Walter Kimbrough’s Higher Calling

On an overcast day in February, Walter M. Kimbrough Jr. stepped off a plane in Washington, D.C., for one of the highest-profile meetings of his professional career.

The Trump administration had invited the leaders of more than 60 historically black colleges and universities, Mr. Kimbrough among them, to a White House “listening session” with Betsy DeVos, the newly appointed education secretary. It was an unprecedented opportunity for HBCUs, long ignored in the public conversation about higher education, to tell the nation why they mattered.

Mr. Kimbrough, the president of Dillard University, approached the visit with a sense of cautious optimism. Here was an administration that had said glancingly little about higher education during the campaign, making HBCUs an early target for support. It was the kind of overture that black college leaders had hoped for under President Obama.

But the opportunity came with plenty of risk. The invitation was an unexpected move by an unpredictable administration. Only a small number of black people had supported Mr. Trump, who rose to political prominence by questioning the legitimacy of the first black president and seemed to appeal consistently to white nationalism during his 2016 campaign.

Still, black colleges rely on money from the federal government, and right now they needed more of it. The Dillard president was looking forward to telling Ms. DeVos why.

He never got to talk, and she hardly got to listen. Instead, in a last-minute surprise, the chancellors and presidents were pulled into the Oval Office. There, they posed for a photograph with Mr. Trump. Almost immediately, the picture went viral on social media: Rows of HBCU leaders flanked a beaming president while a White House adviser, Kellyanne Conway, her feet on the Oval Office couch, looked down at her cellphone. The optics were bad. The visit began to look like a bizarre fiasco. On historically black campuses, students and professors were furious. You got played, many of them said.

Few black college leaders were eager to talk about the meeting in its immediate aftermath. Mr. Kimbrough was an exception.

In an essay posted online later that day, the Dillard president gently chided the White House. “There was very little listening to HBCU presidents today,” he wrote. Then he laid out what he would have said if given the chance. He wrote about the Pell Grant program, and why preserving and expanding it was good not just for black colleges, but for all of higher education.

Overnight, Ms. DeVos created another stir. In an Education Department news release, she claimed that black colleges were pioneers of school choice — a favorite talking point of the charter-school champion. Black-college advocates quickly rebutted the secretary’s assertion: After all, the institutions were born to serve black Americans who had been shut out of higher education.

Mr. Kimbrough was again among the few HBCU presidents to speak out, and he kept his eye on the ball. Sure, he admitted, the remark rubbed him the wrong way. But he was more troubled by another line in the same press release, which suggested that boosting financial support to black colleges wouldn’t be a top priority of the Trump administration. “This has to be a funding issue,” he told The Chronicle.

In the national conversation about higher education, black colleges often languish in the shadows. Critics question not just their relevance but their necessity. The civil-rights battle has been fought and won, the thinking goes; if black students can attend any college, why do black colleges need to exist?

Not enough people knew why they were still important.

They needed federal money desperately, but they also needed a spotlight. Once they had a spotlight, they needed someone who was willing to step into it.

Mr. Kimbrough, a 50-year-old pastor’s son who goes by the Twitter handle HipHopPrez, isn’t shy of the stage. He harnessed the frustration over the DeVos visit, honed it into an argument for black colleges, and took that argument to NPR, CNN, The New York Times. “I hate that people feel — that the students feel — a sense of betrayal,” he told a Times reporter.

The meeting “was a great opportunity to help the new secretary,” he said. But it was also a chance to press a case to the country. In an opinion column later that week, Mr. Kimbrough found the silver lining of an otherwise trying trip: It had pulled black colleges out of the shadows.

“With this new platform, allow me to reintroduce you to HBCUs,” Mr. Kimbrough wrote. “We are uniquely American.”

Two institutions, perhaps more than any others, loom large in the black community: the church and black colleges. Both have served as beacons for hope: Churches built a community for families that had been fractured by slavery. Black colleges offered the promise of upward mobility to members of that community.

Walter Kimbrough Sr., a dynamic young pastor with a knack for building strong black churches out of the ruins of abandoned white ones, moved his family to Atlanta in 1972. The city was rapidly changing. Catalyzed by desegregation efforts, white people had fled in droves. Maynard Jackson, the first black mayor of Atlanta, would be elected a year later.

