COLUMN ONE : For Blacks, a Crisis on Campus : Segregated colleges that educated and nurtured thousands of African-Americans face the prospect of extinction. Students and alumni fear losing a vital institution.

When Taeza Baynes looks out over the Tennessee State University campus, all she sees is construction. Yellow bulldozers and other heavy equipment dot the grounds. New buildings are going up, old buildings are being renovated, new sidewalks are being poured.

You would think the junior engineering major would be glad the state is spending $112 million to upgrade her long-neglected school, the only predominantly black four-year university in Tennessee. But she has mixed feelings.

She is happy for the new facilities, pleased to see the campus brought up to par with other state schools. But she also finds it disturbing because in her view the hefty investment is tainted by racism.

“The only reason we’re getting that money,” she said, “is because it’s becoming a white school.”

State officials would contend that the university, in fact, is becoming “color-blind.” But to achieve this, the campus is required by its settlement of a 24-year-old lawsuit to become 50% white by 1993. The long-range goal is to reach a racial mix comparable to the makeup of the Nashville area, or about 80% white.

Playing out here is a scenario students, faculty and administrations of the nation’s black colleges have come to fear--the loss of black control and, in some cases, the demise of black institutions, brought about by integration.

Born of prejudice, starved for cash and treated like unwanted stepchildren, the nation’s black institutions of higher learning have nurtured and educated untold thousands of African-Americans for more than 150 years, helping them enter the mainstream of society, giving them the skills and confidence to maneuver through often hostile white environs.

Black schools have produced leaders such as civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and opera star Jessye Norman. Without these schools, many blacks would not have had the opportunity to attend college. Their educational needs might have gone unmet at predominantly white schools.

About 300,000 students attend 117 black public and private colleges and universities spread across 25 states, according to the National Assn. of Equal Opportunity in Higher Education. The schools constitute only 3% of the nation’s 3,559 institutions of higher learning, yet, despite the removal of race barriers in the 1960s, they enroll more than 17% of black students attending college. In 1990, more than one in four black bachelor’s degree recipients were graduated from a historically black school.

But the question being asked today is whether black colleges should survive. And, if so, in what form?

The students and teachers who brought desegregation lawsuits in the 1960s and 1970s in the mostly Southern states that maintained separate systems of higher education sought improved access to white institutions that had been closed to them as well as equal funding and educational excellence at traditionally black schools. But as the doors of white colleges have opened wider to blacks since the 1970s, financial problems and dwindling enrollments have forced a number of black schools to shut down.

In addition, successful desegregation efforts have turned five historically black colleges--in Missouri, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Virginia and West Virginia--into majority-white campuses. Several others are approaching the 50% mark.

“Historically black colleges are critical institutions for the black community,” said James U. Blackshear, an Alabama attorney who is representing African-American plaintiffs in a desegregation lawsuit in that state, one of several such suits pending in the South. “The black university is the one institution other than the black church that blacks managed to salvage. They express the educational and political aspirations of the black community.

“We want them maintained,” he continued. “We want them to be high-quality institutions. We want whites to come, but we don’t want them taken away from the black community.”

But they are being taken away, critics contend. In Mississippi, for example, outrage greeted the state’s response to a June ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that the state had not done enough to desegregate its colleges and universities. The state is proposing closing one black school and merging another with a white university. The plan, submitted Oct. 22 to a federal judge who must approve the strategy, would leave Mississippi with only one traditionally black university--Jackson State, which will be upgraded in an effort to make it attractive to whites.

Black leaders in Mississippi have vowed to fight the proposals, but across the country many educators, including blacks, say that providing more funds to upgrade black public colleges without integrating them--a new angle on the “separate but equal” approach--is folly. They believe the government has no business preserving racially identifiable schools.

Otis L. Floyd Jr., the former president of Tennessee State and now chancellor of the University and Community College System of Tennessee, rejects arguments that black universities do a better job of preparing African-Americans for leadership roles in society and provide a more nurturing atmosphere. Black students, he said, need to see “what the real world is like.”

“I went to a (black college) but I’d be danged if I want my kids to go to that school,” he said. “Why should I hold to that (segregated) system when it’s not best for my children? The South is different today. All things change.”

But changes at the nation’s college campuses have been slow to come. Tennessee State provides a case in point.

A black professor filed the original desegregation lawsuit in 1968 seeking to block construction of a University of Tennessee branch in downtown Nashville, a few miles from TSU. The lawsuit contended that the new school would be predominantly white and therefore would foster segregation.

A judge allowed the new campus to be built but ordered steps taken to desegregate both campuses. A decade later, racial differences between the schools remained pronounced and the court ordered them to merge. It was the first time a white school had been absorbed into a black university, but most of UT-Nashville’s white students soon dropped out or transferred to other schools.

The current efforts to upgrade TSU are a last-ditch attempt to attract white students to the 80-year-old campus that television personality Oprah Winfrey, syndicated columnist Carl Rowan and Olympic star Wilma Rudolph attended.

TSU is receiving attention and resources that would have been unheard of a few years ago. But when African-American students and faculty speak of Tennessee’s plans for the school they sound as if they are discussing the slow death of the institution.

“For me it’s like the genocidal destruction of the school,” said Devery Freeman, a 1989 graduate. “It’s the destruction of the culture.”

