When the state of Georgia reopened for business in late April despite rising numbers of Covid-19 cases, the president of Morehouse College in Atlanta made it clear he wouldn’t be following suit.
It would be reckless, David A. Thomas argued publicly, to bring students and the faculty back to the campus of the historically Black college when the pandemic was raging among the families and communities it served.
A month later, many of those students surged into the streets of Atlanta, protesting the police killing of George Floyd and risking further exposure to the virus. For Thomas and the leaders of the nation’s more than 100 HBCUs, the reopening calculus became even more complicated.
Bringing students back, given the disproportionate harm Covid-19 had caused to people of color, could endanger their students, faculty, staff, and surrounding communities, they worried.
But at the same time, some argued that allowing students to return to campuses where they felt empowered and where they could safely explore issues of racial inequity was important for their mental health in this national moment of reckoning. With meticulous attention to social distancing and sanitizing, they reasoned, students might even be safer, physically, than they would be at home.
The dilemma historically Black colleges are struggling with is familiar to any other college that serves large proportions of students of color, who face two plagues — the pandemic and racism — at the same time. The colleges and the communities they serve need one another, but the risks of reunion may be too great.
Most HBCU’s are planning to welcome students back to campus this fall in some form, painfully aware that their own economic survival may depend on it. Most have small endowments and operate on razor-thin margins, serving large numbers of low-income and first-generation students whose financial, academic, and emotional needs will be even greater this fall. Most expect steep enrollment declines, steeper if students aren’t able to physically return.
In April, Morehouse began drawing up plans for a remote fall semester. Since then, Thomas said he’s been heartened by the Morehouse School of Medicine’s plans for testing and contact tracing, but he’s still not ready to declare a return to campus.
“I determined that we would only open if I felt it was a safe environment,” Thomas said in an interview. The college will decide by the end of the month, he said, whether to welcome students back or remain fully online.
The Safest Place They Could Be?
Because of the pandemic’s disproportionate impact on Black people, students attending HBCUs, and their families, are more likely to contract and die from the coronavirus.
People of color are also more likely to be laid off and less likely to have jobs that allow them to work at home. And many serve as frontline workers in hospitals, grocery stores, and public transportation.
Hearing from students whose family members have fallen ill from Covid-19 weighs heavily on him, Thomas said. But with so many lacking a safe place to live, “the flip side is that for some of our students, Morehouse is likely the safest place they could be.”
Morehouse, which is the nation’s only historically Black men’s college , and Spelman College, an Atlanta HBCU primarily for women, do have one advantage their peers could only dream of: This month, each received $40 million for student scholarships from the co-founder of Netflix, Reed Hastings, and his wife, Patricia Ann Quillin. The couple also gave $40 million to UNCF, formerly the United Negro College Fund, to distribute more widely.
Even with an influx of scholarship money, the risks to the bottom line of not reopening are real. More than half of the nation’s HBCUs enroll fewer than 2,500 students, according to the Pew Research Center. And between 2010 and 2018, HBCU enrollments slid by 11 percent, the National Center for Education Statistics reports.
Because they rely so heavily on tuition, these colleges are particularly worried that students might switch to a cheaper community college or drop out altogether.
Reassuring families that students will be safe is a tall order, especially if those students commute back and forth to campus.
“There’s a big difference if you’re living in an environment with a nice backyard and people can social distance than if you’re living in a smaller space where people have not been able to spread out,” said Lezli Baskerville, president of the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education, the umbrella group for historically and predominantly Black colleges and universities. “You might be living with an aunt who has diabetes and a grandfather with high blood pressure. You have to be concerned with all that.”
Most expect to follow the now-familiar plan — all contingent on local health conditions — of returning to campus in August, with a combination of socially distanced classroom and virtual instruction, she said. They plan to remain there until November, break for Thanksgiving, and continue online until returning in early 2021.
Adding to the pressure to reopen, she said, is the fact that historically Black colleges serve vital roles, beyond education, in their communities. Many offer food and nutrition, and child- and elder-care programs, as well as incubator support for small businesses. Campus chapels offer religious services and counseling.
As the colleges’ leaders plan for temperature checks, mask requirements, and limits to group sizes, the question they’re all asking, Baskerville said, is this: “What will it take to be able to say with extreme certainty that students won’t be in harm’s way?”
At the moment, it’s impossible to answer.
No Excuse for Risking Lives
One prominent HBCU president has chided his counterparts for moving ahead too early with reopening plans. In an essay for The Chronicle, Michael J. Sorrell, president of Paul Quinn College, in Dallas, argued that HBCUs’ justified fear of financial ruin “is no excuse for risking the lives of students and staff.”
“I am profoundly concerned about inviting people back to an environment without having a way to keep them safe,” Sorrell said in an interview last month. Sorrell, who is a lawyer, said colleges should consider not only the moral implications, but also the legal ramifications “of knowingly putting people at risk.”
“The way colleges are structured, it’s very hard to do anything other than feed into the spread of an epidemic,” Sorrell said. “Our first goal, if all things are safe, is to bring our students back. Until we can do that, we have to be comfortable with our online format and continue to look for ways to develop an outstanding experience online.”
