In Saturday’s Tallahassee Democrat, FAMU alumnus Larry O. Rivers took on the critics who accuse FAMU of practicing segregation.
From “Critics fail to understand the role of HBCUs:”
It has become a sad but predictable routine. Whenever a news story about Florida A&M University appears online, reader feedback forums explode with jeers stating the university has an "outdated mission," practices "racial exclusion" and ought to be shut down.
Such opinions stand at odds with Martin Luther King Jr.'s views on historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and the role they should play in post-Jim Crow America.
King, an alumnus of the historically black Morehouse College in Atlanta, stressed that eradicating segregation in higher education was not about closing HBCUs. As he once explained, HBCUs were "segregated" but they were not "segregating institutions."
Integration is the process of deconstructing a system of second-class citizenship set up by a segregating institution and reversing the damage it caused. FAMU did not harm whites or relegate them to an inferior position; it never even had the power to do so. As such, it is disingenuous to call on FAMU to "integrate" as if it were actually a segregating institution.
Florida's desegregation settlement in response to the 1973 Adams v. Richardson federal case has helped FAMU draw more whites in a manner consistent with King's example. The settlement pushed Florida to establish programs such as allied health, journalism and architecture at FAMU and upgrade historically under-funded schools such as pharmacy. These programs, along with law, consistently attract sizable white enrollment. Their funding also empowered FAMU to successfully compete for more top-rate professors of all races, which resulted in greater diversity within the faculty.
Hence, it is contradictory for FAMU's critics to fault the university for not having more whites while, at the same time, calling for the removal of the professional programs that are bringing the most whites to campus.
Read the full version here.
Pictured: Students at the FAMU School of Architecture.
Note: Another version of this op-ed ran in Diverse Issues in Higher Education.
From “Critics fail to understand the role of HBCUs:”
It has become a sad but predictable routine. Whenever a news story about Florida A&M University appears online, reader feedback forums explode with jeers stating the university has an "outdated mission," practices "racial exclusion" and ought to be shut down.
Such opinions stand at odds with Martin Luther King Jr.'s views on historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and the role they should play in post-Jim Crow America.
King, an alumnus of the historically black Morehouse College in Atlanta, stressed that eradicating segregation in higher education was not about closing HBCUs. As he once explained, HBCUs were "segregated" but they were not "segregating institutions."
Integration is the process of deconstructing a system of second-class citizenship set up by a segregating institution and reversing the damage it caused. FAMU did not harm whites or relegate them to an inferior position; it never even had the power to do so. As such, it is disingenuous to call on FAMU to "integrate" as if it were actually a segregating institution.
Florida's desegregation settlement in response to the 1973 Adams v. Richardson federal case has helped FAMU draw more whites in a manner consistent with King's example. The settlement pushed Florida to establish programs such as allied health, journalism and architecture at FAMU and upgrade historically under-funded schools such as pharmacy. These programs, along with law, consistently attract sizable white enrollment. Their funding also empowered FAMU to successfully compete for more top-rate professors of all races, which resulted in greater diversity within the faculty.
Hence, it is contradictory for FAMU's critics to fault the university for not having more whites while, at the same time, calling for the removal of the professional programs that are bringing the most whites to campus.
Read the full version here.
Pictured: Students at the FAMU School of Architecture.
Note: Another version of this op-ed ran in Diverse Issues in Higher Education.