ATLANTA — Public colleges created during segregation to provide blacks an education denied to them by white institutions are at the center of a budget battle brewing in Georgia.
Facing a $2 billion shortfall, a Republican state senator has proposed merging two of the historically black schools with nearby predominantly white colleges to save money and, in the process, he says, erase a vestige of Jim Crow-era segregation.
“I think we should close this ugly chapter in Georgia’s history,” Seth Harp, chairman of the state Senate’s Higher Education Committee, said Tuesday.
But Harp has stirred a torrent of opposition. Critics of the plan say students who might otherwise not attend college are being educated at the schools. Black students perform better in the black-college setting, experts say, and the dropout rate among African-Americans is lower than at majority-white institutions.
And the schools represent a key piece of the civil-rights struggle.
“We can’t afford to run away from our history,” said Leonard Haynes, executive director of the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges.
The schools largely were founded before 1964, mostly in the segregated South to teach African-Americans. But they are open to people of all races, and experts say the number of white students at the campuses has been on the rise.
Harp’s proposal would merge the historically black 3,400-student Savannah State University with Armstrong Atlantic State University, a majority-white school. Also, Albany State University, which has about 4,100 enrolled, would combine with Darton College, which has a predominantly white student body. The new campuses would keep the names of the older and more established black colleges.
Harp’s plan was preliminary, with few details about how the mergers would work.
Any combining requires approval by Georgia’s Board of Regents. A spokesman said the board has no plans to consider the idea and suggested the idea runs contrary to the goal of increasing the number of Georgians with college degrees.
“If anything, we need to be broadening access to higher education,” Regents spokesman John Millsaps said.
There are 105 public and private historically black colleges in the U.S. While some private black colleges have folded, no state has dismantled a public one, Haynes said.
“It seems like a politically charged and politically motivated move rather than a fiscally responsible one,” said Michael Lomax, president and chief executive of the United Negro College Fund. “I am deeply concerned. . . . This is a proposal by a politician to address a budget shortfall without engaging academic professionals and planners.”
