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.
