That would have been late '74 or early '75, because then we filed a
supplemental budget request for the Vet School, you remember, for the
'75 session of the General Assembly. And just about that time, see, you
had the Vet School controversy and a lot of stirring on going about our
plan and then came that LDF brief and the reaction of NAFEO to that. And
then HEW sort of fell on us.
[pause] We
did not file by the due date of December 31, 1974, or whenever it
was—our first semi-annual report on our desegregation plan. We were
still trying to design the reporting system. I would just observe in
passing, Bill, that the first year for which we collected data on
enrollments by race in all sixteen public senior institutions in North
Carolina was 1972. Now we had some episodic data from back in the '60s,
but in the late 1960's, or very early in 1970, when I was Dean of Arts
and Sciences at Chapel Hill, in which capacity I also served as chairman
of the Chancellor's Advisory Committee on Admissions. So Dean of Arts
and Sciences does a lot of admissions work. We were then ordered by HEW
at some point during my four year tenure up there as Dean that we could
not ask the person's race on their application for admission. See, we
went through that period when we couldn't acknowledge race, and then
they turn right around and said, "Well, you've got to tell us how many
black people applied," and so forth and so on. So there was a lot of
confusion, but my point was, we had a real job getting some kind of a
reporting system in place. And remember we were dealing with a system
where we had no record of relationships and things with the five
historically black campuses or with all the old regional universities.
We were still going through a period of sort of consolidation of a new
structure. And so we were late. Not surprising. And it doesn't amount to
a hill of beans anyway, but they picked up on that and wrote a, just a,
early in the spring, or late in the spring, I guess it was. It was 1975.
Just wrote a blistering letter to President Friday about all the things
we were doing wrong or not doing, citing mostly to the Vet School. The
fact that we were late to file our report. They were meanwhile putting a
lot of pressure to bear on the Office of Civil Rights to repudiate these
plans it had administratively accepted. And finally HEW just folded, as
a matter of fact. Now that's my word, and that's the way I would
characterize it, but we knew they were working on them, and you can look
up the dates in some of that other material, but at some point HEW just
informed us our plan was no longer accepted and informed all the other
states the same thing, that their plans were no longer accepted. Didn't
say why. Didn't say, you know, "This is the reason." It just said,
"They're no good. They're not working. So your plan is no longer
acceptable." In the meantime, there was one other big debate that we had
on this issue. It was in that 1974 plan. We agreed to do a study of the
five historically black institutions, particularly looking at their
comparative levels of financial support by the state and any other thing
that seemed to be wrong. And we got that, we finished
Page 6that comparative study along in 1975, I guess, and filed that
[unclear] and that was a focus of a great
deal of debate and discussion
[unclear] .
Well, all of which is to say that, obviously, by the latter part of '74
on into '75 this was becoming kind of an overriding issue with virtually
everything that we were doing. And we found it very difficult to
communicate with the officers of the OCR office. And this was of very
great and real concern to President Friday. And as to how we could reach
some kind of understanding and accommodation with them. We were not
looking for a fight. And when we tried to keep up this theme that "What
HEW says it wants is what we want, and we hope that we can find some way
to accomplish our common purpose that we can both come to accept, that
is, as to the way we come about it." But that was getting harder and
harder to communicate with them during '75, and then finally they just
repudiated the plans. And so we—had nothing to do but to wait and see
what kind of ruling we got from them.
By then, we were hot into the elections of 1976 and Mr. Carter won and
appointed Joe Califano as his Secretary of Education. Secretary of
Health, Education, and Welfare. Secretary of HEW. And a new director at
the Office for Civil Rights took over, David Tatel. And we sort of, you
know, stood by him, waited to see what was going to happen. President
Friday knew Joe Califano. Had known him for a long time. They'd worked
together during the Johnson years when President Friday was on the White
House Fellows Commission. And, in fact, I remember in 1970, when I was
Dean, President Friday did us the favor of getting Joe Califano to come
down here and give a speech over in Hill Hall one night. Califano was at
that time one of the key people working with that commission designed to
reform the Democratic party, and that was the subject of his lecture
that night. And I remember I had to find some ashtrays to put up on the
podium of Hill Hall because Joe was quite a smoker in those days.
Anyhow, we hoped that we would have some reasonable people with whom we
could establish a sound working relationship to do what needed to be
done. We now know, and found out shortly after, during the course of our
law suit that Califano appointed a commission and they went to work to
rewrite the guidelines that had been issued back in November of '73, and
made a conscious decision not to consult with any of the universities or
states about those. They were to be developed in secret. But along in
the—I guess the late winter or early spring of 1977, President Friday
was contacted and said that Mr. Califano's special assistant—No. His
counsel, the counsel for HEW. HEW's General Counsel, Mr. Peter Libassi,
and his aide, who was David Breneman, wanted to visit with us. Libassi
was a very prominent attorney. David Breneman was—I guess Dave was an
economist on the staff out at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
And later he became president of, I can't think of the private college
in Michigan, and I think is still a college president. But they were Mr.
