Howard University expects to be classified as a Research-1 institution this spring, making it the only historically Black university with such status.
A Research-1, or R1, label could significantly increase the number of research grants the university qualifies for and attract more top scholars to its staff. The coveted status could also distinguish the HBCU’s focus on research that disproportionately affects the Black community, such as sickle-cell disease and voter participation.
“For HBCUs, in the research that we do, there’s a stated and higher commitment to historically disenfranchised communities,” said Bruce Jones, senior vice president for research at Howard. “Elevating HBCUs to [R1] status opens the door for them to acquire more resources and do more things in terms of meeting the community mission.”
Several colleges are expected to receive R1 status in the spring under new Carnegie Classification requirements. Earlier this year, the American Council on Education, which helps to manage the process, simplified its 20-year-old formula and ranking strategy by deprioritizing the number of doctoral degrees in science, technology, and math a college would have to annually award to qualify for R1 status.
“There were a whole set of institutions that really were shut out from being able to be R1 because they weren’t going to have doctoral production across all of these fields,” said Mushtaq Gunja, executive director of the Carnegie Classification systems.
Next year, in order to receive R1 status, an institution must confer at least 70 doctoral degrees in any field and spend $50 million on research in the previous academic year. Last year, Howard granted 91 Ph.D.s and spent more than $85 million on research, according to Jones.
Gunja said that Howard is likely qualified for R1 status, given their research spending over the last few years.
Howard was the first HBCU to receive R1 status in 1987, but it lost the status in 2005 when the Carnegie Classification requirements changed.
Separate and Unequal
HBCUs’ inability to develop graduate and research programs has severely restricted the number of Black people with graduate degrees.
For several decades, states refused to comply with their own Jim Crow-era “separate but equal” statutes, providing plenty more money for the development of white colleges’ graduate programs than Black colleges’.
In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled that Oklahoma must create a law school for Black students at Langston University, the state’s only HBCU. Within five days, the state propped up a law school inside the state capitol, nearly 40 miles from the university’s campus, and hired just three part-time faculty members, according to Adam Harris, author of The State Must Provide.
“From that foundation, you effectively had two separate classes of institutions in states,” Harris said. “There were all of these different ways that states fundamentally nickel-and-dimed HBCUs out of money.”
There were all of these different ways that states fundamentally nickel-and-dimed HBCUs out of money.
Because so few HBCUs had graduate schools, some of the first integration fights were over Black students’ attempts to enroll in predominately white colleges’ graduate programs, according to a report by the U.S. Department of Education.
Even after HBCUs built graduate programs, states allowed competing public colleges to duplicate the programs, sometimes violating their own laws. HBCU advocates say this weakened HBCUs’ ability to attract students.
“It’s just one of the ways that HBCUs, even though they’re fighting and they’re doing all of the work that they can in order to build out these research programs, are still being discriminated against by states,” Harris said.
In 2021, Maryland’s HBCUs received $577 million in a settlement with state lawmakers, who the colleges had accused of duplicating their programs at neighboring traditionally white colleges.
“It hindered the progression of HBCUs in Maryland,” said Willie Mays, vice president for research and economic development at Morgan State University. “And that’s not just for R1 status. We developed unique programs that would attract a more diverse population and more students. Those programs were duplicated on [predominantly white institutions’] campuses.”
Mays said that while Morgan State won’t qualify for R1 status next year, the university could qualify in subsequent years because of the new Carnegie Classification requirements and a recent enrollment boom on the Baltimore campus.
North Carolina A&T State University and Southern University and A&M College are also HBCUs vying for R1 status in the coming years.
In 2021, North Carolina A&T created a task force to update its labs and redirect funding to research programs as part of an effort to qualify for R1 status. The university recently began offering a new Doctor of Nursing Practice program. It has raised nearly $250 million in research funding.
In December of last year, Southern University received a $5-million research grant from the Biden administration to hire more research faculty and expand its research facilities.
Neither university responded to The Chronicle’s requests for comment.
Sustaining the Status
Since 2018, when Jones started at Howard, the university’s application for research grants increased by 30 percent. The total amount of grant money it was awarded also rose from $53 million to $122 million in 2022, he said.
Jones said the university is already focused on how it will sustain the status.
“We want to get way out there, deep into what it means to be an institution that produces very high research,” Jones said. “But if you remain on that borderline between R2 and R1, then there is a higher probability you can fall back to R2.”
Part of that effort includes a $90-million University Affiliated Research Center, a Howard-led HBCU consortium focused on developing tactical autonomy research for the Air Force.
“We’re doing things now to make sure we stay there,” said Jones, “and the only way to do that is really invest and keep your research infrastructure moving forward, to continue to hire top-notch faculty, continue to emphasize research with our students, continue to form partnerships with our HBCUs.”