Mr. Kimbrough was assigned to Cascade United Methodist Church, a struggling church with a membership of fewer than 100 in 1974. The pastor, a graduate of the historically black Morris Brown College, set out to rebuild, visiting 30 to 40 local schools a year, doing community service, forming relationships, making a name for Cascade United. Marjorie Kimbrough, his wife, had taught him the value in working with children. “When parents can see that their children are happy, that’s where they want to be,” the elder Mr. Kimbrough said.

His son, Walter Jr., was by his side, watching and learning. At 11 years old, Walter Jr. was delivering speeches during Sunday services. Congregants suggested that he grow up to be a preacher like his dad. He pushed against those expectations. His father supported him.

By 1985, Cascade had grown to roughly 2,000 members, and Walter Jr. was salutatorian of Benjamin Mays High School — named for a black-college icon, the former president of Morehouse College. He had options, including Clark Atlanta University, a black college where his mother would later teach philosophy and religion. But he wanted to be a veterinarian. The University of Georgia seemed like the best way to achieve that goal.

The institution had been forcibly integrated only in 1961, but that didn’t dissuade Mr. Kimbrough, whose mother had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California at Berkeley. He knew what he was getting into. But two decades of integration had not solved two centuries of racial hostility. When black students petitioned for an African-American cultural center, the student newspaper ran an editorial cartoon saying that they already had one: the basketball court.

“I’m one of the few who survived,” Mr. Kimbrough told a group of black high-school students on a recent recruiting trip. “And I use the word ‘survived’ deliberately.”

A lifeline was Alpha Phi Alpha, a black fraternity founded in 1906 as a refuge for black students at Cornell University. Mr. Kimbrough became student assistant vice president for the fraternity’s Southern region.

Something tugged at him. He had grown up following his father to church; the children of Maynard Jackson and the civil-rights leader Andrew Young came to his neighborhood to play football. Now he found himself embedded in another strong black community, meeting regularly with university presidents and leaders of industry.

Perhaps he could be one of them too.

Mr. Kimbrough earned a doctorate in higher education and, after stints at Emory, Old Dominion, and Georgia State Universities, he landed his first job at a black college — vice president for student affairs at Albany State University. He became an expert on fraternities and hazing. He published Black Greek 101, which quickly became the go-to book on the culture of black fraternities and sororities.

Then Philander Smith College, a small black college in Arkansas affiliated with the United Methodist Church, needed a new president. The college thought Mr. Kimbrough was the right fit.

At just 37 years old, Mr. Kimbrough had become the leader of a black college. Philander Smith was once a gem among HBCUs, but it had fallen into dire straits. There were the financial issues: unpaid bills and an investigation into the potential improper distribution of federal financial-aid funds. And a more fundamental issue: The college was struggling mightily to recruit and keep students.

A week into the job, he was already daunted by its breadth. “You don’t want to be the young president who messes it up for all the young presidents,” he says. People were watching to see how he performed. “If I did well, it would open the door for other people.”

He called a guy whom he knew would understand: his dad. Early in his career, Walter Sr. had been named the first black pastor of Calvary Methodist Church in Chicago as it was undergoing a racial transformation. At first, he wasn’t sure he was up for the task. It had made him angry at God. His wife, Marjorie, whom he had met during seminary, emphasized the importance of trials and tribulations.

“If you started at an easy place,” he recalled her telling him, “and later on in your ministry, you went to a tough place, you wouldn’t be able to handle it.”

Walter Sr. passed that advice to his son. “This is a blessing,” he told him. “You’re really going to be able to show what you can do.”

Philander Smith’s young president got to work. His personal touch, honed from years of watching his parents tend to their congregations, became a calling card. He invited students to text him. He popped up at the teams’ away games and checked in personally with student athletes. When a group of students needed to get to a conference 445 miles away, he gave them a ride. The college’s retention and four-year graduation rates improved. By just about all measures, the institution’s stock was rising — and so was Mr. Kimbrough’s. He was heralded as a fresh voice in higher education.

