Some of the oldest and most persistent problems faced by HBCUs have to do with states providing better funding to predominantly white colleges, allowing them to duplicate degrees and programs already offered at HBCUs, and even plopping down new college campuses that are sometimes in HBCUs’ backyards. Over the years, the challenges of fending off program creep by predominantly white institutions and contesting state education systems’ disproportionate investments in newer colleges have taken their toll on HBCUs. At least 19 of them, including both public and private institutions, have closed their doors for good, including six over the last two decades.
What’s been happening in Maryland lately illustrates these pressures. Morgan State University, an HBCU in Baltimore where I taught in the 1970s, has been in the news regarding a long battle with Towson University, a nearby predominantly white school, over program duplication. Several years ago, MSU began a doctorate program in bioenvironmental science, and Towson wanted to start a similar one that the Maryland Higher Education Commission recently agreed mirrored the one at MSU. Last year the commission also ruled against Towson over a business analytics administration program it wanted to start, which the commission deemed too similar to MSU’s. And the commission denied Johns Hopkins University’s and Stevenson University’s requests to establish a Ph.D. program in physical therapy that duplicated an existing program at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, another public HBCU.
The reasons Towson and other predominantly white schools keep doing this is that too often they get away with it. Let’s look at what happened in Florida: In 1965, the state closed down the Florida A&M University law school (FAMU), which had been operating since 1949, and funded a new law school at Florida State University. It was widely believed at the time that FAMU’s defunding was due to its students’ active role in the civil rights movement. Funding that was previously appropriated to FAMU’s law program was transferred to Florida State. Because of that, FAMU was not able to restart its law school until 2000 — and it had to reopen it in Orlando, 259 miles away.
States have encouraged and routinely approved the openings of new colleges in the same general areas where HBCUs have long existed. In Georgia, Savannah State University, an HBCU, was established in 1890. In 1935, when the state wanted to make higher education more accessible to white residents in Savannah and surrounding counties, instead of investing in and expanding SSU’s programs and curricula it built Armstrong State University, 10 miles from the HBCU campus. SSU alumni and Black elected officials have complained over the years that ASU has received priority funding.
It all came to a head in 2018 when the state board of regents, after considering merging Savannah State and Armstrong State, opted instead to consolidate ASU with Georgia Southern University, a larger institution 50 miles northwest of Savannah. This action created a larger and more prestigious university with 26,000 students, presenting an even bigger challenge for SSU, a 3,200-student liberal arts college.
What I find most disturbing is that while HBCUs are battling state education systems and predominantly white colleges over program duplication and other issues that impact their bottom lines, most states have yet to address the $13 billion underfunding gap that the U.S. secretaries of education and agriculture brought to the attention of 16 governors last year. The states of Florida and Georgia, according to those federal officials, owe their land-grant HBCUs $1.97 billion and $321 million, respectively. To Maryland’s credit, it did agree to a $577 million settlement to compensate its HBCUs for years of underfunding and other practices and policies that proved deleterious to its predominantly Black colleges.
When I read about the hardship that some HBCUs face today, such as Tennessee State University’s needing to avoid a $46.1 million shortfall at the end of this academic year, I wonder whether they would be in this position had they received funding equitable to the state’s predominantly white colleges. The federal secretaries said Tennessee underfunded its land-grant HBCUs by fully $2.14 billion over the last three decades. The state should use a portion of the debt it owes to Black colleges to make TSU whole.
What all this adds up to is that the fate of all HBCUs is at best uncertain. Given the changes afoot on the national level, it is unclear what Linda McMahon, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to head the U.S. Department of Education, might mean for higher education in general and HBCUs in particular. Trump has said he wants her to dismantle the department and send some of its funding to the states. I am not encouraged when I hear that states might control more federal higher ed dollars with less oversight by a weakened (or nonexistent) Department of Education.
Public officials who oversee the operations of higher education institutions and set their budgets must ensure that HBCUs and other minority-serving institutions thrive. According to the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, HBCUs account for 40 percent of the African American members of Congress, 40 percent of Black engineers, 50 percent of Black lawyers and 80 percent of Black judges. If state policymakers need more convincing of the value of HBCUs, let us be reminded of the tagline from the old United Negro College Fund advertising campaigns: “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”
Governing’s opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing’s editors or management.
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