Historically Black Colleges: A Forgotten Issue Waiting for a Populist President

Trump passingly mentioned HBCUs at least once on the campaign trail, I’m told—and in the final stretch, the GOP took up HBCU advocacy as an appeal to the African-American community.

Now, the prospect of a White House initiative—an executive order is in the works, Omarosa Manigault, director of communications for the Office of Public Liaison (and a graduate of HBCUs Howard University, Central State University, and Payne Theological Seminary), reportedly said—came up at a listening session to kick off Black History Month. The event was marred in the popular imagination by the president’s apparent ignorance of abolitionist and statesman Frederick Douglass. When it comes to what HBCUs need, confessing his ignorance—and listening to those who know more—is actually a good thing. Much better than believing he knows best, anyway.

At another such “listening session,” a closed meeting a month earlier, administration officials listened to black leaders with impressive humility, said Johnny C. Taylor, Jr., president and CEO of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, a national organization supporting and representing HBCUs. “They didn’t go in and say, ‘Oh, since Omarosa went to three HBCUs, we’ve got all of the answers.’ That would be an easy approach, but instead it was surprisingly one of humility.”

“I was so wildly impressed with that position coming in, versus ‘We know what you all need, we have these policy experts, and so this is what we’re going to do for you.'” And, more recently, Taylor received a call asking, specifically, for the same sort of expert stakeholder guidance—on drafting an executive order to benefit HBCUs. The executive order, reportedly “imminent,” would ideally include a funding goal for federal money specifically committed to HBCUs and would make support for these schools a special focus of the White House, Taylor has said.

Historically black colleges and universities—HBCUs, as they’re known—are schools founded before 1964 expressly to educate African-Americans. They’re historically black, not “exclusively black”, always having admitted students of all races. Two in West Virginia, Taylor points out, have in fact become majority white. (Washington, D.C.’s Howard University, often counted among the best of the best along with Atlanta’s all-women’s Spelman College and all-male Morehouse, is upward of 90-percent majority African-American. But HBCUs in general have only a 76-percent majority-African-American enrollment, according to a 2015 report from UPenn’s Center for Minority Serving Institutions.)

HBCUs’ unifying quality today is not necessarily race, Taylor told me. “We’re giving voice to people who are not listened to,” he said, referring to the consistent goals of the Trump administration and the HBCU community. “Everyone listens to the Harvard, the Yale, the Stanford. The last administration did that quite well.” This priority of the Trump administration is something else, and it’s about more than race. “This is as much about reaching out to the people whose voices haven’t been heard, the common everyday proletarian to say, ‘We want to figure out how invest in institutions that are relevant to you.'”

HBCUs enroll more students from low-income families than most other institutions. Their students’ average debt is higher than the national average, their graduation rates lower. Their funding comes overwhelmingly from the state and federal grants and loans—when, in 2011, the Department of Education under then-Secretary Arne Duncan tightened the credit guidelines for Parent PLUS loans, 28,000 HBCU students had to pack up and head home.

The Trump administration’s focus on HBCUs dovetails with congressional Republicans’. South Carolina senator Tim Scott and North Carolina representative Mark Walker, whose wife earned two degrees from HBCU Winston-Salem State University, invited HBCU presidents to a “fly in” at the end of February to discuss their schools’ needs.

Working with Republicans is more a matter of geography than political expediency, I’m told. Most HBCUs are, after all, in red states. Of the nation’s 105, all but 10 are in the South. “Look where most of our schools sit. They sit in the South where Republican governors run the map,” Taylor said. The Thurgood Marshall College Fund enjoys the president’s support and works closely, now, with the Koch Foundation—but they do not endorse or embrace partisan affiliation: “We weren’t anti-Obama—we were anti-Obama-policies when we realized that they began to hurt our community.”

Fallout from the tightening of Parent PLUS restrictions—”a classic example” of paternalistic policy, Taylor said—was only compounded by an insufficient appeals process created to correct the administration’s blunder. Students who figured out how to request their loan denial be reversed were generally successful, but most never knew they had the option.

Trump didn’t win the vote of young African Americans, nor did he court it. But anyone inclined to criticize HBCUs for selling out to Trump and Republicans should note 93 percent of these schools’ funding comes from state and federal sources, according to HBCU advocates. And when those sources of funding are eager to listen, speaking up for their too-often-misunderstood institutions is these college presidents’ essential duty. If they can bring Congress and the president’s attention to their foremost needs, until now ignored, they will.

