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| Catherine Lhamon, USDOE Asst. Sec. for Civil Rights |
According to a preliminary report by CBT University
Consulting, the firm hired to study the college for the Board
of Governors (BOG), “[U.S. Department of Education] Assistant Secretary for
Civil Rights Catherine Lhamon, in a letter to Governor Rick Scott dated April
25, 2014, expressed concern that separation of the Joint College was under
consideration.”
Lhamon’s office is responsible for enforcing the consent decree that Florida entered into with the former Civil Rights Office of the
U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW).
During the year 1973, the HEW
civil rights office ordered Florida to either begin complying in honesty with
Congressional laws that mandated the desegregation of higher education or lose
$70M in federal money. If inflation is taken into account, that $70M from 1973
would be about $370M today.
The State of Florida avoided losing those federal dollars by entering into a desegregation consent decree with the HEW Civil Rights Office. During the 1980s, the state moved to fulfill part of that consent decree by agreeing to fully fund an engineering school at FAMU. FAMU ended up having to share its new engineering school with Florida State University (FSU), which also wanted an engineering school at the time and successfully lobbied to be part of the one at FAMU.
Back during the 2014 legislative session, Sen. John E.
Thrasher, R-St. Augustine, led an unsuccessful effort to split the joint
E-College and give Florida State University $13M to begin the process of
creating a separate college. He refused to offer one cent to help FAMU acquire
the $100M that it would take to construct a brand new engineering college on
the university’s main campus or the $5M necessary to replace all of the FSU
faculty who would leave.
Lhamon’s letter to Scott came one day after Florida House
Speaker Will Weatherford announced that he wanted the BOG to weigh in before
the legislature considered any changes to the joint college. The House and
Senate came to a compromise on April 27 by agreeing to appropriate $500,000 for
the BOG to conduct a study of the joint E-College.
The Florida Legislature asked the BOG to review whether the
option of creating “differentiated engineering programs” at FAMU and FSU would
be permissible under 1964 Title VI of Civil Rights Act, the U.S. v. Fordice
Supreme Court decision, and other applicable federal regulations.
CBT University Consulting’s preliminary report states that “the
differentiated programs option would result in an investigation and subsequent
challenges from the Office of Civil Rights.”
The preliminary report also addresses the option of establishing separate colleges of engineering with duplicate programs at FAMU and FSU. It
states that “the cost to set up a new FSU engineering college that has the
scope of a top 25 public engineering college is estimated at $500 million. The Fordice
Decision seems to imply that the same $500 million would need to be invested in
the FAMU engineering college.”
That would be total of about $1 billion in start-up costs
for two separate engineering colleges at FAMU and FSU. The recurring costs
would $197M for each school per year, a total of $394M annually.
CBT University Consulting also states that the Fordice
decision prohibits FAMU and FSU from both having independent engineering
colleges with duplicate programs in Tallahassee.
“If the decision to separate is made and FAMU receives all
extant resources, buildings, equipment, laboratories, and faculty and FSU then
establishes a new engineering college, it cannot occur in Tallahassee,” the
preliminary report states. “Separation will require relocation of one of the new
engineering colleges. Separation will impose considerable expense in order to conform
to the Fordice standards.”