Will Georgia’s Budget Crisis Bring Black and White Together?
Posted on December 2, 2008
Filed Under News, The Daily Prereq | By Jessica Dye
In these budget-crunchin’ times, schools are considering all kinds of crazy stuff to keep from draining their bank accounts. And now word from Georgia is that the chairman of the state senate’s Higher Education Committee, Seth Harp, is proposing that two historically black colleges merge with neighboring historically white schools. If enacted, the move would combine the resources of HBCU Savannah State University with mostly-white Armstrong Atlantic State University, in addition to merging historically black Albany State with two-year, mostly-white Darton College.
Harp says the move isn’t all about money, however. “The white schools were begun as segregation schools. It’s time Georgia closed that ugly chapter,” he said during a hearing on the state’s University System budget, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. So more than 40 years past Brown v. the Board of Education, and all it took was a little global recession to finally spur lawmakers to Do the Right Thing? But not everyone’s buying the argument. A number of faculty members from HBCUs voiced their opposition, saying that historically black colleges serve an important role in the black community, not just for the education but for the way they represent and preserve their trail-blazing alumni’s legacies. President and CEO of the United Negro College Fund Michael Lomax said it was neither a “timely or thoughtful suggestion.”
For now, the proposal has been shelved, and the state senate has formed a committee instead to improve facilities at three of the state’s HBCUs and encourage students at some cash-strapped mostly-white schools to consider enrolling in an HBCU. The cash-flow crisis may have colleges considering some drastic steps, but this is one that won’t be taken…at least, not until the next dip in the Dow.
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