It’s amazing that any type of segregation would be allowed at a college.

The College Fix reports.

Civil rights group blasts racially segregated course offerings at community college

The second-largest community college in Illinois is reserving some sections of a mandatory course for black students only – and it’s getting lambasted by a civil rights group for doing so.

The Daily Southtown reports that readers were asking why registration for some sections of “College: Changes, Challenges, Choice” at Moraine Valley Community College were marked as “limited to African-American students.”

The school says the eight-week course, whose “discussion/lecture format” sessions are nearly two hours each, has long restricted enrollment “to various demographic groups” within some sections, including veterans and “older students”:

Benefits of limiting enrollment in certain classes to targeted populations include increased engagement and student participation.

“The focus can be on specific issues they face,” [Assistant Director of Communications Jessica] Crotty said. “For example, veterans face a specific set of challenges. Students feel comfortable and are more likely to open up because they’re with other students who are like them.”

In an open letter to Moraine Valley President Sylvia Jenkins and Barbara Gellman-Danley, president of its accrediting body, the Higher Learning Commission, New York Civil Rights Coalition Executive Director Michael Meyers wrote in part:

Classes for “whites only” and/or classes for “blacks only” are one and the same—sheer racism. Such racial restrictions violate every tenet of equal protection under the law, and of academic integrity—notably the open pursuit of knowledge. I need not recount here or remind you what the federal and state laws require and prohibit. …

Any policy or effort that restricts enrollment to a college course on such objectionable and prohibited racial grounds—is profoundly obvious and disturbing. … To defy the law and regulations and academic principles in such a flagrant fashion suggests the lowering if not outright abandonment of rigorous standards of the college’s accreditation.


 
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