Califano's emissaries who were going to come and talk to us about we
assumed, what we were going to be called on to do. Because we knew we
were sitting here with, you know, with a rejected plan, and we knew HEW
was under a court order. It had to do something. And so that was the
first word that we had that they would be coming to visit us. Now I
remember they came, they arrived on a Sunday, and so we had a long
session in that conference room right around the corner. The president
invited the Chairman of the Board of Governors, who was Mr. William A.
Johnson. Judge Johnson. He was present. I was there. Felix Joyner was
there. Dick Robinson was there. Cleon Thompson was there. That's
probably pretty much the meeting—then Libassi and Breneman. Libassi had
a tablet on his lap, and he would speak from that tablet. And that
clearly was a draft, a working draft of what came to be known as the
Criteria, which was, you know, the new guidelines. But they were going
to issue them as—they were called Criteria—gosh, I never tought I would
forget the full name. Let's see, here.
[Pause to
look for information] You ought to go through our state
plans and consent decree at some juncture, and then all these dates. You
ought to go, you ought to really go through these. Let's see here.
Page 7Yeah. The full title is Criteria Specifying the
Ingredients of Acceptable Plans to Desegregate State Systems of Public
Higher Education. And that's what he was working off of. He raised, you
know, a lot of, a lot of good questions. It was a good discussion. But
it was clear that the focus now was on increasing black participation
and increasing black presence at the historically White campuses. There
was very little said about white presence at the historically black
campuses. That was just not on their minds. But they made it clear that
there were going to be some standards set for us to meet in these other
two areas. And it looked like, it sounded as though they were going to
be very severe standards and very difficult to meet. They stayed over. I
think we—I believe we met a while that following morning, Monday
morning, and then they left. And we heard nothing more. We now know, and
the Criteria came to reflect this, that the federal government had
something of a dilemna on its hands. The LDF brief, back in early 1975,
quoted with approval the dictum of Swann versus Mecklenburg. "No black
schools, no white schools, just schools." That's not what the black
institutions wanted. And then, see, after that it became clear in those
discussions with Libassi and Breneman, and then it became clear to us in
the Criteria, that there were really sort of two flags here that one
could march under. And they were not necessarily in competition with one
another in all senses, but they also were, in a way, fundamentally
competitive. One was integration. The other was preservation of the
black colleges. Because, you see, we were declared to be in violation of
the Civil Rights Act. I guess the Fourteenth Amendment was thrown in,
for good measure. Because we were operating a racially dual system of
public higher education, and that racial duality was always documented
by the fact that we had five institutions whose student bodies were
overwhelmingly black, and eleven institutions whose student bodies were
overwhelmingly white. Now was the idea to get a racial balance
reflecting the whole population on all sixteen, or what? And so these
goals, you know, finally can, can become right on. And we found the
Federal Government had two flags that it would march under from time to
time as circumstances warranted. One of them was integrate. The other
was to develop the black institutions. We had no issue with them, in a
real sense, over the development of the black institutions. But our
problem was that we were, you know, told we were in violation of the
law, and we never could get any kind of a guide or standard out of them
and what would be the characteristics of a unitary system? "If ours is
racially dual, tell us what it is we have to be not to be racially
dual?" And that's the question we could never get the answer for except
we were simply told, "Well, do what we tell you to do and we'll let you
know." Now this was a—I cannot overemphasize, Bill, this was 1976-77,
but I cannot overemphasize to you how difficult our predicament was.
Every one involved in this on the University side had been a proponent
of the civil rights movement. We had all been proponents of integration
of the University. And some of us had had an active role, for example,
in working to increase black enrollment at Chapel Hill and elsewhere.
Just the symbolism of being in conflict with or at odds with the civil
rights establishment was painful. Because while there were still some
quarters who would give you high marks for just being in opposition to
the Office for Civil Rights, those were not generally the quarters that
we looked to as the people with whom we liked to compare ourselves,
starting with our faculties. Because faculty members, you know, assume
that the civil rights establishment is right, and, again, this was not
long after the height of the movement in the '60s. So then, what was
wrong with us? What is it we're doing wrong? And this was very difficult
for the President, because we knew what it finally came down to, is that
we were being asked to do things which were unreasonable and detrimental
to the University and destructive, we believed, to the purposes that we
thought we should be working toward. But we were being told that by
people and offices and organizations who were identified automatically
as the champions of civil rights. And so it was a hard thing to
Page 8think through is, "Do we want to take on the civil
rights establishment? Is there—isn't there some way to live with them at
peace?" I—we get our fix where we're their enemy. Now Libassi was very
candid about this in a conversation with President Friday. He told him
that he should understand that among the powers up in Washington, who
were—I'm sure he was referring to the LDF and the folks running the
Office of Civil Rights—that they had singled out the University of North
Carolina. Their feeling was if they could break the University of North
Carolina, they could get anyone. Now that's what we were told. And
everything that happened from 1976 onward tended to bring out that we
were being set aside as a special case.