October 23, 2009
Morgan State University may have won a Pyrrhic victory in its dispute with the University of Maryland University College over a graduate program to train doctoral candidates in community college administration.
The school had wanted the Maryland Higher Education Commission to block a planned online community college administration program at UMUC on the grounds it would duplicate Morgan's own up-and-running program in the same specialty. This week the commissioners sided with Morgan, at least to the extent of barring UMUC from offering its course to students in Maryland, setting a worrisome precedent for how the state will handle a longstanding anti-segregation measure in the digital age.
Since UMUC is mostly an online institution, and the vast majority of its students already live outside the state (many are military and government personnel stationed abroad), it's hard to see how the decision benefits Morgan. Those students wouldn't be attending classes on its campus anyway.
Historically, state officials had good reason to avoid duplicating programs offered by Morgan and other historically black colleges and universities at nearby, predominantly white institutions. That's because such duplication had the effect of maintaining a racially segregated system of higher education. The dismantling duplicate programs was intended to foster the integration of Maryland campuses by attracting a more diverse student body to all the state's institutions of higher learning.
But that's exactly what's happening already at Morgan, where more than half of the 50 students enrolled in its community college administration program are now white. And there's no indication that a similar online program offered by UMUC would be any less integrated, since it would be open not only to African-Americans in Maryland and across the country but also to people of color around the world. By its very nature, the Internet is a powerful integrative force for bringing people together regardless of race, creed or national origin.
Even if UMUC had been allowed to offer its courses to Marylanders, Morgan would have remained the only school in the state system to offer a graduate community college administration curriculum in the context of a live-classroom situation and face-to-face interaction with instructors and research staff. Given the uniqueness of its program, there's little doubt that students who could take advantage of those opportunities would prefer it to the solitary online experience.
The program at UMUC was developed to serve the needs of students who can only earn their degree online. Some may live in outlying areas where they can't easily travel to Morgan's campus or to any of the satellite programs it has established in Central Maryland and Frederick County. Others may be unable to attend Morgan's weekend classes. But most of them not only will never live in Maryland, they may not even pursue their higher education goals in this country. And even if Morgan eventually does develop its own online course in community college administration, UMUC's offerings at best could only complement rather than compete with Morgan's campus-based program.
Given its advantages, if Morgan still can't convince prospective in-state students that its program offers something substantially more attractive than online instruction, then it has more problems to overcome than a legacy of segregation.
Readers respond
The decision by the Maryland Higher Education Commission to prohibit access by Maryland citizens to an online academic program of a Maryland university is insane! In the Soviet Union, citizens who accessed electronic communication from outside the country were sometimes shipped off to the Gulag in Siberia. What might happen to a Marylander who accessed UMUC's program through a computer outside Maryland, in D.C. for example?
Donald N. Langenberg, Baltimore
The writer is chancellor emeritus of the University System of Maryland.
The harm done by our horrible legacy of racial segregation runs so deep in our society that even today many people will choose UMUC over Morgan State University for no other reason than Morgan is a "historically black" college. That is why the Maryland Higher Education Commission voted correctly on this issue. It is going to take more than time to correct our past mistakes; it is going to take rulings such as this one.
Sean Tully
