I attended Morehouse College in the 1980s. It was a heady time to be at a historically black college. We were fighting for divestment from South Africa and struggling against the consolidation of the Reagan revolution. Racial politics were everywhere, and at Morehouse, I was immersed in the diverse beauty and power of black culture.
My son, who came of age during the Obama years, now confronts, as I did during my time at college, the ugliness of American racism. His political consciousness has been shaped by the deaths of Michael Brown, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Alton Sterling, and too many others. But my son is not at Morehouse, or any other HBCU. He attends Brown University.
The trend in my family is reflected nationally. In the 1970s, HBCUs educated 75 to 85 percent of African-Americans. Today, according to the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, only 9 percent of black students in American higher education attend an HBCU. Many HBCUs can barely keep their doors open.
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Their decline is a complicated story, stretching back decades. It is a tale both of greater inclusion of African-Americans at predominantly white institutions, and of a broad economic and institutional crisis engulfing black communities. The very institutions that once protected black people from the headwinds of racism are collapsing, and the Great Recession of 2008 quickened the pace. Important “free spaces,” like bookstores and community churches — where African-Americans can cultivate civic virtues and a healthy self-regard — are contracting because of the destabilizing effects of poverty. All of which has been complicated, even more, by the general crisis in American higher education.
Yet the story would be incomplete if we didn’t confront a troubling paradox: America’s first black president has accelerated the crisis facing historically black colleges and universities.
“When white America has a cold,” the old saying goes, “black America has the flu.” HBCUs have a severe case of the flu. The economic fallout from the 2008 recession cracked the foundations of black America: more than 240,000 homes lost, skyrocketing levels of unemployment, and downward mobility as families fell into poverty.
Colleges with small endowments found it difficult to hold on, leading to furloughs of staff and faculty members and decreased enrollments (75 percent of HBCU students rely on Pell Grants, and 13 percent use Parent Plus loans). Like predominantly white institutions, HBCUs, with already strapped budgets, had to tighten their belts.
The election of President Obama, even amid this economic storm, brought a moment of excitement. His administration expanded funding for Title III Part B grants, which are aimed at predominantly black institutions. The hopes of many HBCU leaders were lifted. “Then the wheels fell off,” Walter Kimbrough, president of Dillard University, told me.
America’s first black president has accelerated the crisis facing historically black colleges and universities.
In 2011 the Department of Education changed the standards for Parent Plus Loans. Borrowers could not have any loan accounts more than 90 days late, or any foreclosures or defaults, a change that cost HBCUs tens of millions of dollars. The United Negro College Fund reported that in 2012-13, “the number of students attending HBCUs with Parent Plus loans dropped by 45 percent, or more than 17,000 students.” Four years later, the Department of Education changed its policy, but for already cash-strapped institutions, the damage was done.
Then, in 2015, Obama put forward a program for two years of free tuition for qualified students at community colleges without apparent consideration of the effect on HBCUs, who often compete for the same students. Congressional intervention made sure that the free-tuition provisions were expanded to include HBCUs and other minority-serving institutions. It seemed as if the Obama administration held little, if any, concern for black colleges.
In addition to the economic and political challenges, HBCUs face increased competition. Elite colleges like Princeton, Harvard, and Amherst offer generous financial-aid packages to high-achieving black students, and HBCUs find it difficult to compete. Black faculty members now have more options to work at all sorts of institutions. The advantage that HBCUs once had — a captured population — no longer obtains.
On the face of it, more opportunities for black students at elite colleges is something to celebrate, but the fact is that, even as HBCUs lose top students and faculty to traditionally white institutions, they outperform predominantly white institutions when it comes to producing black success stories. Although only 9 percent of African-American students attend HBCUs, they produce 35 percent of black lawyers and 50 percent of black engineers and teachers. That makes the crisis, and the Obama administration’s indifference, all the more alarming.
What should be the role of HBCUs? There will be no return to the golden years. The majority of black students will continue to learn at predominantly white universities. And many HBCUs will continue to recruit nonblack students — a quarter of historically black-serving institutions have at least a 20 percent non-black student body. As these numbers grow, will the HBCU still be a black college or university? What will that mean?
Parts of the traditional function of HBCUs have moved elsewhere. African-American-studies programs at predominantly white institutions have taken on more importance as places for intellectual work on questions of race. Those of us who inhabit these spaces must be aware of that shift and the responsibility that comes with it. We must do the serious work of thinking carefully about the challenges facing black America and, by extension, the country. The Obama years did not substantively change racial matters. In fact, they made this work all the more necessary.
But African-American studies cannot take on the role of a “free space” for black America. That would be silly. Departments, programs, and centers are just islands on predominantly white campuses. It’s worth noting that over the past year, as racially charged protests have taken place at campuses across the country, HBCUs have seen a significant uptick in enrollment. That’s because HBCUs, despite their challenges, continue to demonstrate how important they are as “free spaces” for young black Americans.
Recently my son said he was thinking about spending a semester at another institution. He needed a break, even as Brown pledged $100 million to address campus racism. He mentioned Morehouse. He wanted to be in a different, freer space — in “an environment that’s black,” he said. Irony abounds.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is a professor of religion and African-American studies at Princeton University. He is the author, most recently, of Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul (Crown).
Correction (9/29/2016, 11:15 a.m.): This article originally misstated the name of a nonprofit scholarship organization. It is the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, not the Thurgood Marshall Fund.
