Alabama’s all-but-level higher education playing field is a case study in what’s wrong with higher education’s commitment to equity and diversity
Two months ago when the Southern Education Foundation released the findings of its latest report, Miles To Go, it sparked widespread pandemonium among those concerned about the fate of minorities in higher education.
The foundation reported that the nineteen states that once operated dual systems of higher education have made little progress in guaranteeing educational opportunities for African Americans, even alter more man thirty years of court-ordered “affirmative steps.” The report’s grim statistics highlighted state-by-state inequities characteristic of the South’s separate and unequal educational opportunities that still exist today.
“It’s not a popular issue in the South, not because people are walking around as pointy-headed racists anymore, but because they’d rather ignore it and hope it will go away,” said the study’s author, Robert Kronley. “But the evidence shows that we’re nor going to be able to close our eyes and will these problems away.”
At the heart of the nation’s struggle to dismantle the effects of segregation in higher education is the state of Alabama. Deep-South that it embodies, this bellwether state, with its forty-eight colleges and universities, typifies the lack of headway the states have made in leveling the playing field.
This is the state where thirty-five years ago, then-Gov. George Wallace made his famous “stand in the school-house door.” On the surface, it was a physical attempt to prevent the University of Alabama’s first two Black students from attending. Symbolically, it illustrated the state’s contumacious resistance to integration.
Today, Black students still don’t have comparable access to the state’s “flagship” colleges. Majority White public institutions set up shop and duplicate programs just minutes from historically Black schools and nearly 75 percent of Black students attending public institutions still remain at two-year and historically Black institutions.
It is in this land, where confederate flags wave ominously from roof tops, that the cost of college tuition equals more than 10 percent of the average Black family income.
Alabama, with all its men of good will and altruism, epitomizes the unlevel playing field.
Knight v. Alabama
De jure segregation in higher education officially ended in the South in 1972, when a court order in the Adams case mandated that the states cease from continuing these practices and policies. The court also required each state to submit to the United States Education Department a plan to desegregate its public colleges and universities. Alabama’s plan was rejected and forwarded to the Department of Justice.
On January 15, 1981, Montgomery attorney John F. Knight, and others, filed a lawsuit in the Middle District of Alabama contending that segregation was part of an official state policy of White supremacy in higher education. The policy was enforced, according to the plaintiffs, with negligible endowments, discriminatory funding practices, restricted missions for some universities, program duplication, limited integration of HBCUs, and White control over public education for Blacks, among other things.
Two years later, Alabama State University and Alabama A&M University — the state’s two historically Black universities — joined the U.S. government in a similar suit. The courts found in favor of the plaintiffs in U.S. v. Alabama in 1985.
But the state appealed and in 1987, portions of the plaintiffs case were dismissed in U.S. v. Alabama. The cases were then combined with Knight’s lawsuit and the litigation became known as Knight v. Alabama.
In 1991, U.S. District Judge Harold S. Murphy issued an 840-page court order. After ten painstaking years of listening to the testimony of some 200 witnesses and perusing 20,000 pages of transcripts, Murphy ruled that the vestiges of de jeru segregation had indeed impeded the progress of Black students in the state. He determined that — among other things — the state limited the scope and missions of the two public historically Black schools and limited Black enrollment at the flagship schools through admissions standards.
Murphy ordered several state schools to hire more Black faculty and administrators. He also mandated an endowment be set up at the two HBCU’s — Alabama State University and Alabama A&M University. As a result, both schools received extensive capitol improvement funds to upgrade their facilities. Both schools also established new graduate and Ph.D. programs. The judge then ordered Alabama A&M and Auburn University — the state’s two land-grant schools — to unify their cooperative extension programs.
Widely perceived as a win for Black Alabamans, those concerned were generally happy that the decree force changes no one believes the state would have made on its own.
“It is because of the decisions of the court, not because of the state having some epiphany and saying `We need to do this,'” said Dr. Bill Harris, president of Alabama State University of the improved funding and other mandates. “Without the decision of Knight, there would have been no more funding for Alabama State University other than what we would have gotten out of what is a clearly unhelpful attitude about higher education in the state, period.”