In 2012, another black college affiliated with the United Methodist Church came calling: Dillard University, in New Orleans.

Mr. Kimbrough, once intimidated by the prospect of protecting the legacy of black colleges, was now certain he could handle the pressure. He’d complained to his father years earlier about the task. His father called it a blessing.

“And he was exactly right,” he says.

Philander Smith’s issues weren’t unique to the college. They were broadly indicative of the challenges that plague many of the 107 black colleges today. The sector is often dogged by criticism. Many institutions struggle with limited finances; many others face questions about how well those finances are managed, as well as the quality of the education they provide.

Diversity pushes by predominantly white institutions have exacerbated dwindling enrollments at many black colleges, driving some HBCUs to admit more international and nonblack students. Graduation rates have lingered near the bottom of the barrel. Many black colleges have made strides in correcting these issues, and several posted enrollment gains this fall. But in many ways, the most challenging problem confronting black colleges is a matter of public perception — a sense that, in an era of integration, they’re less relevant than they once were.

Black colleges tend not to appear in the news unless there’s bad news — there’s not enough money, the students aren’t graduating, or they’re at risk of losing their accreditation. So leaders of the institutions are often reluctant to speak to the media. Why be a party to yet another narrative of failure?

Yet the absence of their voices has allowed others — lawmakers, pundits, potential students — to fill the void with their own perceptions of the sector. Many people now view black colleges as aloof — doomed, even. Not enough are sure of their continued significance.

The few presidents who have fashioned roles as national spokesmen tend to stand out: David Wilson at Morgan State University, Michael Sorrell at Paul Quinn College, and Mr. Kimbrough, among them. “The people on the ground need to speak,” he says. And, he adds, they need to speak about more than just themselves. Black-college leaders are regularly called on to talk about black-college issues. Black colleges, however, are not just a parochial offshoot of higher education; they are an integral part of it. They have been among the first to grapple with thorny issues — the line between campus safety and free speech, the scourge of fraternity hazing, the fight to secure funding, and the need to rethink enrollment strategy — that tend to pop up later on across higher education.

“There is a diversity of experiences” within black-college leadership, Mr. Kimbrough says, “and we can talk about a range of higher-ed issues that aren’t HBCU-specific.” If black colleges stand to benefit from adopting a more-public profile, there are also a lot of things that other sectors could learn from them.

Inspiration is a funny thing: Sometimes you find it; sometimes it finds you. One way or another, Walter Kimbrough Jr. kept crossing paths with Benjamin Mays.

Mr. Kimbrough was born in Chicago in 1967. Months later, Mays resigned as the president of Morehouse College after a term of 27 years. Mays was, by any definition, a heavyweight: He has been identified as the “intellectual conscience” of the civil-rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr., who attended Morehouse, called Mays his “spiritual mentor.”

Mr. Kimbrough’s eyes light up when discussion turns to Mays. “People don’t talk about their college president like that anymore,” he says.

Mays’s mentorship of the civil-rights era’s most enduring icon is part of what appeals to Mr. Kimbrough. “The man with the dream attended an HBCU and was inspired by his college president to address the social injustices of his time,” he wrote in an op-ed.

But beyond the mentoring, he admires the late leader’s fearlessness and resolve to speak hard truths regardless of criticism. Mays’s autobiography was titled Born to Rebel. He was a prolific writer — a fierce critic of white liberals who claimed to support civil rights but didn’t fight for them, and a passionate advocate for nonviolence even as black militants derided that approach as passive and unrealistic.

Mays described his outspokenness not as a bid for attention but as a calling. “I have never done anything for the purpose of being honored, to have my name on the front pages of the newspapers,” Roger Wilkins, a civil-rights icon in his own right, recalled Mays saying. “I have done what I believe I was sent into the world to do: worship my God and serve my fellow man.”

Mr. Kimbrough met Mays once, when he was young. Now Mays is gone, and Mr. Kimbrough’s not so young anymore. The once-37-year-old college president now looks the part, his hair dotted with specks of gray. He acknowledges that he’s not on Mays’s level, but he wants to be.

“I don’t think we speak out enough on our issues,” he says. If we don’t advocate for our institutions, who will?

