Author Says College Desegregation Has Lost Its Way

U of Ideas of General Interest ó July 1999
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Contact: Craig Chamberlain, Education Editor
(217) 333-2894; [email protected]

HIGHER EDUCATION
Author of new book says college desegregation has lost its way

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. ó One court ruling tells colleges to pursue enrollment parity based on race. Another ruling tells them they canít take race into consideration.

And while one state offers scholarships to white students to attend public historically black colleges, another state threatens one of those same colleges with closure.

Itís no real surprise to M. Christopher Brown II, a University of Illinois professor of higher education and author of a new book on collegiate desegregation.

The problem, Brown said, is thereís never been a consensus on the goal of desegregation in public higher education, and it changes with new court rulings and presidential administrations. "Weíre spending money saying ëweíll know it when we see it,í but we donít know what weíre looking for."

And those efforts are now further complicated by rulings against affirmative action, he said.

Brown, whose book "The Quest to Define Collegiate Desegregation" (Bergin & Garvey) was published last month, says courts and the federal government have gotten ahead of themselves. "I think part of the reason they canít define the goal is because what theyíre trying to define is integration, instead of desegregation. Theyíre trying to define the end step and not the middle step Ö Itís like stepping from the porch to the second floor," he said.

"All of the desegregation litigation that has ever been filed had one primary quest: equitable funding for a formally black institution," Brown noted. Yet the rulings, often coming after federal government involvement, have focused more on enrollment. "They want to see more brown people showing up at Ole Miss, and more white people showing up at Mississippi Valley State," he said.

But that hasnít worked, and for a number of reasons, Brown said, one of them being that it disfavors public historically black colleges. Most of those institutions have continued to be underfunded compared with their historically white peer institutions, he noted, and without equitable funding, to support equitable programs, they will have a difficult time attracting white students.

One possible and ironic result, already suggested in one state, is the closing of historically black schools to meet desegregation goals, Brown said. But that disregards the vital role these schools have played in the education of African-Americans, as well as the effect of their closing on their communities.

"The vestige [of segregation] is not the fact that the enrollments, in and of themselves, are polarized," thereby suggesting a dual system is in place, Brown said. "The vestiges are those tangible realities that force people to choose not to select certain institutions."

Instead of focusing on enrollment at individual colleges, people should focus on how a stateís higher education system as a whole is serving its various populations, Brown said. "The focus should be on quality of programs and student access Ö and on how well those are coordinated statewide."

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