Desegregation in Higher Education

by Samuel L. Myers Jr.

The four essays contained in this volume examine the status of desegregation in today's colleges and universities. Dr. Samuel L. Myers, Sr., discusses the renewed focus on improving access, retention and graduation of minorities in colleges and universities. Dr. Julia Wells discusses individual and institutional racism, noting institutional racism is more pervasive in that 'institutional racism is harmful not only to blacks who are targets, but also erodes the core of idealism and progress in American society.' Dr. Paul Fairley examines the desegregation activities at Maryland's historically black public institutions for undergraduate higher education. Dr. Louise M. Tomlinson presents the findings from a survey questionnaire, distributed to the six key administrators at each of the 34 major institutions in the University System of Georgia Higher Education. The survey was designed to examine the administrators' responses to the issues of recruiting and retaining black American faculty. Co-published with the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education.

98 pages, Paperback

First published December 30, 1988

Reviews

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I am engaged in historical research on aspects of underrepresented populations in the context of the education of history, this book attracted my attention. While some of the data and framework has aged, if you are engaged in historical study about aspects of this topic, the four essays in this book provide some interesting framework to how evaluations of integration and advancement of African American student populations were and were not being represented and paralleled in faculty numbers throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The essays examined HBCUs as well as historically white colleges and discussed changes and interpretations of how things were impacted and the long term effects of these changes. While reading these essays in a strictly modern standing, we can see which of their predictions and concerns were valid, but also interesting is the review of President Reagan's involvement in attempting to use Executive Orders to strengthen and develop HBCUs.

Thus, this book has aged, but it is a readable artifact of interpreting the historical view of desegregation from Brown versus Board of Education through the 1980s and, using the standards and data of the 1980s attempts to show both signs of progress and concern. It would be interesting to attempt to review the data in modernity to see if the trends established continued to be of concern or if the needs were addressed as needed, but I will leave that to someone else's dissertation work.