Improving diversity remains concern for state colleges

In the post-Geier environment announced last week, Tennessee higher education faces a junction where universities must single-handedly determine how aggressive they desire to be in sustaining campus diversity.

The Geier lawsuit, which dates back to the original grievance filed by Rita Sanders Geier in 1968, sought to require the state of Tennessee to take proactive measures to correct the enduring effects of the prior de jure segregation of higher education throughout the state.

“The UT system was interested in expanding a campus at UT-Nashville,” said Fran Ansley, a professor at the UT College of Law and the chair of the college’s Geier Task Force. “People at Tennessee State University saw this, I believe quite accurately, to be a problem.”

TSU, a previously black campus, would have had a more difficult time integrating its own campus by recruiting white students in 1968 if The University of Tennessee, a predominantly white institution, had expanded into Nashville, TSU’s domain.

Although the case initially concerned stopping the expansion of UT into Nashville, the lawsuit developed as an effort to dismantle the parallel system of higher education around the state by trying to enhance integration at schools that had seen prior segregation by law.

The U. S. government, also involved in the case, originally appeared as a defendant. Very early in the litigation process, however, the U.S. Department of Justice switched over to Geier’s side, expressing support for affirmative efforts at desegregation, Ansley said.

Following the 1977 merging of UT-Nashville and TSU, a stipulation was issued in 1984 that required institutions of higher education to periodically report on its rates for recruiting, retaining and graduating numbers of black and white students, creating a system of on-going self-evaluation.

In 2001, a five-year plan was issued with the goal of bringing the Geier lawsuit to a conclusion — an objective Governor Phil Bredesen last week declared Tennessee higher education had achieved.

“The goals were to create a unitary system of higher education, and we wanted to make sure that we were recruiting highly qualified and diverse students, and in this case, especially African-American students,” said Susan Martin, senior vice provost for academic affairs. “The Geier case has permitted us to be engaged in these recruitment and retention efforts, and we have seen success.”

The court had determined in the Geier case that universities had to deal with “much heavier obligations” than simply allowing minority students to apply, Ansley said.

“The obligations are a product of the fact that the barriers are much greater than the padlock on the door,” Ansley added.

Permission to enter and the removal of legal barriers to attendance at institutions were not the only blocks preventing African-Americans from attending UT and other overwhelmingly white institutions.

Gaps in standardized test scores, as well as the reality that the wealth gap is significantly larger than the income gap for African-Americans in comparison with whites, are among the other explanations for how a college education may not have been an accessible option for many minority students, according to Ansley.

In the post-Geier environment established last week, the question appears to be whether institutions will continue to aggressively reach out to African-American students as they have in the past 38 years under Geier-produced monitoring.

“We receive money primarily to allow us to offer scholarships to African-American first-year law students,” John Sobieski Jr., interim dean of the College of Law, said. “That has been crucial in our ability to recruit African-American students.”

The College of Law saw the largest number of African-American applicants for this fall’s entering class than any previous year. Nearly 15 percent of this fall’s incoming law school class is African-American.

“The hope is that going forward, we won’t regress back,” Sobieski said. “We are hoping that the state will continue to fund the scholarships and other efforts that the law school, and the university in general, has done.”

Under Geier, institutions of higher education were compelled to participate in systematic self-evaluation of their progress and a continual process of reporting back to the court.

“Now we are going to enter a new period when we are going to have to step up and act like grown-ups,” Ansley said. “It’s a moment when the university faces moral and educational challenges that it hasn’t had to face before, and I really hope that we figure out how to do the right thing.”

With the scholarship programs the university intends to establish or has already founded, UT officials say they hope to meet the challenge.

“Our admissions and enrollment services offices have spent a lot of time and effort looking at national models and we feel confident that in light of that study we will be able, through a number of efforts, to continue that recruitment and enrollment,” Martin said.

Those efforts exceed offering financial assistance to minority students. They additionally include the ambitious campus-wide agenda to make UT as international and intercultural as possible.

“I’m optimistic that the work on our diversity plan and the Ready for the World initiative will help us to continue to move forward in diversifying the campus and those initiatives build on Geier truly and provide us with a way to move forward,” Martin said.