ISSUE IN-DEPTH: ENDING THE RACE DIVIDE: College mergers worth look

Georgia’s three publicly funded historically black colleges are vestiges of a time when state leaders wanted to keep African-American students out of the state’s public colleges and universities. That time has passed, so it’s logical to ask whether the need for those institutions has passed as well.

More specifically, state Sen. Seth Harp, chairman of the Senate Higher Education Committee, asks whether the time has come to merge the traditionally African-American campus of Albany State University with majority-white Darton College in southwest Georgia, and traditionally black Savannah State University with majority-white Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah.

“The white schools were begun as segregation schools,” Harp said. “It’s time Georgia closed that ugly chapter.”

However, ending a historic anomaly is not in itself reason to close colleges, even in these financially challenging times. Such a step should be taken only if the result is a stronger system of higher education for the people of Georgia.

While Albany State and Savannah State universities continue to attract largely black students, the student bodies of Armstrong and Darton are no longer all white. Today, Darton College has a minority enrollment of 46 percent. More than a third of Armstrong Atlantic students are minorities, according to Board of Regents data.

In educational terms, there may be valid reasons for maintaining all four campuses. As a community college, for example, Darton opens its doors to students who require more academic support than their peers at Albany State, and thus performs a different mission. According to state data, 58.6 percent of Darton freshmen required remedial courses in 2007, compared with only 7.8 percent at Albany State.

And while Savannah State University is a traditional campus with a long history of residential housing, nearby Armstrong Atlantic was designed as a commuter campus. While Armstrong has added student housing, its student body is still slightly older than that of Savannah State, and many of its students hold jobs and take longer to finish their degrees, Regents spokesman John Millsaps said.

That’s why Savannah State has a six-year graduation rate of 40 percent, while Armstrong’s rate is only 25 percent.

Clearly, operating two public colleges with similar missions side by side is not a financially or educationally sound policy, especially when the state confronts a deepening budget crisis. And the state has considered a merger of the campuses at least three times in the past 30 years, most seriously in 1988.

At the time, emotional protests from both the white and black colleges doomed that initiative. In rejecting the merger proposal, the Board of Regents concluded that it would be racially divisive, cause white and black flight and diminish services to students.

“The whites will go somewhere else,” warned B.R. Tilley, the Darton president. “Then it’ll degenerate down to a little black college, and that’ll be what’s left.”

H. Dean Propst, who was then the University System chancellor, accepted that decision with reluctance. “We are confronted with an issue that brings into direct opposition that which seems to be dictated by logic and that which is pragmatically workable,” he said. “It is an issue which dramatically reminds us how short of perfection we as human beings really are.”

Twenty years later, Georgians are still short of perfection, and there would no doubt be an outcry today over merging the campuses, although most of the opposition would grow out of nostalgia rather than overt racism. Many graduates of Albany and Savannah are proud of their alma maters, both of which have been educating black Georgians for more than 100 years. Proponents of black colleges also point to a host of research showing that historically black colleges and universities —- known as HBCUs —- still retain, graduate and send more black students on to professional schools than other colleges.

However, an increasing number of black students are choosing options other than HBCUs. In 1960, 65 percent of African-American college students attended historically black colleges. Today, HBCUs enroll 14 percent of all African-American students in higher education, although they constitute only 3 percent of America’s 4,084 institutions of higher education.

HBCUs, in other words, still have a role to play. No one would argue with the success or mission of Spelman College or Morehouse College, just as no one would insist that Georgetown University and the University of Notre Dame abandon their identities as Catholic colleges. As private institutions, they’re entitled to create and maintain their own missions.

But Albany State and Savannah State are public institutions, and it would be healthy to debate whether Georgia should be in the business of maintaining segregated campuses in 2009, even if the segregation is by choice now rather than law. (Georgia’s third public four-year black college —- one of 39 in the country —- is Fort Valley State University.)

Furthermore, any merger along the lines suggested by Harp should ensure that the rich histories of Albany State and Savannah State are protected, and that the faculty and administration of the newly constituted campuses are diverse.

In 1983, when an even earlier effort was made to merge the state’s black and white schools, the idea drew cautious support from then-Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young. However, Young warned, “the process of ending those traditional black state institutions has got to be done in such a way that they are not abandoned, that there is a genuine integration of faculty, of administrators, of the Board of Regents, of boards of trustees.”

A quarter-century later, that advice is still sound.

—- Maureen Downey, for the editorial board (mdowney@ajc.com)