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‘Dr. Ronald Mason, the President of the Southern University system, says this merger will cause Southern University to lose its identity in New Orleans.’

But what is that identity? The Governor of Louisiana and the university system regents want Southern to merge with a respectable university – one with a graduation rate above 11%, for instance – and Southern is resisting. Grade-changing scandals, an Athletic Director skulking the streets of Houston — these are Southern, and they are in danger of being lost.

Margaret Soltan, April 4, 2011 10:23PM
Posted in: the university

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8 Responses to “‘Dr. Ronald Mason, the President of the Southern University system, says this merger will cause Southern University to lose its identity in New Orleans.’”

  1. Eddie Francis Says:

    Hello Margaret,

    I am sure that Dr. Mason would be more than happy to address the question. 🙂

    Eddie Francis
    Director of Public Relations
    Southern University at New Orleans

  2. david foster Says:

    Eddie…I hope your compensation package includes combat pay.

  3. bfa Says:

    let me break this down:
    Louisiana’s historically black colleges (the Southern system and Grambling State) are 95% black. Lousiana’s other state institutions (the LSU and U of L systems) are 80-95% white, depending on the campus. This is in a state that’s more than a third black overall.

    SUNO’s problems have nothing to do with the institution, and everything to do with the community they serve, which is poor urban blacks who live in and around New Orleans. Of course SUNO has a low graduation rate- its students work too much, take too few classes at a time, and lack support networks. The school they want to merge SUNO with, UNO, has a similarly low graduation rate, because of similar factors- but not as bad, because it’s slightly better to be poor white in New Orleans than it is to be poor black (although it sucks either way).

    If you merge SUNO and UNO into an institution in the U of L system (which is the proposal), it doesn’t actually fix the problem, because the student body will stay the same- graduation rates will continue to suck. But you’ll lose SUNO’s emphasis on the black community, which is sorely needed in a state that is still really, really, really racist. SUNO and UNO’s problems are the result of urban poverty, and aren’t something that can be fixed by moving boxes around the org chart.

  4. Margaret Soltan Says:

    bfa: I think the reason the governor and a majority of the regents wants something like a merger to go forward is that SUNO is simply going nowhere with its students. All that you say about the community it serves is true; but it doesn’t serve that community at all well. There is reason to believe this change might be for the better – though that is certainly not guaranteed.

  5. bfa Says:

    I can assure you, whatever else, the governor does NOT have the best interests of the community at heart. This is a man who cut funding from the universities so that he could give development funds to companies that didn’t even want them. And motives of the board of regents are fairly suspect as well, given that 14 of the 15 members are white, and none of its members graduated from the Southern system or Grambling.

    This is not about raising graduation rates. How is merging two bad institutions, without changing anything else about the system, supposed to produce a good university? This is actually about saving money so the state can lower taxes again. After they merge SUNO and UNO, the next debate will be about merging La Tech and Grambling, and then they’ll move on to talk about closing Southern’s main campus in Baton Rouge and letting LSU take over its property.

    The minute they start talking about something that will actually make a difference to the quality of education at SUNO, I’ll be behind it, but all this merger nonsense is is taking away the very poor opportunities that New Orleans’s blacks currently have and replacing them with nothing at all.

  6. Margaret Soltan Says:

    bfa: You’re better informed than I, and may be right about the bad – or at least mixed – motives of some of the players here. But what if nothing – after years of trying this and that – can make a difference to the quality of education at SUNO? Nothing but shutting the school down and starting over? Would you support a proposal from the government to shut the school down and devote its former resources to, say, a two-year remedial college in its place?

  7. Mr Punch Says:

    Part of the issue here seems to be “community” vs “students.” If you have two public universities in town, one historically black and one integrated since its inception, and the latter is larger and has a better reputation, and the best that defenders of the HBCU can say is that its students wouldn’t do any better at the other school, then the answer is obvious in strictly academic terms (and in terms of efficient use of limited resources). bfa’s arguments are about “ownership” and control, they’re political; I don’t dismiss them (the LSU board, for example, really should change), but they’re the kind of thing that ultimately get settled through the political process.

  8. University Diaries » The Governor Can’t Make Southern University Disappear… Says:

    […] of Southern University, a total money-pit bearing no resemblance to a university. He was going to merge it with a better university. But that doesn’t seem to be […]

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