Apart No More? Part I

Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part series on historically black colleges and universities. Here is the second part.

As the economic downturn grows longer and more severe, almost nothing is off the table when it comes to looking at new ways to cut costs. Programs that were very recently considered untouchable have now been placed under the budgetary microscope.

In a couple of states—Mississippi and Georgia—government officials have even started questioning the status of public HBCUs—historically black colleges and universities. However, they might only be speeding up a process of HBCUs becoming mainstream that is complete in West Virginia and appears to be well under way in North Carolina.

HBCU is an official designation given by the federal government in the Education Act of 1965 to all institutions of higher education that had been created primarily to educate African-Americans. Such schools (currently 105 in number) are eligible to receive special types of federal funding. Colleges that were founded after 1964 (or that had a predominantly white population at that time), and now have a predominantly black student body, such as Chicago State University in Illinois, are not considered HBCUs.

HBCUs do not discriminate in admissions, however. They are open to all students who meet their admissions criteria, and most public HBCUs have significant non-black populations. In fact, many public HBCUs are under court orders to increase diversity on their campuses. The three Mississippi HBCUs were required by the landmark Ayers v. Fordice court decision to raise their white enrollment to ten percent in order to qualify for additional state funding (they have not yet done so).

In Mississippi, Governor Haley Barbour recently proposed that the state’s three HBCUs be combined into one. His intent was to save money by eliminating duplicate programs and administrative positions. The idea was met with a loud outcry by the schools’ supporters.

Earlier in the year, Georgia state senator Seth Harp suggested that two public HBCUs join with two non-HBCUs in the same cities: Savannah State with Armstrong Atlantic State in Savannah and Albany State with Darton College in Albany. His proposal was greeted with an immediate adverse reaction as well.

In North Carolina, which has the most four-year HBCUs in the country, there have been no such proposals—yet. There are, however, changes occurring at the five state-supported HBCUs that could also have long-term implications.

Barbour’s proposed plan is to fold two of the state’s three public four-year HBCUs, Alcorn State University and Mississippi Valley State University, into the third, Jackson State University.

This plan will very likely not produce the savings Barbour anticipates, however, at least not without a serious reduction in the services provided. That is because the three schools are geographically dispersed, combining programs to cut costs will mean that many courses and majors previously offered will simply unavailable on some of the campuses.

And it might very well cause some political fallout, because of the intensity of opposition to the plan. An Inside Higher Ed article quoted one black educator, Julius Chambers, as saying the move “is obviously a slap at black colleges.” (Chambers is the former president of North Carolina Central University.)

On the other hand, Harp’s Georgia proposal will likely realize considerable savings. Because it combines schools in the same city, the mergers will allow the schools to eliminate many duplicate positions in the administrations, some of them with six-figure salaries. There will be no reason to get rid of academic programs. In fact, the quality of many programs could possibly be improved even with slight reductions in faculty by combining the academic departments. (A spokesperson from Harp’s office said that no action has been taken on the proposal in the last legislative session, and the new session does not begin until January 2010.)

Although any proposal to alter the direction of HBCUs is likely to encounter some political resistance, major changes might be inevitable. For instance, in West Virginia, the state’s two public HBCUs have gradually become predominantly white. Bluefield State College is now only 12 percent black, and West Virginia State University is only 17 percent.

And in North Carolina, a process of integration with the mainstream of society is occurring both naturally and through subtle policy changes (although the changes aren’t even close to what has happened in West Virginia). At all five of the state HBCUs, the proportion of non-black students has risen above ten percent, unlike the similar schools in Mississippi and Georgia. In some specific programs, such as N.C. Central University’s law school, African-Americans are now a minority (in 2008, 41.7 percent of the law school’s students were black).

The changes are most likely to affect two UNC schools the most. The percentage of black undergraduate students at Elizabeth City State University (ECSU) has dropped to 79.7 for the 2009-10 school year, while at Fayetteville State University (FSU), it has fallen to only 72.1 percent.

These two schools share an important difference from the other three HBCUs in North Carolina. In each case, the school is the only public university located within a reasonable commuting distance for a large area of the state. White students who live in the state’s Triad region can easily commute to UNC-Greensboro, instead of attending the area’s two historically black schools, Winston-Salem State University and N.C. A&T. And students in the Triangle region have their choice of N.C. State University and UNC-Chapel Hill, instead of going to the historically black N.C. Central.

But students who live in the far northeast of the state have only one public school for commuting—ECSU. And most residents of the heavily populated Fayetteville area must travel an hour or more to state schools other than FSU.

UNC schools recently updated their mission statements, and the results are revealing. While the other three schools either maintained or added language emphasizing their African-American roots, Fayetteville’s statement makes no mention of race, other than a line added to emphasize the school’s diversity. ECSU actually removed language about the school’s black heritage, and simply added a nod to its “diverse student body.”

The Fayetteville area is also home to several military bases, which is very likely one reason why FSU is the most diverse of the five UNC HBCUs. Cooperation between the UNC system and the military is growing, as exemplified by a recent Memorandum of Agreement between the U.S. Army Special Operations Command and the state university system. The high likelihood of future cooperation suggests there will be a greater military—and therefore mainstream—presence on campus.

ECSU has also added a couple of programs in the last several years that are likely to increase the non-black campus population. One is a branch of UNC-Chapel Hill’s pharmacist program. The other is an aviation school.

This sort of transition—from a specific demographic group to a more general population—is not without precedent in North Carolina. UNC-Pembroke began once a school exclusively for the state’s Native American population (one of its many names was Pembroke State College for Indians). It did not accept other races until 1953. While it still has a significant Native American population the school’s student body now has more whites and more blacks than American Indians.

Only time will tell whether the proposals in Mississippi and Georgia will advance beyond the discussion stage. But as the country continues to distance itself from the segregation of the past, some sort of changes are likely for the HBCUs, whether they come at the stroke of a legislator’s pen, or whether they occur naturally because racial differences no longer seem so important. The second article of this series will discuss different aspects of HBCUs in this time of transition.