“Culture of Success”

 ‘Aisha Tariqa Abdul-Haqq ’13 cannot be reduced to a stereotype.

She is an African-American, first-generation college student who intends to earn a graduate degree and lead others. She is a student who struggled academically during her first year at Earlham but will soon present her research at a national academic conference. She grew up poor in the housing projects of Indianapolis, but now she aspires to run a non-profit that would help alleviate global poverty.

Abdul-Haqq, a Human Development and Social Relations major, describes her younger self as a “shy, docile” girl who “didn’t think [she] had anything to say.” Now she positively vibrates with ideas and opinions, is a leader of a student organization and confides with confidence, “I’ve found something I really care about, and I’ve discovered that I’m really good in leadership roles.”

Sitting in the Runyan Center Coffee Shop, she speaks quickly, in full paragraphs, with the urgency of someone who has just made an important discovery that she needs to share. Abdul-Haqq is complicated. She is difficult to categorize. At Earlham, she has found her niche and appears to be on a path to great success. But this could have gone a different way.

A ROUGH BEGINNING

Abdul-Haqq’s school career got off to an uneven start. She didn’t attend kindergarten, but eventually found elementary school easy, gaining an early love of reading and regularly winding up on the honor roll. By middle school, she was skipping school regularly, but still enjoyed reading science fiction novels.

“Everyone was always telling me how smart I was and doting on me,” she recalls. “I always thought I would go to college, but I didn’t really understand what it takes to succeed.”

She got good grades at the charter school she attended for high school, but because that school allowed students to work at their own pace, she didn’t develop the study and time management skills she needed to excel in college.

“My first year at Earlham was terrible,” she admits. “I just wanted to hang out with my friends, so I did not do well.”

It didn’t help when one sibling accused her of “forgetting where she came from” and another pointed to a friend of his who had graduated from college but still couldn’t find a job.

Supported by professors who recognized her potential, however, Abdul-Haqq was accepted as a McNair Scholar. The Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program helps low-income first generation college students — and those from under-represented racial and ethnic groups — prepare for graduate study leading to a Ph.D. Funded by the U.S. Department of Education, the program offers students special mentoring and requires them to attain a cumulative grade point average 2.75 and to participate in summer research projects, working closely with mentor professors. The McNair program also offers participating students help with the graduate application process and funding to attend academic conferences.

A BLOSSOMING SCHOLAR

Last summer, while doing her research, something clicked.

Abdul-Haqq spent six weeks exploring the so-called “Culture of Poverty,” a concept coined by the anthropologist Oscar Lewis in 1959. Under the guidance of Deborah Jackson, an associate professor of sociology/anthropology and director of the Human Development and Social Relations program, she studied how various writers — including Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Charles Murray and William Julius Wilson — have expressed this concept and how their formulations have shaped public policy. According to Jackson, Abdul-Haqq was able to make connections between her scholarship and her personal experience during the course of her project.

“Aisha already had a strong interest in poverty, especially as it is experienced in the U.S. That has come through in the volunteer work she chooses to do and topics she chooses for class projects. Her summer research was an opportunity to take it to another level,” says Jackson.

“I suggested the topic and gave her a basic reading list, but she ended up finding sources that I had not seen before, and I learned a lot from her about her topic. It was great to see her emerge as a critical thinker as she worked on this project. This was a chance for her to do the kind of work she will do in graduate school.”

A WAY OPENS

Close relationships between students and professors is a routine part of an Earlham education — but six weeks set aside for research, conversation and collaboration is an extraordinary opportunity for any student-faculty pair.

“She is a shining example of what the McNair program can do for a student,” says Jackson. “The stipends the program provides give students and faculty members the gift of time. We were able to meet regularly to talk about the readings and explore ideas together.

That is much harder to do in the context of a regular class or even with a thesis project during the semester. Aisha was able to study a concept on the theoretical level and then connect it with lived reality. That’s not always easy for students to do.”

Abdul-Haqq admits that she began her summer research stint wishing she were home, and sorry to be missing family events like birthday parties and baby showers. But gradually, she realized that she was where she needed to be.

“I realized the amount of work I could put my head to, and I began seeing that a lot of things I was reading, I could vouch for,” she says. Abdul-Haqq reports that to some extent, she has experienced a “culture of poverty” in her own life. Her choice to go away to college has sometimes caused conflict with her siblings, some of who felt that, “college was just about trying to look cool.” But then again, “my 16-year-old sister says she’s going to beat me in school. And I really hope she does.”

On a personal level, she hopes to be an example to her family that an individual can choose another path in life, though she acknowledges that changing one’s own circumstances is never easy.

“There are structural forces that affect the lives of poor people. We can’t just say that people are poor because they have ‘deviant values.’ There was a time growing up when the guys next door to us were drug dealers. They certainly did some ‘deviant’ things in their lives, but there was also a time when my mother was in the hospital and there were no other grownups around to look after my brothers and sisters and me. They fed us and made sure we were safe. Sometimes people show their values in [unexpected] ways.”

Later this fall, Abdul-Haqq will present her research at the National McNair Scholars Research Conference and Graduate School Fair at the University of Delaware. As her junior year begins, she is contemplating graduate work in non-profit management. Eventually, she would like to direct an organization that helps to alleviate global poverty.

“This probably sounds really naïve, but I think it’s crazy that anybody in this world is starving,” she says. “We were poor, but I always had a roof over my head, and we always had food. So I look at what some other children are experiencing, and I know I need to do something about it. This needs to be my career now.”’

(Original article since deleted from Earlham College website.)