Are Black Colleges Worth Saving?

By JULIE JOHNSON/OXFORD

For the past 120 years, Alcorn State University, situated on a remote Mississippi campus, has been attended almost exclusively by blacks. It is typical of the nation's 47 historically black state-run colleges, most of them in the Deep South, which were founded as the stepchildren of a segregated public education system. The institutions were eventually touted as providing "separate but equal" training for blacks excluded from universities such as Ole Miss. What was missing, mostly, was equality: the schools were underfunded, understaffed and ignored, a condition that persists in varying degrees today.

Now Alcorn State (enrollment: 3,317) is at the center of a legal struggle that could have the same significance for public higher education as the hard- fought battles over school desegregation of the 1950s. A class-action suit was filed in 1975 by a group of students, parents and taxpayers who demanded that all of Mississippi's black colleges receive more money and aid to make up for the decades of neglect. The case has finally made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and arguments will be heard next week. It marks the first time the Justices will consider how the widely embraced principles of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark decision that desegregated public elementary and secondary schools, apply to colleges and universities.

In addition, the dispute raises a larger philosophical question: Should separate colleges that serve primarily blacks be encouraged, or is it better to push for a color-blind system of public higher education? The Justice Department had planned to argue that it might be unconstitutional to force states to bolster black colleges on an explicitly racial basis. But President Bush has long believed that black colleges play an important role; he is an honorary chairman of the United Negro College Fund, which raises money for 41 private institutions, such as Morehouse and Tuskegee, that are not part of publicly funded state systems. After heavy lobbying by presidents of black colleges, Bush personally ordered the Justice Department to amend its brief so that it supports the role of historically black colleges, public as well as private.

The confrontation comes at a time when these institutions are enjoying renewed popularity. The proportion of blacks going to college across the U.S. has declined, but public black colleges saw their enrollment climb 13.2% from 1986 to 1989. The institutions also award nearly one-third of all undergraduate degrees granted to the 1.1 million blacks who pursue postsecondary study.

Contrary to the national trends, black college enrollment in Mississippi is declining. The state's three historically black state-run schools -- Alcorn State, Jackson State and Mississippi Valley State -- educate the majority of black residents who go on to college. In 1981 the three schools graduated 1,353 students, while the predominantly white universities graduated 584 blacks. By 1990 the number of degrees granted at black schools had dropped to 935, while predominantly white schools awarded only 610. Contends Alvin O. Chambliss Jr., a Mississippi legal aid lawyer who has shepherded the plaintiffs' case from its outset: "Our black colleges are dying on the vine, and it's criminal."

Mississippi publicly ended college segregation in 1962. But Chambliss argues that only continued discrimination can explain why all of the state's formerly whites-only universities remain more than 80% white, even though about half of Mississippi's public high school graduates are black. He contends that the discrimination is bolstered by policies like Mississippi's reliance on the ACT assessment test as the primary criteria for admission to colleges. The score requirement set for admission to Mississippi's onetime white colleges is higher than at the historically black schools.

What Chambliss calls the "inherently superior resources and programs" of the formerly white schools shows up dramatically in a comparison of Alcorn State and the flagship agricultural and engineering school, Mississippi State, in Starkville, 210 miles northeast of Alcorn. Both are land-grant institutions, and both focus on agricultural and livestock research.

The similarities virtually end there. Mississippi State, with 14,700 students, offers more than 200 undergraduate and graduate degrees. Its library, with more than 1 million volumes, is the biggest in the state. Alcorn's academic offerings are limited almost exclusively to degrees in education and agriculture. The plaintiffs are demanding an end to the artificially high entrance barrier at the formerly white schools. But more important, they want Mississippi to spend enough money on Alcorn and the other black schools to upgrade their standards, and to add remedial programs to assist black students as they enroll at the predominantly white schools. White Mississippi educators and politicians fear that that remedy could easily run into tens of millions of dollars. A favorable ruling would have immediate implications for states like Alabama and Louisiana. Both face similar litigation, and have filed briefs in support of their neighbor.

W. Ray Cleere, Mississippi's higher education commissioner, concedes that "there are program disparities" between the black colleges and the predominantly white ones. He argues they are not attributable to race, but to the "high-cost, highly prestigious programs" that have traditionally been based at the larger schools. "All of our colleges," he adds, "are equitably and consistently underfunded at the same level." Mississippi argues that there is no need for further remedies against past bias, beyond aggressive recruitment efforts aimed at minorities that are already under way at the formerly white schools.

There are few precedents to help predict what the Supreme Court will decide. The Justices ruled 5 to 3 last year, for example, that municipalities can be compelled to correct vestiges of prior discrimination. The question is whether college systems have a similar duty, since students attend them voluntarily. Justice David Souter was asked in his confirmation hearings about racial discrimination, and replied that there was a duty not only to stop it but also to offer redress. Clarence Thomas, according to individuals familiar with his thinking, is said to be "pro-black colleges," but in public pronouncements he has leaned toward the color-blind jurisprudence popular with conservatives.

As the situation at Alcorn State illustrates, it is impossible to have it both ways: seeking a color-blind and integrated system of state-funded education, while at the same time preserving a system of black colleges that both the President and the plaintiffs believe can play a useful role. If the Supreme Court rules that the states do not need to provide a remedy, these institutions will wither away. "A defeat will spell, legally, the beginning of the end for black colleges," says Chambliss. "They're hanging by fingernails now."