NEW ORLEANS – Eye-level watermarks, gutted buildings and rows of mobile classrooms linger as reminders of the flooding from Hurricane Katrina that nearly wiped out Southern University at New Orleans in 2005.
Now the predominantly African-American university faces what students and administrators view as a new threat: Gov. Bobby Jindal’s proposal to consolidate the school with the nearby, mostly White University of New Orleans.
“It will be the death of SUNO,” student government vice president Ellis Brent Jr. said recently as he worked on a letter-writing campaign in hopes of killing the idea in an upcoming legislative session.
Jindal’s proposal renews a politically and racially charged argument that pops up periodically in the roughly 20 states that have public, four-year institutions known as historically Black colleges and universities.
“Every time the economy tanks, and certainly, right now, these are dire economic times, understandably governments and legislatures look for ways of cutting costs while maintaining and increasing a level of educational excellence,” said Lezli Baskerville, president of the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education. “We certainly applaud and salute that.
“The challenge comes when there are broad and diverse options and the first option appears to be ‘let’s look at submerging HBCUs into the historically white college and university system.’”
Jindal is adamant. “It makes no sense to have colleges blocks apart, neither one of them with graduation rates we can accept,” he said Tuesday at his weekly legislative news conference in Baton Rouge. At the same time, more than 200 SUNO supporters were gathering on the Capitol steps to protest the merger.