While most folks agree the court order will mean real improvements, there’s an overriding consensus that Murphy, who had repeatedly urged the two sides to settle, tried too hard to please everyone.
“Nobody wanted this to go on for years and years of appeals and further litigation,” said Alease Simms, another plaintiff in the case who hoped for other edicts such as flagship status for A&M — her alma mater. “Judge Murphy tried to please everyone and didn’t end up satisfying anyone.”
And Dr. Richard Carpenter, who presides over Calhoun State Community College in Decatur, says, “The Knight case is still going on after almost twenty years. It diverted half a million dollars in legal fees. I think it richly educated the children of our attorneys.”
The amount to which the decree will enhance educational opportunities for Blacks in the state is yet to be seen. So nearly eighteen years after Knight first brought his lawsuit, and twenty-six years after segregation supposedly ended in Alabama, wrinkles are still being ironed out in the furrowed case that is an attempt to right the wrongs of the Wallace era.
The following article continues the first half of this two-part series that examines the tangible impact the past three decades of struggle in Alabama have had on African American students, faculty, and administrators in the higher education community there, The article focuses upon the consequences felt by students. Part two, which will be featured in a future edition, will examine the effects Alabama’s unlevel higher education system has had on faculty, administrative staff, and institutions.
RELATED ARTICLE: Beneath the Veneer
Understanding the depth of disparity in the educational opportunities available to Alabama’s Black and White students requires looking beyond the surface
Whenever Auburn University has a home football game and is playing one of its classic rivals, Louisiana State University, bets are it’s the only show in town. Hotels are booked weeks in advance, traffic backs up on Auburn’s Interstate-85 and Tiger spirit filtrates this eastern portion of the state.
The traditionally White institution (TWI) kicked off this season against Louisiana State to a capacity crowd of 85,212 at the Jordan-Hare Stadium. And as seventy Black Tigers — nearly half the team — stepped onto the field wearing blue and orange, unwitting viewers might have assumed that the state’s flagship university has a similarly integrated, desegregated campus.
Nothing, however, could be further from the truth.
Visitors to the Auburn campus on a business-as-usual school day will encounter an environment where only 6 percent of the more than 21,000 students — graduate and undergraduate combined — are African American.
To the northwest of Auburn is the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. It reports that 12 percent of its student body is Black. Its powerhouse sister campus in Birmingham has filled 23 percent of its slots with Black students. Troy State University in Dothan has a 12 percent Black student population. And the University of Montevallo, named after its host city, is at 11 percent.
In short, while some state universities are doing better than others, Black Alabamans largely do not have access to the prestigious public institutions their tax dollars support.
And where Black students do abound, so do underfunded facilities and limited programs. The state’s two historically Black schools — Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University in Huntsville, and Alabama State University in Montgomery — are handicapped by a state traditionally apathetic to fostering educational opportunities for African Americans.
Further, a whopping 51.3 percent of African American students at Alabama’s public institutions are at community and technical colleges.
Less than 15 percent of bachelor’s degree -earners in Alabama’s public institutions are African American. And Blacks represent 31.6 percent of the state’s eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old population, but only 25.1 percent of first-time, full-time freshman at state schools.
Alabama — where the average Black family income is less than $20,000 — has 220,000 college students but ranks fourteenth out of the fifteen Southeastern states in the amount of money it provides for scholarships.
In addition, southern states distribute more than one-third of all their financial aid without consideration of need.
It was recognition of these and other staggering statistics that prompted the lawsuit, Knight v. the State of Alabama, which resulted in a 1991 decree forcing the state to further integrate its traditionally White colleges and universities and fortify the two Black institutions as well.
Many people, the defendants included, think implementing the decree will help.
“I think this lawsuit will go a long way in terms of addressing some of these issues,” says John Knight, the lead defendant in the case.
However, most agree that Alabama has — like the title of a recent dismal report by Atlanta’s Southern Education Foundation — miles to go before it achieves a level playing field.
The TWIs
The University of Alabama-Birmingham has covered the most ground in the state when it comes to raw numbers and percentages. In addition to its large total student body proportion, African American students make up 32 percent of the university’s freshman class. Indeed, out of all Carnegie I institutions nationwide, this institution has the third largest percent of African American students.