“Do I pass up an opportunity to assist students because someone thinks it looks bad to meet with someone who is unpopular in the African American community? No,” said Walter Kimbrough, president of Dillard University in New Orleans and an Obama supporter. “Because my students pay taxes, and there are some things the government should be doing for our institutions that they have not done.” Pell Grants top the list, Kimbrough said. Pell, an income-based grant for college tuition, has not kept up with inflation. And infrastructure funding, he added, would help HBCUs sustain historic buildings.

Kimbrough pointed out that the common perception that Obama policies overall failed HBCUs is misleading. In his first year in office President Obama did not renew Bush-era policies that assisted HBCUs—but, Kimbrough said, he did implement a larger, general funding increase that benefitted HBCUs along with other schools, funding which Dillard University still enjoys.

It was, foremost, the former president’s dismissive and unfounded criticism of HBCUs that cast him their enemy. The damage Obama did to HBCUs was reputational insofar as his disparaging remarks permitted everyone to think less of HBCUs, and HBCUs to think less of him.

The president’s commencement speech at Morehouse College in 2013 was, for some, too close for comfort to preaching “respectability politics”—an instructive sermon on how black men should and shouldn’t behave. And at the time, Kimbrough told me, some wondered: “Why would you at the HBCU have that conversation about ‘you need to carry yourself a certain way’ when you didn’t do that at any other commencement addresses that you gave?”

At the time, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote an essay “How the Obama Administration Talks to Black America” in which he took a critical stance against the president’s tone and focus when addressing black communities. He quotes the Morehouse speech, in which Obama told graduates of the all-male and almost entirely black Atlanta college, “We’ve got no time for excuses,” and analyzes the president’s remarks in context: “I would have a hard time imagining the president telling the women of Barnard that ‘there’s no longer room for any excuses’—as though they were in the business of making them. Barack Obama is, indeed, the president of ‘all America,’ but he also is singularly the scold of ‘black America.'”

Coates’s words doubtless ring true for HBCU advocates whom the Obama administration disappointed: When historians study his speeches to black audiences, Coates wrote, “They will see a president who sought to hold black people accountable for their communities, but was disdainful of those who looked at him and sought the same.” And he concluded, “I think the president owes black people more than this. …Perhaps they cannot practically receive targeted policy. But surely they have earned something more than targeted scorn.”

Early last year, at a town hall in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the president answered a question from a student at HBCU Southern University—with talk of low graduation rates:

The value of the first black president’s endorsement cannot be overstated—and the damage done by the opposite? For many the perceived insult still stings, Kimbrough said. “A lot of people took that as a slap in the face because that’s coming from the president.”

And what’s worse for an Obama supporter like Kimbrough, and so many in the HBCU community, is that Obama showed he didn’t understand the challenges facing these schools that primarily serve low-income students. “If you have a student population that is high-Pell Grant, that has a lot of financial need, all of those institutions regardless of race have lower graduation rates.”

HBCUs serve a student population that is less likely to succeed at an expensive, majority white liberal arts college or big state school. They and their students need, at least, to be heard.

Now, with Trump, there’s an overdue opportunity for HBCU leaders, one which Obama never offered them. What will come of it remains to be seen. But the very fact of the overture—undeniably a convenient one-uppance and thus far little more than a photo-op—already far exceeds the previous administration’s offerings to historically black colleges and universities.

Omarosa knows the HBCU community, and what makes it worth preserving, in a way that Obama and his advisers never did: “There was no one in the Obama administration that has the HBCU pedigree that Omarosa has, nobody. They didn’t really interact with HBCUs. Trump has an advantage on him in having someone who understands,” said Kimbrough.

Because he didn’t have an Omarosa, or an HBCU president like Kimbrough, in his ear, Kimbrough would have relished the opportunity to advise Obama’s HBCU outreach. It wouldn’t have taken much to regain their trust and favor, he ventured. But the opportunity was never offered. “I’m a big fan of President Obama,” Kimbrough said, “so that was, for me, disappointing.”

D.C.-knows-best policies and too little listening left these schools in the lurch. And now, as a result, President Trump’s reflexive drive to swipe at his predecessor might actually do some serious good for historically black colleges and universities.

Just by listening to these schools’ unique needs, inviting their presidents to the proverbial table, Trump has already far and away exceeded expectations. And a commitment to listening first and acting later at least suggests that whatever action might follow will make a meaningful difference.