Discriminations

According to this interesting Associated Press article (HatTip to the Chronicle news blog), gay students do not feel welcome at most historically black colleges and universities.

Church leaders are often cited as setting the tone regarding homosexuality across the black community.
Nationwide, black pastors have opposed gay marriage and shot down comparisons between the struggles for civil rights and gay rights; others have attacked ‘‘down low’’ bisexual men for contributing to the rising AIDS rates among black women, though the topic is a matter of debate in the public health community.

On historically black campuses, those tensions make life uncomfortable for gay students.

Many black officials and leaders are unapologetic about their unwillingness to promote gay inclusion.

But just as gay students can rightfully request campus inclusion, so too can black college administrators deny it, argued the Rev. William Owens, an HBCU graduate and head of the Coalition of African-American Pastors in Memphis, Tenn.

Those administrators may cite the Bible, or simply personal beliefs -- and they don’t have to be politically correct, Owens said.

‘‘They can say ‘no’ and I don’t think they have to give a lot of reasons,’’ said Owens, who joined other black pastors worried that, along with dismal marriage rates, socially accepted homosexuality ‘‘is a threat to the black family.’’

In 2002, the issue of gays on black campuses grabbed the attention of the Human Rights Campaign, an advocacy group that organizes annual ‘‘coming out’’ days.

‘‘We would send out information to all the colleges and universities about getting national coming out packets, and for some reason the only institutions they were not hearing back from at all were the historically black colleges,’’ said the group’s diversity manager Brandon Braud, who began calling campuses.

I think the interesting question here is not over the niceness (or not) of the distinct lack of “inclusiveness” at HBCUs; it is whether those institutions have the same academic freedom to discriminate that the Grutter majority recognized and to which it deferred.

In her majority opinion, Justice O’Connor gave what many, including Chief Justice Rehnquist, regarded as “unprecedented” deference to the “academic freedom” of universities to discriminate if they believed it necessary to the mission of their institutions. But was this position really deference, or was it a simply a pass given to universities to pursue policies of which the court majority approved? Does Norfolk State have the same academic freedom to discriminate in furtherance of its academic mission as the University of Michigan? (Presumably it, too, could solicit an amicus briefs from some generals and the military that the Grutter majority found so persuasive.)

Finally, there was one very revealing passage in the AP article that deserves comment:

At Hampton, where rules govern everything from overnight guests to student dress, officials insist they don’t discriminate against gays. They say they’re simply enforcing the regulations on student groups, and there just isn’t space for another one.

But some students here see more than a conservative approach to the regulations. They, and many others at the nation’s more than 100 historically black colleges and universities, say that a broader suspicion of homosexuality keeps gays in the shadows at these tradition-heavy schools.

I don’t know whether the Hampton “officials” are telling the truth or being disingenuous. (I do know that Justice O’Connor believes, as she wrote in Grutter, that “‘good faith’ on the part of a university is ‘presumed’ absent ‘a showing to the contrary.’”) But note what this passage says of the contemporary understanding of “conservative” in academic and media circles: abiding by regulations is “conservative.” Presumably the “liberal” thing to do is to violate regulations when necessary on behalf of a an approved group or purpose.

But then, isn’t that what Grutter did?