Raymond Richardson, the black chairman of TSU’s department of physics, mathematics and computer sciences, likewise sees vindictiveness in the state’s plans for the school. “The people who implement desegregation plans are the same folks who fought those plans tooth and nail,” he said. “They often try to turn desegregation into a worse hell than segregation to make the plaintiffs sorry they ever did it.”

As evidence he points to a long-discarded plan from the early 1970s that called for dispersing TSU’s black faculty members throughout the state and replacing them with white teachers. While the state never officially undertook to carry out that plan, Richardson said the effect is the same. Through attrition, the number of black teachers at TSU has been whittled away until they now account for only 48% of the school’s faculty.

He calls such measures punitive and argues that they are misplaced because black schools do not stay black by design, but because white students refuse to attend. Black colleges have always had whites on their faculty and administrations.

Take a walk on the main campus today and, even though 38% of the 7,504 students are white, there is little evidence of them. That is because most of the whites are older, part-time or evening students who attend classes at the downtown campus. Those who do venture to the main campus in a black neighborhood in northwest Nashville rarely live in the dormitories or take part in campus social activities.

“A lot of them aren’t comfortable being in dorms with black students because they feel (blacks) are hostile,” said Freeman, the black former student.

Many black students, in fact, are resentful of the newcomers, in part because white students receive minority scholarships and other financial assistance to attend. As part of Tennessee’s statewide desegregation program, race-specific financial aid is available to students--white or black--willing to attend a school at which they would be members of a racial minority. Without those incentives, many whites acknowledge that they would not attend TSU.

Some students predicted that the tension will increase as the number of white students goes up and the feeling among blacks grows stronger that their school is being taken away from them.

Racial tension has been high since the 1979 merger. A number of white professors who had formerly taught at the white school have had their classes boycotted by black student groups because of complaints that they grade blacks unfairly.

For a number of years black and white faculty members hardly spoke to each other. Things have improved recently, in part, said white political science professor H. Coleman McGinnis, because white professors who came to TSU against their will in the merger and did not want to work with blacks have already left.

McGinnis joined in a 1983 lawsuit that contended the school was integrating too slowly, and he still argues that the university is dragging its feet. He blamed the incompetence of TSU administrators and their unwillingness to take the steps necessary to bring about change.

“If they did the things they ought to do, if they really make this place work--which would benefit everybody--you wouldn’t be able to keep the white students out,” said McGinnis.

Because funding is keyed to enrollment, when TSU lost white students after the merger it also lost critical operating dollars, making it even more difficult to “make the place work.” State education officials acknowledge that the campus’ original buildings were built more cheaply than those on white campuses and the school always had less money for their upkeep.

“There are some classrooms that I’ve taught in for 12 years where the heating and air conditioning have never worked,” McGinnis said. The buildings, he said, “were falling down by the time they were built. You can’t blame all of that on campus personnel.”

Nevertheless, despite the inferior facilities, poor upkeep and inadequate funding, TSU continues to attract black students from across the country, in large part because of its identity as a black school. One of its largest alumni chapters is in Southern California.

“A black school is more like a family,” said Naneke Brooks of Atlanta, an engineering major. “At a white school you’d have to look for people to give you guidance and attention.”

Elliott Pilton of Detroit, who attended TSU on a football scholarship, said he feared racial prejudice at a white school.

Baynes, a Pittsburgh, Pa., native, said she considered going to predominantly white schools, the University of Pittsburgh and Penn State among them, but decided on TSU after talking it over with her parents. “I wanted to go to a school that our people had created, that was a part of our history that we could hold on to,” she said.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in June on the Mississippi case was the first time the court had directly addressed college desegregation, but its ruling, which sent the case back to a lower court, left unresolved the question of what is to become of black public colleges.

Writing the majority opinion, Justice Byron R. White said states must do more than adopt race-neutral policies and that states bear the burden of proof to show that they have eliminated vestiges of segregation.

But in language that caused concern among some civil rights experts, White also rejected the argument that traditionally under-financed black colleges are entitled to increased funding for what he termed “exclusively black enclaves.”

However, J. Clay Smith, a Howard University law professor and a supporter of black colleges, said he was encouraged by Justice Clarence Thomas’ separate opinion.

Thomas wrote that while “a state is not constitutionally required to maintain its historically black institutions as such, I do not understand our opinion to hold that a state is forbidden from doing so. It would be ironic, to say the least, if the institutions that sustained blacks during segregation were themselves destroyed in an effort to combat its vestiges.”

State education officials insist that when TSU becomes a majority-white university, it will not forsake its black students. “I don’t see the court order as a hindrance to TSU doing what it has done so well, and that is the nurturing of black students,” said Sonya Smith, state director of student and community relations.

Richard G. Rhoda, vice chancellor for administration, insisted that the changes will benefit everyone. In addition to the massive building program, TSU has developed expensive new degree programs and has first claim on any new graduate programs that will be offered in mid-Tennessee. And some special programs have been adopted to increase the number of blacks in the professional schools.

What angers many black students, though, is that the changes wouldn’t have taken place if not for the desegregation order. Floyd, the first black head of a state university system in the South, insists that this shouldn’t matter.

“Tennessee State will always be the primary black university in the state of Tennessee because (black people) always will send their students back,” he said. He acknowledges, though, that if all goes according to plan the state’s “primary black university” will someday have a predominantly white student population and probably also a white president.