3-27-07


Black Colleges Seek Congress's Help in Desegregation Disputes

By PETER SCHMIDT/Chronicle of Higher Education

Washington

The leader of an advocacy group representing historically black colleges says two key members of Congress have agreed to hold hearings to determine if the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights has shirked its responsibility to enforce higher-education desegregation agreements.

But press officers for the two Congressmen, Rep. John Conyers Jr., a Michigan Democrat, and Robert C. (Bobby) Scott, a Virginia Democrat, declined last week to confirm or deny that they had any plans to hold the hearings described or to provide additional comment.

Lezli Baskerville, president of the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education, said last week that she had met separately with Representatives Conyers and Scott in January. During those discussions, she said, Mr. Conyers expressed a willingness to subject the Education Department's civil-rights office to oversight hearings by the House Judiciary Committee, which he leads, over its enforcement of the seven state desegregation agreements that the department still monitors.

Representative Scott, who is a member of both the House Judiciary Committee and the House Education Committee, said he would seek to have the education committee hold oversight hearings on the civil-rights office's enforcement of higher-education desegregation agreements as a whole, Ms. Baskerville said.

Ms. Baskerville announced her requests for Congressional hearings during a presentation at her organization's annual conference here this month. She described the requests as part of an effort by her group to try to protect historically black public colleges and universities from state actions that, she said, are leaving them with inadequate financial support or are hindering their ability to compete against predominantly white colleges for students.

Whatever actions Mr. Conyers and Mr. Scott said they would take, however, Ms. Baskerville clearly got out in front of the congressmen in discussing them. Members of the congressmen's staffs, as well as the staffs of the education and judiciary committees, said that they had no knowledge of any discussions of hearings with the Nafeo head and that no such hearings were scheduled.

Giving Up on Federal Courts

Jim Bradshaw, an Education Department spokesman, said his agency had not received any word of the hearings. In a written statement, he said the department and its civil-rights office "take seriously the monitoring and correction of civil-rights violations," but the higher-education desegregation plans it is monitoring in seven states involve "legally complex issues."

Ms. Baskerville said Nafeo also plans to ask the Senate education committee to hold hearings on the Education Department's civil-rights office.

For now, however, Nafeo has given up on the idea of filing a federal lawsuit to try to compel the civil-rights office to enforce higher-education desegregation agreements whose provisions, for example, forbid predominantly white colleges from offering new programs that mirror those offered by nearby historically black institutions.

Raymond C. Pierce, dean of North Carolina State University's law school and the association's point person investigating such an approach, told participants in the Nafeo conference that, given the current state of the law and the ideological balance of the federal courts, such litigation was unlikely to prevail.

At a panel discussion held at the conference, the presidents of historically black colleges in Maryland, South Carolina, and Texas described their institutions as on the defensive against recent efforts by predominantly white institutions to draw their students away. In both Maryland and Texas, the Office for Civil Rights declined to get involved in recent disputes over proposals by predominantly white institutions to offer programs that nearby historically black institutions challenged as duplicative of their efforts.

In the case of Maryland, historically black Morgan State University complained that the Maryland Higher Education Commission violated a federal desegregation order in 2005 by voting to let the University of Baltimore and Towson University jointly offer a new program — a master's degree in business administration — that threatened to draw students who otherwise would have enrolled in a Morgan State business program.

At the urging of the Maryland legislature's black caucus, the State Senate this month passed a bill requiring the higher-education commission to take up all challenges by historically black colleges to proposed programs they regard as duplicative. The measure also allows historically black colleges to appeal commission decisions in favor of such programs to state circuit courts.

Gov. Martin J. O'Malley, a Democrat, has indicated he will sign the measure if it is passed by Maryland's House of Delegates.

Desegregation vs. Competition

In an interview, Morgan State's president, Earl S. Richardson, said his institution needed more power to challenge plans by other colleges to duplicate its efforts because the state still has not eliminated the vestiges of its past segregation and put its historically black public colleges on an equal footing. He called the bill passed by his state's Senate "a monumental step in the right direction, toward achieving comparability and parity."

But Towson University's president, Robert L. Caret, argued in an interview last week that Morgan State had proved unable to offer an M.B.A. program that would attract large numbers of students. "I fully support our HBCU's," Mr. Caret said, "but they have to realize that they are in a capitalistic society, and at some point they need to be working with these programs to make them competitive."

James E. Lyons, who took over as Maryland's secretary of higher education this month — after serving as president of two historically black public universities — Bowie State, in Maryland, and Jackson State, in Mississippi — said he did not plan to revisit the commission's decision on the Towson M.B.A. program unless state lawmakers forced his hand. Noting that the Maryland Higher Education Commission had denied 10 requests by predominantly white institutions to offer programs opposed by colleges that were historically black, Mr. Lyons said his goal would be to try to resolve disputes before tensions reach a point where colleges consider legal action.

"I don't think anyone wants the courts involved in making higher-education decisions," he said.

'Disparate Impacts'

In Texas historically black Prairie View A&M University fought last year to block the University of Houston from establishing a new satellite campus in the northwest suburbs of Houston, where it was likely to compete for students with Prairie View. The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board voted last September to allow the new campus, but it placed enough restrictions on it — stipulating, for example, that Prairie View could have a say in which programs were offered there — that the University of Houston abandoned its plans.

At the Nafeo conference, Ms. Baskerville said her association also planned to lobby Congress to pass legislation making it clear that individuals can file lawsuits challenging as discriminatory state actions that have a disparate impact on certain minority groups. In its 2001 ruling in Alexander v. Sandoval, involving English-only driver's license tests administered by the state of Alabama, the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not give private citizens the right to sue public colleges, or other state agencies that receive federal funds, over policies that seem discriminatory simply because they help or harm members of a particular race or ethnicity.

Federal agencies can file Title VI challenges against state actions viewed as having a disparate impact, but lawsuits by private citizens must show that the discrimination was intentional. The Sandoval ruling has made it impossible for students, alumni, and others affiliated with historically and predominantly black colleges to challenge state actions under Title VI based solely on alleged harm to students at those institutions.