Although it’s been suggested that is not a particularly impressive feat in a city where Blacks are almost 75 percent of the population, school officials say their success has not been painless.
“The actual city of Birmingham is heavily African American, but the larger area has a White majority,” says Dr. Ann Reynolds, the university’s president. “Our faculty has worked very hard at various programs aimed at bolstering minority participation.”
The programs Reynolds refers to are extensive. They include several designed to encourage, mentor, and finance Black youth who want to go into the medical field, in which the university has a massive curriculum and vast connections.
Reynolds also points out that half the campus residents are African American, and that Black students play an active role in campus life.
“When you have a campus ripe with Black fraternities and sororities, Black students who participate in student government and other campus organizations, it’s bound to get around,” Reynolds says. “We are very aware that for us to have this major African American population is a word-of-mouth issue…. We are always working with people to think about more programs and more initiatives.”
However, Dr. James C. Brown, says he takes no delight in Auburn University’s racial make-up.
“Auburn is very much concerned about the number of African Americans participating” in educational advancement at the university, says the school’s assistant to the president for minority advancement, noting that a recent change in out-of-state tuition caused a slight dip in what had been an increase over previous years.
“All schools in this region are competing for the African American participants. It’s all about competition,” he added.
One of the schools Auburn competes with in this region is Tuskegee University, which duplicates Auburn’s science and engineering programs. Though classified as private, Tuskegee was first started by the state of Alabama, and continues to receive a some state support.
Brown says that Auburn — which is just minutes from historically Black Tuskegee University, and has less than a 50 percent retention rate for African American students — participates in several programs to try to boost minority participation. For example, his office works closely with enrollment management to recruit and augment pipeline programs. Auburn invites HBCU undergraduates to their campus to court them to the school’s graduate programs. The university also participates in the National
Consortium for Educational Access, which promotes increased production of Black Ph.D.s; and the National Science Foundation-sponsored Alabama Alliance for Minority Participation, which recruits minorities in the field of engineering.
This Research II institution heavily steeped in math and science really does want — at least theoretically — to encourage Black participation in higher education, Brown says. It’s just that it takes more than soupy sentiments and getting involved in various programs.
“Any institution that develops a systemic initiative must have institutional commitment,” he says. “Institutional commitment is dollars.”
Brown, who works with a roughly $200,000 budget, says his efforts will never be enough if he doesn’t have the money to back them up. Further impeding his efforts are people within the institution who still haven’t gotten with the program.
“All institutions have cultures,” Brown says. “And within those cultures, what you must be able to do is try and get people to understand how to go about developing these kinds of initiatives.”
As for the students, many of the Blacks at Auburn say they feel relatively comfortable, though not at home. Several reported racial slurs hurled at them a few years back, but said they felt the university was making a conscious effort at conciliation. Recent campus programs that have included a Def Comedy Jam concert, which one student says may seem trivial, but is the type of event that helps Black students feel more welcome.
It doesn’t sound trivial to Northwestern University sociologist Dr. Aldon Morris, who testified as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in the Knight case.
He visited Alabama’s colleges and universities to prepare for his deposition. He found that although Jim Crow laws were no longer in place and some of the colleges had even taken great strides to physically integrate their student populations, some very key factors had been neglected.
“It was my observation that the Black students at the predominantly White institutions had a very isolating experience,” he says. “Their culture and heritage were not encompassed within the newly integrated institutions.”
Morris found the opposite to be true at the historically Black institutions. He also found that White ascendancy colored the state’s pattern of according prestige, resources, and programs to its higher education institutions.
“It was so clear,” says the author of Origins of the Civil Rights Movement. “The predominantly White institutions had the flagship status, the largest budgets, the graduate programs. The Black institutions were clearly second-class.”
The HBCUs
Judge Murphy must have been swayed by the appeals of Morris and others because he ruled extensively in favor of initiatives to strengthen the two state-supported HBCUs.
Both will add new state-funded programs to their curricula. Alabama State will take on two undergraduate programs in occupational therapy and health information management; two graduate programs in physical therapy and business; and two Ph.D. programs in education and microbiology.
“Those programs will result in a considerable amount of additional funding for the university over the next couple decades,” says Dr. Bill Harris, president of Alabama State University. “And in the case of the allied health sciences — occupational therapy, physical therapy, and those programs — we’re gonna get a new building.”