Listen to Mr. Kimbrough as he speaks about the legacy of Benjamin Mays, and it’s not hard to see the contours of an argument about what it takes to lead a black college in 2017. Plenty of the sector’s leaders have some of the community-building aplomb of Walter Kimbrough Sr. — including Walter Sr. himself, who took over the reins of Gammon Theological Seminary this year. But few fit the mold of Benjamin Mays.

Black colleges need a shepherd to tend to the flock and an outspoken proselytizer to reach beyond it. They need a personal touch and national advocacy.

Mr. Kimbrough believes he can do both. But that’s a tall order.

For Walter Kimbrough, taking up the mantle of leadership often means issuing challenges to his own community.

In 2009, when the Associated Press interviewed Mr. Kimbrough about graduation rates at black colleges, the Philander Smith president said his sector had gotten “lazy.” The graduation rate at the colleges was four percentage points lower than the national graduation rate for black students. “That was our hallmark 40, 50 years ago. We still say, ‘Nurturing, caring, the president knows you.’ That’s a lie on a lot of campuses. That’s a flat-out lie.”

That angered some in the community. One president told him that his comments could make fund raising more difficult.

In another instance, Mr. Kimbrough held the Obama administration’s feet to the fire. The significance of Barack Obama’s election was not lost on Mr. Kimbrough — in fact, his young son’s middle name is Barack. But when the administration made moves that disappointed black-college leaders, tightening requirements for Parent PLUS loans and arguing that they were setting families who couldn’t afford them up for failure, Mr. Kimbrough shared a different opinion. He invoked “The Questions,” a track by the hip-hop artists Mos Def and Common. “If I had ID, I wouldn’t need ID,” he said, echoing one of Mos Def’s lines. If the families had money, they wouldn’t need the loan.

He noted missed opportunities by the Obama administration on several other occasions. So when President Trump was elected in November, Mr. Kimbrough surprised many people by arguing that Trump’s election was “a tremendous opportunity to launch a renaissance of black colleges” — if the colleges were willing to work for it.

But he wasn’t carrying water for the new administration, either. Two days later, more than 100 college leaders sent an open letter to the president, urging him to take a forceful stand against “harassment, hate acts, and violence” committed in his name, many of which were taking place on college campuses. Mr. Kimbrough was one of a handful of black-college presidents to sign. Later, he admonished President Trump for condemning black athletes who chose to kneel during the national anthem.

Mr. Kimbrough says his job is to protect speech. And he practices what he preaches — even when it makes his students angry. When he was president, Philander Smith invited Ann Coulter and Charles Murray to speak at his “Bless the Mic” campus lecture series. Ms. Coulter drew boos when she said that the crack epidemic “has pretty much gone away,” according to the Associated Press. But by and large, the event went off without major flare-ups.

But protecting speech can eventually put a president in hot water. That’s what happened when another controversial speaker landed on Mr. Kimbrough’s doorstep this past November.

He didn’t plan for David Duke to speak on his campus. The former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan was running for U.S. Senate, and Dillard had previously pledged to host a debate among the candidates. Mr. Duke barely qualified for the debate by polling at 5.1 percent — a tenth of a percentage point over the threshold.

Against his convictions, Mr. Kimbrough explored whether he could back out. No luck. He believes that a university is the ideal location for a debate, he told The Advocate, but he didn’t want to be stubborn and not explore all of his options. He also suggested that the polling that allowed Mr. Duke to participate may have been rigged.

The debate came, and this time the response was different. Students fumed; several people protested. A small group broke into the auditorium and was briefly detained. Police arrested six people, one a Dillard student. Protesters said officers had pepper-sprayed them.

Mr. Kimbrough was harshly criticized for the university’s handling of the incident. The campus police should not have been allowed to use force, said Dillard students and outside sympathizers; they certainly should not have been allowed to use pepper spray. Meanwhile, Mr. Kimbrough found himself rebutting claims that his students were the primary agitators, leading some critics to argue that he should have taken more responsibility for his students’ involvement.

The incident confirmed for Mr. Kimbrough that higher-education leaders could learn a lot from black colleges, if only they would pay attention. “The anguish over Duke’s simply being present on the campus,” he later wrote, “should have been a wake-up call.”

