1973: HEW tells Florida to get rid of separate-but-equal in public higher ed or lose $70M

The Florida Capitol building in 1973

Back in 1973, the Civil Rights Office of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) told the State of Florida that it was still carrying out a separate-but-equal operation in its State University System. Federal officials said that if the state didn’t begin complying in honesty with Congressional laws that mandated the desegregation of higher education, then Florida would lose $70M in federal money.

A St. Petersburg Times article from 1973 reported that: “Florida has until April 8 to submit a plan to replace one rejected Nov. 13 or face the loss of about $70-million in federal funds, mostly research grants.”

If inflation is taken into account, that $70M from 1973 would be about $370M today.

The State of Florida avoided losing those tens of millions of 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 had received authorization to open an engineering school back in 1949, but had not received a sufficient level of monetary support from the state. FAMU ended up having to share its new engineering school with FSU, which also wanted an engineering school at the time and successfully lobbied to be part of the one at FAMU.

The consent decree (which is currently enforced by the Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education) doesn’t appear to be much of a concern for state Sen. John Thrasher. He recently introduced an amendment into the Florida Senate budget that would give FSU its own independent College of Engineering but hasn’t proposed one cent to permit FAMU to hire any professors to replace those that FSU will take away. FSU currently controls the money that pays for 36 of the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering’s faculty members.

FAMU President Elmira Mangum, former vice-president for budget and planning at Cornell University, estimates that it would take at least $15M per year to provide enough faculty and staff for a FAMU College of Engineering.

The lack of money for faculty replacement hiring would bar FAMU’s independent engineering college from meeting the accreditation requirements of the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). FAMU could also run into ABET accreditation problems due to the bad physical condition of the current buildings in Innovation Park, which Thrasher says he wants FAMU to keep. That is part of the reason why Mangum has also requested $100M for a new engineering building on the main campus.

Thrasher, who is the chairman of Gov. Rick Scott’s reelection campaign, might very well win the battle to get his proposal approved through the state lawmaking process. But the good news for FAMU is that the war is set to end with the federal government.

FAMU will have the help of a recent federal court decision that declared that the State of Maryland was out-of-compliance with its consent decree with the USDOE Office of Civil Rights. FAMU will also be helped by the fact that the USDOE Office of Civil Rights will remain under the direction of U.S. President Barack Obama until 2017.

Editor's note: This post contains corrections made on April 20, 2014.