Fritz Schranck has an absolutely fascinating post on the surprising outcome, announced last week in a Fifth Circuit opinion, of the decades-old litigation involving the (formerly?) two-track Mississippi higher education system. Go read his whole post, since he says far more than I do here.
The settlement involved, among many other things, a payment that could exceed $500 million dollars over the next 17 years to the historically black public colleges in Mississippi, and this amount is over and above the appropriations that would be made each year in the normal course of business. I wonder if it would be stretching matters to regard this payment as something very much like reparations. Whatever, anyone who instinctively rejects any consideration of reparations should take a careful look at this settlement, since I think it would be very hard to argue that Mississippi owes nothing to its historically black colleges other than a normal annual appropriation.
One other highly controversial aspect of the settlement that Fritz discusses is the creation of publicly funded ($70 million) and privately funded ($35 million) endowments for the benefit of Alcorn State, Jackson State, and Miss. Valley State. These schools are required to use the income from these endowments for “other-race marketing and recruitment, including the employment of other-race recruiting personnel and the award of other-race student scholarships.” (“Other-race”means non-African American.) The schools will receive their share of the endowment income, however, only “when the institution attains a total other-race enrollment of ten percent and sustains that enrollment for three consecutive years.”
Wow! So now we have not only something that looks like reparations, but a pretty hard quota-like version of affirmative action. If you don’t hit the “goal,” you don’t get the money.
Shouldn’t those of us who oppose quotas, preferences, etc., be up in arms about this settlement? Not necessarily.
On the “reparations” front, I see nothing wrong with making whole specific, identified victims of discrimination, and clearly Mississippi’s historically black colleges were kept in a repressed second-class status for their entire existence.
Regarding the requirement to enroll at least 10% of “other-race” students, note well that there’s no “diversity” baloney being served. There is, it turns out, a world of difference between this requirement and the diversiphiles’ discrimination against whites and Asians in order to secure a “critical mass” of minorities. As Fritz quotes the Fifth Circuit’s rejection of a complaint about this part of the settlement:
the ten-percent threshold seeks to ensure that the historically black universities devote the endowment funds to promoting the desegregation of their schools, not to upgrading them “so that they may be publicly financed, exclusively black enclaves by private choice.” Fordice, 505 U.S. at 743. This provision will not encourage the historically black universities to discriminate in admitting students because the current admissions standards are uniform across the state-university system; the schools lack discretion to deny entry to those applicants who meet the uniform criteria. Instead, the ten-percent threshold will provide the historically black universities with a legitimate incentive to recruit and to attract other-race students.
What the court is attempting to promote is voluntary, non-discriminatory desegregation, integration without the busing. This is needed in the historically colleges, the court noted, because desegregation has been proceeding at a much faster pace in the historically white colleges of the state. In short, this is affirmative action as originally conceived and announced in the executive orders of presidents Kennedy and Johnson — taking affirmative steps to assure non-discriminatory equal opportunity. See my recent comment on these orders here.
Thanks to Fritz for bringing this important settlement to our attention.
I’m starting to change my mind about reparations.
ID descendents of slaves, give them initially non-taxed lump sum, but severely cut back or even cancel most if not ALL Affirmative Action programs. We could afford it that way. What’s it going to cost us, $100-$200 billion? Even 1/2 Trillion? Frankly, petty cash to have this done. No more unfunded mandates. And all those goo-goos and misery merchants would have to get real jobs.
Bill paid in full.
As I recall, one of the demands made early on by the plaintiffs in the Ayers case was that Jackson State be expanded to include a medical school as large, modern, and well-equipped as the one at Ole Miss. This, in spite of the fact that black students are welcome to attend the medical school at Ole Miss, or any other program there, for that matter. To support this, let me say that I remember reading some time back that the student body had elected a black president. Some of the plaintiffs are apparently as ardent in their segregationalism as any white Southern politician of fifty years ago. Of course the state can’t support two large medical schools, and there’s no reason for it to.