Learning While Black: The persistent racism of state higher education funding.

• Date: 01 November 2021
• Author: Carey, Kevin

The State Must Provide: Why America's Colleges Have Always Been Unequal--And How to Set Them Right

by Adam Harris

Ecco Press, 267 pp.

In 2019, the state of Mississippi provided the University of Mississippi, affectionately known as "Ole Miss," about $245 million to support the education of 22,500 students. Divide those numbers, and you get roughly $10,900 per student, to which Ole Miss added tuition revenues in similar amounts and earnings from a $775 million endowment. Seventy-seven percent of Ole Miss undergraduates are white.

That same year, Mississippi gave Jackson State University, a historically Black institution with a student body of 6,600, about $43 million, or $6,500 per student. Jackson State's endowment is $60 million. Three percent of its students are white.

$10,900 and $6,500. $775 million and $60 million. Seventy-seven percent and 3 percent. Keep those numbers in mind, because they are the end of the story that Adam Harris, a staff writer at The Atlantic, tells in his vital, searing new book, The State Must Provide.

The book is a corrective to the standard triumphalist narrative of racial progress that remains dominant in our culture, and goes something like this:

"A long time ago, America was founded with slavery, which was very bad, as was the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision. We fought a civil war, which produced the very good Fourteenth Amendment, which was sadly interpreted in the very bad Plessy v. Ferguson decision that established the principle of 'separate but equal,' until the Supreme Court ruled--unanimously!--in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation was unconstitutional. There was some foot dragging over the next decade involving standing in schoolhouse doors, etc., but now education is open to all. As for colleges, Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862, which created some great big salt-of-the-earth universities with terrific football teams, then Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the GI Bill, which, along with Pell Grants and student loans, means people can afford colleges. Those colleges are definitely not racist, because racism and segregation are the same thing, and segregation is illegal. The end."

Harris has written a history of American higher education that begins in the decades before the Civil War and finishes in the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. If there's one thing you should take away from The State Must Provide, it is that the nation's power structures did not want to give Black people an equal opportunity for higher education then, and they do not want to give Black people an equal opportunity for higher education now. The degree of discrimination has diminished. The principle remains.

Harris...