CUNY Program to Help Black Men Is Called Discriminatory

A New York advocacy organization asked the United States Department of Education yesterday to look into whether programs aimed at helping black male students at the City University of New York and its Medgar Evers College discriminated against women and students who are not black.

In a complaint filed with the department's Office for Civil Rights, the group, the New York Civil Rights Coalition, asserted that the Male Development and Empowerment Center at Medgar Evers, and other programs at the college and at CUNY, violated federal regulations prohibiting discrimination by race or gender.

The student body at Medgar Evers, which is in Brooklyn, is 94 percent black and 76 percent female. The college created the center to help it attract and retain male students and to help them graduate. The center offers workshops and other services for men.

"This is plainly wrong," said Michael Meyers, executive director of the coalition, a 20-year-old group that describes itself as having been founded "to promote racial integration and racial reconciliation and to vigorously oppose racial separatism, segregation, prejudice and all other forms of racial idiocy."

"I can't do anything about the racial paternalism of Medgar Evers College officials or of the chancellor and board of trustees of CUNY," Mr. Meyers, who is black, added. "But when that racial paternalism takes the form of discriminatory behavior of a federally funded institution that excludes women students and discriminates in favor of black men and black men only, then I've got them."

Edison O. Jackson, the president of Medgar Evers, said programs at the center and the college were not exclusionary.

"We're not doing anything inappropriate," he said. "We don't discriminate on the basis of race. Any student who wants to participate in any activity on our campus is welcome."

The complaint comes as universities nationwide are concerned about low college attendance and graduation rates among men, especially black men, but are also worried about legal attacks on scholarships and other programs for minorities.

Jay Hershenson, CUNY's vice chancellor for university relations, said yesterday that Matthew Goldstein, the university's chancellor, had created a university-wide program to help black male students because of a "very real crisis in American higher education."

Mr. Hershenson said the university's effort, modeled in part after the Medgar Evers program, was part of CUNY's master plan, which had been approved by the New York State Education Department and by the New York State Board of Regents. The program was financed by the City Council.

Asked whether its program was legally defensible, Mr. Hershenson said CUNY did not believe its programs were exclusionary.

Dr. Jackson said that Medgar Evers had had a center for women for 20 years, and that the center for men had been set up in 2004.

"Both centers have been designed to increase the success of all of our students," he said.

He added that although 1 of the 36 sections of its freshman orientation course was aimed at men, another section was aimed at women. And, he said, women could enroll in the men's class if they wanted.

Mr. Meyers characterized himself in an e-mail message as a "true-blue liberal/progressive" who believed in affirmative action, as long as it is "inclusionary."

He said CUNY's chancellor, Dr. Goldstein, had the "best intentions to increase the standards for the City University of New York," but added that in setting up a program for black men, he was sending them a message that they could not do the work other students could "and that they have to be babied."