Race Discrimination in Public Higher Education: Interpreting Federal Civil Rights Enforcement, 1964-1996

Race Discrimination in Public Higher Education: Interpreting Federal Civil Rights Enforcement, 1964-1996

John B. Williams. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 1997, 203 pp., $23.75

ALTHOUGH I SOMETIMES APPROACH books about law that are written by nonlawyers with some trepidation, Race Discrimination in Public Higher Education by John B. Williams, professor of education at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, explains convincingly why desegregation in public higher education has been such a dismal failure.

Some less informed observers might attribute segregation in the university systems that Williams analyzes-in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana-to the long-standing existence of and support for historically black colleges and universities (which Williams refers to as TBIs, or traditionally black institutions). Williams shows that such an explanation is too facile. The reality of discrimination in public higher education is characterized by the concerted efforts of state and university officials to perpetuate inequities, disregard judicial mandates, and obfuscate issues when required to explain continuing patterns of segregation.

In his case study of Georgia's university system, Williams describes its administrators' misguided assumption that they had limited authority to act against segregation; their reliance on allegedly uncontrollable external factors as an excuse for doing little to eradicate segregation; their mistaken position that state policies unrelated to desegregation, such as increasing enrollments of white students in all institutions, were responsive to civil rights concerns; and their deliberate decisions to minimize compliance or to perpetuate noncompliance. Moreover, the refusals of several governors to fund the universities' requests for capital necessary for desegregation constantly shifted accountability from one state entity to another.

In his analysis of Mississippi's system, Williams focuses on the implementation of the Supreme Court's 1992 decision in United States v. Fordice. The Court held that a state is required to eliminate the present effects of discrimination if these effects can be traced to its prior system of segregation, are without some educational justification, and could in fact be eliminated. Notwithstanding the Court's edict, Williams argues that Mississippi's system of higher education continued to be segregated because of different policies for undergraduate admissions at TBIs, on the one hand, and traditionally white institutions, on the other; duplicative academic programs at these two types of institutions; unequal funding for landgrant programs; and unequal library resources and monies for equipment of every sort.

Williams's analyses of the university systems in Alabama and Louisiana are not as detailed as his examination of the systems in Georgia and Mississippi, but he highlights deficiencies in Alabama (for example, inequities in funding and physical facilities) and also reports one of the more outrageous and perhaps little known facts about Louisiana State University: it awarded most of its fifty-- four minority scholarships to white students over a two-year period.

Williams does not spare the federal government from criticism, as he discusses the reasons for federal inaction and lack of oversight by the Office for Civil Rights of the Department of Education (formerly, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare) and the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. On the other hand, there have been some positive developments, notably the Title VI higher education guidelines promulgated by the Carter administration for implementing desegregation. The guidelines called for increased enrollment of African American students at predominantly white institutions and of white students at TBIs; increases of "other-race" faculty, administrators, nonprofessional staff, and trustees; and reporting and monitoring requirements. Overall, however, Williams paints a bleak picture.

Perhaps the most important evidence of the federal government's ineffectiveness in enforcing civil rights laws was the infamous Adams litigation, which was initiated during the Nixon administration. In Adams v. Richardson (1973), a federal appellate court upheld a district court's order directing the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to begin enforcement proceedings against systems of higher education in several southern states that were still segregated. Although the case was dismissed during the Reagan administration (as Williams points out, after the Justice Department switched positions and successfully challenged the standing of the African American students and parents represented by the Legal Defense and Education Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), the litigation resulted in a number of judicial orders premised on the government's failure to enforce Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as it applies to federally supported higher education.

Williams observes that "the Reagan and Bush administrations clearly. . . moved in the direction of diluting remedies, de-emphasizing the importance of goals and timetables, prohibiting complaints, and requiring higher standards of proof of discrimination." As a civil rights lawyer who left the employ of the Justice Department during the Reagan administration largely because of what Williams describes, I witnessed first hand such changes in policy.

The Clinton administration also comes in for its share of criticism by Williams. He cites a 1995 report of the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights that highlights the absence of a designee at the White House to oversee civil rights policy, the saga surrounding the appointment of an assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Department of Justice, the lack of a desegregation policy agenda at the Office for Civil Rights of the Department of Education, and the decline of federal college scholarship programs.

Williams leaves us with two possible conclusions to draw from the experiences with the enforcement of civil rights in public higher education: (1) those efforts overstepped reasonable limits of government intervention under circumstances of declining race discrimination and produced unintended but unacceptable consequences, or (2) enforcement had dismal results because remedies were weakly designed and poorly implemented. Anyone who reads Williams's book will, I believe, reach the latter conclusion and realize, based on the facts that he has gathered, that the first conclusion is no more than a rationalization for perpetuating the status quo.

Gilbert Paul Carrasco, professor of law at Villanova University, is visiting professor of law at the University of Oregon and the author of Civil Rights Litigation: Cases and Perspectives (Carolina Academic Press 1995).

Copyright American Association of University Professors Jan/Feb 1999
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