If you looked at Dillard, you could have foreseen the protests over controversial speech that later roiled the University of California at Berkeley or Middlebury College. “It signaled that we were in an era when rational dialogue and debate had been abandoned for the high of in-your-face confrontation,” he wrote. “With social media as an accelerant.”

Now Mr. Kimbrough travels the country making that point. He’s a frequent panelist in discussions of free speech, a guy who can deliver a message from the front lines. The role is one of many that have Mr. Kimbrough’s schedule bursting at the seams. The Dillard president freely admits that it’s a lot to handle. And it often means spending less time with his family than he would like.

He tries to take his children, Lydia and Benjamin (named for Benjamin Mays), with him as often as possible. They were supposed to accompany him to Chicago late last month but, the president joked, they’d been “acting up.” So he was alone in the city for a little over 12 hours to visit a campus of Urban Prep Academy and speak to graduating seniors.

A flight delay prevented him from making it into Chicago until after midnight, but by the time he arrived at the high school the next morning he looked fresh and enthusiastic.

He was ushered into the gym where students had congregated for their morning address. Mr. Kimbrough took out his phone, snapped a picture, and uploaded it to Twitter. “I’m at Urban Prep today — first time visiting,” he wrote. Students came up and introduced themselves to the president, who greeted them warmly.

He enjoys these visits, no matter how brief.

Later, during a presentation, Mr. Kimbrough told the students — all young black men — to consider what was best for them. Was it the major university, where they may be one of 1,000 in a lecture course? Or was it the smaller university, where they can get individualized attention? Did they need professors who looked like them? Perhaps so, he said.

Mr. Kimbrough pointed to Carmela Myles, one of his former students at Philander Smith, who was in the room. Ms. Myles had enrolled at the Methodist college after seeing the president at her own high school years earlier. She is now a regular guest at Thanksgiving with Mr. Kimbrough, his wife, Adria, and the children. “I was in town, and she said, ‘I need to come and hang out,’” the president said. “That’s very important in terms of relationships.”

One student asked about the pre-law program at Dillard. Make sure you email me, Mr. Kimbrough told him; his wife, the pre-law adviser, would love that. Several students stuck around for one-on-one chats. He handed them business cards, told them to email or call him with questions — or, of course, find him on Twitter.

It’s not often that the president of a university comes to visit you in person, Tim King, founder and chief executive of Urban Prep, told the students.

All the more reason to consider an HBCU, Mr. Kimbrough said.

An hour later, Walter Kimbrough Jr. was standing just outside the security checkpoint at Chicago’s Midway airport, leaning upon his just-small-enough-to-carry-on luggage, his dark suit offset by a striking lime-green tie. His flight back to New Orleans was scheduled to take off in an hour and a half, which gave him a chance to finish the bottle of tea he had just purchased.

Free speech was again on his mind. James B. Comey, the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations, had been heckled earlier that day during an appearance at Howard University’s convocation. Mr. Kimbrough was reminded of another recent speech gone awry, when students turned their backs on Ms. DeVos during a commencement speech at the historically black Bethune-Cookman University. Ms. DeVos should absolutely be invited to speak on black-college campuses, Mr. Kimbrough was explaining, just not at graduation, when the accomplishments of students should be controversy-free.

A woman approached. She recognized the president. “Dr. Kimbrough,” she said.

He turned and smiled, offering a warm greeting.

Years earlier, she explained, Mr. Kimbrough had spoken at the school she worked at. He had left an impression. There was familiarity in his responses, like a pastor greeting a congregant he faintly knows. After a brief exchange of pleasantries, she departed. He returned to his tea.

There was a lot of work to do. Before his flight, there was a conference call for a Southern Association of Colleges and Schools accreditation committee he serves on. On the plane, he’d knock out another opinion column on fraternity hazing. The next morning, he would attend a funeral for the parent of a campus employee.

He headed toward the checkpoint, tossed out his bottle, and breezed through security.

Adam Harris is a breaking-news reporter. Follow him on Twitter @AdamHSays or email him at adam.harris@chronicle.com.