Harris says that what his university will get as a result of the Knight case gives him and Alabama’s youth a lot more with which to work.
“That allied health sciences program changed the options for a whole large number of people who never would have had that option at the university,” he says. “Black young folk and White young folk have an opportunity now for careers that were not available before.”
Dr. John Gibson, president of Alabama A&M University, says the mandate will be significant for his university as well. He’s just disappointed that “it took a decree to provide us what we should have had 123 years ago.”
What A&M will get is a fully-fledged engineering program — something Gibson says that as a land-grant institution, they should have had long ago.
One stipulation of the decree, however, is that the Black schools make an effort to attract White students. They will both be reimbursed up to $1 million annually for scholarships given to White students. And while the mandate was devised to eliminate perceptions of inferiority, it interestingly has some students and administrators grumbling over the fact that White students can get into the universities with lower grade point averages than their Black counterparts.
Others worry the two will lose their focus of educating Black students. Gibson assures that won’t happen while he’s in office.
The Community Colleges
One person who is not so disappointed that slightly more than half the Black students in Alabama’s public institutions are at community colleges is Joe Reed.
“Everybody does not have to have a bachelor’s degree to be successful,” he says.
“I think that one of the mistakes that we Blacks have made over the years is that we have down-played the contribution community colleges have made to our communities.”
“The community colleges in Alabama are the first-choice schools of many students,” says Dr. Fred Gainous, who presides over the state’s two-year college system.
Dr. Richard Carpenter, president of Calhoun State Community College in Decatur, adds that Alabama’s community colleges provide a convenient, affordable higher education access point for many of the state’s African American students.
“If some people are disappointed that half the Black students are at community colleges, I’m disappointed we’re not getting more of them,” Carpenter says. “It just makes more sense for many students to do their first two years of college at a community college.”
Dr. Johnny Harris, president of J.E Drake State Technical College in Huntsville, agrees.
“If we’re doing a better job of providing educational opportunities for African American students, I’m glad,” he says. “At community college, they can acquire skills which help them gain access to jobs which can help them finance the education the state doesn’t seem to want to do.”
His institution has a 48 percent Black student population.
Black students constitute slightly fewer than 20 percent of Calhoun’s student body, and Carpenter says he’s very pleased with that number.
“We are one of the few institutions in this state that can say that the percent of African American students is the same as their population in our surrounding community,” he says. “We drink that’s pretty good.”
RELATED ARTICLE: If I Was Judge Murphy …
Just about each and every higher education official in the state of Alabama was impacted by the state’s desegregation lawsuit. And most of these officials have an opinion on what they would have included in presiding Judge Harold Murphy’s decree. The following are a few examples:
“If I had my way, I would have done it differently. I would have disallowed Troy State to operate in Montgomery at all. I would have made Auburn University at Montgomery a liberal arts undergraduate school only. Then I would have allowed Alabama State to take all liberal arts and graduate programs. That’s what I would advocate” — Joe Reed, president, Alabama Education Association
“If you were to ask me if we got from the court the best that we could have gotten, the answer is no. When we developed our whole plan, we developed a very different university that would have professional schools of law, of pharmacy for example…. We think that there is a need for a law school in the central part of Alabama that is public — we don’t have one. But the court determined that the state could not afford it and he wouldn’t order it. I still think that there ought to be a pharmacy school, but then reasonable people disagree.” — Dr. Bill Harris, president, Alabama State University
“The decree elevated the salaries of the extension employees at Auburn University, but we were not able to raise salaries for our faculty.” — Dr. John Gibson, president, Alabama A&M University
“The pennies we got from the decree do not begin to compensate for 100-plus years of discrimination when we didn’t get any money. In 1875, our portion of the state budget was $1,000.” — Alease Simms, a plaintiff in the Knight case and A&M alumna
“I could sit here and find fault with everything Murphy’s done. He could have done a better job, but when you look at the big picture, it’s really hard to complain.” — Jim Blacksher, lead attorney for the plaintiffs
COPYRIGHT 1998 Cox, Matthews & Associates
© Copyright 2005 by DiverseEducation.com
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