A New York civil-rights group filed a federal complaint last week challenging as discriminatory an effort by the City University of New York to help black male students, as well as several programs at CUNY’s Medgar Evers College that the university system could end up replicating elsewhere.
In its complaint, the New York Civil Rights Coalition asked the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights to halt the Medgar Evers programs and to block the CUNY system from following through on a planned Black Male Initiative calling for the creation of similar programs on other campuses. The complaint alleges that the programs at Medgar Evers, in Brooklyn, violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits racial discrimination by colleges receiving federal assistance, and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits sex discrimination by such institutions.
Officials of the federal civil-rights office declined to comment last week, saying they were still processing the complaint.
Jay Hershenson, a CUNY spokes-man, denied that the system planned to promote the creation of race-exclusive programs as part of its effort to help black men and boys. But, he said, CUNY may soon encourage campuses to set up “gender focused” programs to help black men, who are significantly less likely than other Americans, including black women, to earn college degrees.
The university’s decision to mount an effort to help such students had been endorsed by the system’s Board of Trustees, the New York State Board of Regents, and the New York City Council, he said.
Responding to the civil-rights group’s complaint, Mr. Hershenson said, “In the business of higher-education opportunity, this is a variation of the theme ‘No good deed goes unpunished.’ This is ‘No good deed goes unassailed.’”
The Medgar Evers programs, which are offered through the college’s Male Development and Empowerment Center, include monthly meetings “intended to encourage male-to-male communication,” a series of financial seminars designed to increase the economic power of black and Hispanic men, workshops to help such students learn more about various industries, and a program that helps fathers deal with issues related to their parental rights.
The center’s executive director, Gerald G. Jackson, said last week that white men have participated in the seminars. Similar programs were established at the Medgar Evers women’s center at about the same time, he said, and the programs for men and women “have branched and developed according to their own gender script.”
Emphasis on Integration
The New York Civil Rights Coalition is not alone in challenging college programs advertised as solely for members of racial- or ethnic-minority groups. Other individuals and groups, including the Virginia-based Center for Equal Opportunity, have persuaded more than 100 colleges to open such programs to students of any race, and have filed federal complaints triggering investigations by the Office for Civil Rights of several colleges that had resisted their demands.
But the New York group has a profile different from those of other organizations that have opposed such programs — one that precludes pigeonholing it as conservative or libertarian, or accusing it of seeking to protect white interests.
The former chairman of the group’s Board of Directors was the late Kenneth B. Clark, the black psychologist whose testimony regarding the effects of school segregation on children was pivotal in the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The board’s current members include two well-known black authors of books about the civil-rights movement: Juan Williams, a television and newspaper commentator, and Orlando Patterson, a Jamaican-born professor of sociology at Harvard University.
The group describes itself on its Web site as committed, above all, to racial integration, as both a philosophy and a strategy for ensuring equal opportunity. Established in 1986 in response to racial violence in Queens, it has mounted several protests against incidents of racial violence while, at the same time, taking a harshly critical stand toward college programs for minority students. In a 2002 report, it condemned ethnic dormitories, as well as courses and programs for minority students, as “segregationist” and “apartheid policies.”
Michael Meyers, the group’s executive director, described himself last week as a liberal who favors affirmative action but believes that “separatism is not affirmative action.” He characterized affirmative action as “the affirmative use of race and gender in order to integrate people into the mainstream of American society, not to put them on the shoulder of the road.”
Helping or Stereotyping?
The programs being considered for expansion by the CUNY system are part of the “Initiative on the Black Male in Education,” part of a four-year master plan approved by the system’s Board of Trustees in 2004. Last October a panel that was created to find ways to improve the education of black men recommended to the chancellor, Matthew Goldstein, that each CUNY college develop a comprehensive plan to improve the enrollment and graduation rates of black men.
In an appendix to that report, a subcommittee recommended that CUNY establish a systemwide Black Male Initiative Committee and, on each campus, a Black Male Initiative Program. The subcommittee said the systemwide program “should include activities designed to provide mentorship, counseling, academic support, extracurricular activities, and seminars on personal, economic, cultural, and social consequences and development.”
The New York Civil Rights Coalition’s complaint to federal officials cites newspaper and magazine reports suggesting that CUNY officials plan to reserve such programs for black men. Mr. Meyers says the system’s plans appear to be based on negative stereotypes of black men, but he has been unable to dissuade CUNY officials from moving ahead. He says CUNY “seems intent on this exercise in racial and gender discrimination and their ratification and perpetuation of racial, gender, and black male stereotypes.”
Although the Education Department has recently altered its Title IX regulations to allow single-sex classes and programs for children in elementary and secondary schools, it has not changed the regulations to allow for such programs at colleges, says the complaint to the civil-rights office.
If such programs are allowed to spread throughout the system, the complaint argues, CUNY “will be in open defiance” of Title VI and Title IX. “Hence,” it says, “your duty is clear.”
The complaint directs its harshest criticisms at the programs already in place at the Male Development and Empowerment Center at Medgar Evers. It denounces as “putrid and nonsensical racial rhetoric and male chauvinism” a quote on the center’s Web site from its director, Peter A. Holoman.
The quote reads: “The people in the village are many, but the warriors are few and are now scattered; thus leaving the borders unprotected and us as easy prey for the enemy.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Government & Politics Volume 52, Issue 34, Page A32
