White Out
The TSU audits didn't focus on another problem: the school's lack of white kids
by Matt Pulle
The damaging audits of Tennessee State University and its athletic department focused on school president James Hefner's almost incomprehensible record of mismanagement and ethical lapses. As president Hefner awarded scholarships even though there was no money to fund them, he also accepted lavish perks from important vendors and outright lied to auditors who were sniffing out his misdeeds. But understandably lost amid the drumbeat of evidence that the school's president is unable to manage the school's finances are signs that TSU and Hefner have lost interest in recruiting white students.
The TSU Foundation, one of the targets of the recent state audits of the school, funded 939 scholarships from 2001 to 2003, nearly 95 percent of which went to black students, the Scene has learned. Only 49 scholarship recipients from the foundation were white. Roughly 21 percent of the school's student body is white.
From its state budget—which is separate from the TSU Foundation—the university has funded only an additional 157 scholarships to white students.
The TSU Foundation raises money from private donors but is staffed by university personnel, and Hefner sits on its board. It is essentially a fund-raising arm of the university.
A state audit cited Hefner for personally awarding 85 honors scholarships to students who didn't meet the foundation's established criteria. Of those 85, only two are white.
In each of those cases, the audit says, Hefner awarded scholarships to students with whom he was more or less acquainted and made a decision to make exceptions to the foundation's guidelines based on his own judgment. Had he been serious about having more white students on the TSU campus, it would stand to reason that he'd have given more than two of them scholarships. But since the signing of the 2001 desegregation consent decree, which basically relieved TSU from the obligation of meeting white quotas at the school, neither Hefner nor TSU has any incentive to attract white students, and some think there's no reason for them to try.
"I don't know anybody who knows how to attract white students at a historically black college," says TSU mathematics professor Ray Richardson, one of the plaintiffs in the long-running lawsuit against the state that claimed Tennessee was running a dual system of education. "Actually, here's how you do that: You get rid of the black faculty. Then you get rid of the black administrators."
Richardson's brazen sentiments highlight just how far TSU has strayed from a 1984 court order mandating that Nashville's only public university reach a 50-50 split between black and white students. The court order also called for major renovations to TSU's campus. No one ever thought the 50-50 quota was attainable, but Coleman McGinnis, a white professor who petitioned the court to intervene on the grounds that TSU was resegregating, thought that establishing a goal would prompt the university to attract more white students.
"The only reason I supported putting such a number in the stipulation was not as an end but as a means to an end." McGinnis explained to the TSU alumni magazine.
But TSU never came close to the 50-50 quota. Even as TSU expanded its facilities and programs, white students flocked to MTSU, which experienced explosive growth in large part at the expense of its Nashville counterpart.
Today, 20 years after the court order, only 16 percent of the school's undergraduate students are white, while 81 percent are black. So, in 2001, plaintiffs in the original desegregation lawsuit agreed to the heralded consent decree, which did away with any quotas for TSU.
"Basically, what we tried to do in the consent decree was to put into place the programs and practices that would have the effect of having a diverse enrollment without putting into place specific goals," says Wendy Thompson, the special assistant to Tennessee Board of Regents Chancellor Charles Manning.
The 2001 consent decree shifted the focus from white college-aged students to so-called nontraditional ones, basically part-time students who already are in the workforce. Hashed out by civil rights attorney George Barrett and Tennessee Attorney General Paul Summers, the agreement called for the state to spend $75 million over 10 years on programs that would appeal to people with jobs who might be looking to continue their education.
Those students have been far more likely to attend TSU than recent high school graduates. According to the school's most recent enrollment data, 42 percent of its graduate students are white, a much higher proportion than the makeup of the undergraduates. So trying to reach those students makes sense.
In a way, the consent decree yielded the battle over white area high schoolers to MTSU. "We made an effort to attract traditional white students, and we found it didn't work, or work to the degree we'd hoped," Richardson says.
Instead, the African American professor who came to TSU in 1965 and is a staunch defender of the beleaguered Hefner says that the university's efforts to reach out to older, part-time students has been more successful. He says that, of the scholarships that the school granted to nontraditional students, around 25 percent went to white students, roughly the same percentage who applied for aid.
Dewayne Wright, TSU spokesman, says that the racial breakdown of TSU makes it "one of the most diverse colleges in the state." In fact, as TSU's defenders correctly point out, it has a far higher percentage of white students than UT and MTSU have black students. Of course, all that proves is that Tennessee still has a dual system of education, which is what sparked the higher education lawsuit against the state back in 1968. We haven't exactly come a long way.
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