as promised!) so we're good to go here. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 00:15, 11 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]