As the number of new Covid-19 cases has surged to record levels in Texas, a Paul Quinn spokeswoman said this week that the college has not yet decided on whether the campus will physically reopen for classes this fall. And she said the president stands by the statements he made last month.
“The question I would ask everyone who’s so determined to open everything: Tell me fundamentally what is so different now than when we closed everything in March?” Sorrell said in May. “Do we have a vaccine, widespread testing, a way to make people safe? Otherwise, we’re going right back to what we had that cost people their lives.”
Walter M. Kimbrough, president of Dillard University, in New Orleans, has also been wrestling with these questions.
In an opinion essay for The Chronicle last month, Kimbrough wrote that for many cash-strapped, mission-driven colleges, “not reopening the campus this fall amounts to an institutional death sentence.”
That’s especially true, he wrote, when nearby campuses are offering the residential campus experience many students crave. The pressure is intense to follow their lead.
“But how do you open when your main demographic is the one disproportionately impacted by Covid-19?”
In a June 1 letter to the campus, he wrote that Dillard is working on plans for a partial return to campus so long as there are no spikes in infection rates. It will require personal sacrifices, including face coverings and social distancing, he wrote.
“The easiest thing for us to do would be to simply stay online,” Kimbrough concluded, “but the educational benefits of being in community together are undeniable.”
A ‘Haven’
For Black students who have spent the past several weeks explaining to white allies what it’s like to be in their shoes, it could be a relief to return to campuses where they’re surrounded by people who get it.
“It’s very challenging trying to explain racism to white people who feel, that because they don’t say the N-word, they aren’t racist,” said Alexander Freeman, a rising senior and president of the Student Government Association at Morgan State University. The Baltimore HBCU is planning for a hybrid semester that will allow students to return to campus or attend classes remotely.
As a student leader, Freeman said he feels some obligation to help others understand the concept of white privilege, but he’s looking forward to returning to campus in the fall to learn from other Black students how to keep the momentum of the summer going.
“More than ever, the need for these institutions is evident,” said Harry L. Williams, president of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, which represents 47 publicly supported HBCUs. “They’re providing students a safe haven where they can be what they need to be without the added stress” they might face at a predominantly white college.
Marybeth Gasman, executive director of Rutgers University’s Center for Minority Serving Institutions, said that some of the expected downturn in enrollment at HBCUs could be offset by the renewed interest in their mission during the national reckoning on race.
These colleges offer an environment “where African Americans can feel empowered and appreciated and feel that they matter and are surrounded by people who care about them,” she said.
The students she’s interviewing for her current research projects tell her they miss being in the classroom and having face-to-face conversations with their professors and peers.
“They understand and are worried about health issues, but they are concerned they won’t be able to learn to the level they need to to be successful,” Gasman said.
A recent study by researchers at Arizona State University reinforced what many educators fear — that the shift to online learning has been harder on the low-income students HBCUs predominantly serve. The study found that, as a result of the pandemic, low-income undergraduate students at Arizona State were 55 percent more likely to delay graduation than their more affluent peers, and 41 percent more likely to change their major.
One of the major appeals of historically Black colleges is the close connection students make with faculty members and the wraparound advising, tutoring, and emotional support they offer.
“There is no Zoom connection that can give you the high-touch experience you get when you’re engaged, up close and personal, in the same room with a professor,” Baskerville said.
‘Safer on Campus’
Eighty-two percent of the student body at Benedict College, a private liberal-arts HBCU in Columbia, S.C., depends on Pell Grants, and three-quarters of its students are the first in their families to attend college, according to the college’s president, Roslyn Clark Artis. Twelve percent have no access to broadband internet at home.
Some walk miles to parking lots with Wi-Fi, sitting for hours there in temperatures that can reach 90 degrees. Some live in Covid-19 hot spots in homes where the primary breadwinner is a frontline worker.
Students are telling Benedict officials they’ll drop out if classes remain online, which could create “a perfect storm: college dropouts with few opportunities for gainful employment beyond high-risk, low-opportunity, service-line jobs in an economy decimated by the pandemic,” Artis wrote last month in HBCU Digest.
“The bottom line is that Black men are safer on the campus of Benedict College, even in the wake of Covid-19, than they are out jogging in their own neighborhood, walking down the street with a bag of Skittles and wearing a hoodie, sitting in a car, or eating a bowl of ice cream in their own home,” she wrote, referring to seemingly harmless activities of Black people who died because of police violence or other racist attacks.
The reality of police brutality hit home last month, said Thomas, the president of Morehouse, when a student at the institution and a Spelman College student were dragged from their car and Tased during a protest. At least four police officers were fired as a result.
Spelman’s president, Mary Schmidt Campbell, issued a statement saying the incident illustrated exactly what the demonstrators were protesting: “the disregard, disrespect, and aggression that seems to make stalking Black citizens, rather than protecting them, the goal of law enforcement.”
In a letter to Morehouse students last month, Thomas wrote that many would no doubt spend a long, tense summer in hot spots of racial tension and discord, and that he was “mourning the fact that you are not here on this hill during this moment of racial tension in the midst of a pandemic.”
He wasn’t in a position to promise them they could return.