Dual Identities?
The president of Lincoln University, in Jefferson City, Mo., recently raised some eyebrows when he touted his institution’s dual identities — as a historically Black college and as a regional campus serving a predominantly white region.
In 2021, about 40 percent of its roughly 1,400 students identified solely as white and 43 percent of students identified solely as Black. The county it’s in is about 80-percent white. The university’s president, John Moseley, is white.
That tension isn’t a new one. In the past couple of decades, as many small historically Black colleges have struggled with declining enrollment, their leaders have sought to chart paths forward by recruiting more students from different backgrounds. (Some large HBCUs, like North Carolina A&T State University and Morgan State University, are seeing significant enrollment increases.)
At Delaware State University, for instance, the population of international students rose by 14 percentage points between 2004 and 2014, while the share of Black students declined by 16 points. Toward the end of that period, Delaware State enrolled more than 4,000 undergraduates for the first time; last academic year, the university enrolled more than 4,800 undergraduates, a record.
But some HBCU alumni and advocates have decried such moves as an attempt to erase tradition and history.
In May, the president of Lincoln University’s alumni association wrote an open letter in which he sought to stand up for the university’s HBCU identity.
Sherman Bonds, the alumni-group leader, criticized the idea that Lincoln could have two distinct identities, and wrote that he believed the president’s comments — particularly those describing the university as a regional college — didn’t present a full understanding of its history as a Black college, founded by Civil War veterans for formerly enslaved Black people who had just gained their freedom.
Hearing Lincoln “reduced to a regional college,” Bonds wrote, “is an insult.”
Lincoln’s president, meanwhile, made the comments in the context of strategic planning. The university’s enrollment has declined by 55 percent since 2014.
“For a long time, predating my appointment as president, there’s just been this belief that if you recruit locally, you’re turning away from your mission as an HBCU. Or if you recruit nationally, you’re turning away from your responsibility as a state institution that is a regional institution,” Moseley told the Jefferson City News Tribune.
In an email interview with The Chronicle, Moseley, who has worked on HBCU campuses for 13 years, said the immediate region is the university’s biggest market. About 80 percent of Lincoln’s students come from within a six-hour drive of the campus, and nearly half come from Jefferson City or the counties immediately surrounding it.
At the same time, he wrote, “we will ALWAYS be an HBCU.” Students of color make up nearly all of those who live on campus.
‘A Very Real Worry’
When I was reporting a few months ago at Elizabeth City State University, in the rural northeastern corner of North Carolina, similar questions about HBCU identity amid an enrollment slide came up.
Six years ago, ECSU was tapped for a legislative program, championed by Republicans, to reduce tuition to $500 a semester for in-state students — with the goal of driving more enrollment to ECSU and a handful of other public colleges in the state. Elizabeth City State had lost 59 percent of its students in just a few years.
But when the program, called NC Promise, was unveiled, HBCU alumni in the state were skeptical of the involvement of ECSU, as well as two other historically Black colleges. Critics thought the legislature would “shut it down and take it over and change it into something no longer like an HBCU,” Zack Hawkins, an ECSU graduate who’s now a Democrat state representative, told me in December.
“That was a very real worry, that Elizabeth City State could turn into a UNC-Wilmington over time,” Hawkins said, referring to the predominantly white University of North Carolina campus farther down the state’s coast. The other two HBCUs asked to be removed from the program.
Bob Steinburg, a Republican state senator who represents Elizabeth City, said in a December interview that ECSU needed to evolve with the times. He commended the university’s progress in that direction.
“That doesn’t mean that they’re walking away, or that there’s any less pride in the fact that they’re an HBCU,” Steinburg said. “But I think that anyone with any degree of common sense who’s living in the 21st century knows that a university like this cannot exist any longer, or very much longer, with just providing an education for African Americans.”
For some years, Elizabeth City felt disconnected from ECSU, Steinburg said. Local residents would say things like “it’s not our university,” he said. “They felt like this was the Black college, and not that that’s a bad thing, but that this was the Black college and university that just happened to be in Elizabeth City.” He said he’s tried to refute those stereotypes and change people’s attitudes in recent years.
“When they were faced with the possibility of this university closing,” Steinburg said, referring to a 2014 state proposal that could have shuttered the institution, “I think that’s when a lot of people woke up.”
Despite the initial resistance to NC Promise, Hawkins and other HBCU advocates told me in the winter that they now support the program. And so far, Black enrollment at ECSU has held steady since the low tuition took effect, though white and Hispanic enrollment have gradually grown in the past dozen years. The student body is about two-thirds Black.
This month, Chancellor Karrie G. Dixon said in an email interview that ECSU is attracting more in-state and out-of-state students who hope to graduate from college with little to no debt.
Historically, nonresident enrollment was capped at 18 percent at North Carolina’s public universities; this spring, the North Carolina system’s governing board increased that to 50 percent at ECSU. So the university is focusing on recruiting students from nearby Virginia, as well as transfer students, military-affiliated students, and adult learners.
“We expect that our student population will continue to become increasingly diverse,” Dixon said.
Embracing a Moment
Today, the conversation about what a Black college should look like is occurring amid a celebrity moment of sorts for HBCUs — one that has brought about a renewed appreciation for their role in the higher-ed landscape.
Federal and state governments and philanthropists like MacKenzie Scott are sending an influx of dollars toward HBCUs and other minority-serving institutions, with the goal of lifting up the students those institutions have traditionally served.
As Dixon sees it, embracing this moment doesn’t conflict with welcoming more diversity at Elizabeth City State. “There has been a resurgence in students seeking to study at HBCUs,” she said, and at ECSU, that interest has come from students from a range of backgrounds. “Diversity is part of why HBCUs are embraced by all demographics of our student population,” she said.
Similarly, Lincoln’s Moseley believes HBCUs have a crucial role to play in 2022: “rising beyond their initial founding ideals” to educate a range of students on cultural competency and inclusion. Colleges across the country would love to have the kind of student diversity that Lincoln has, he said.
This fall, Moseley said officials are cautiously optimistic that, for the first time in several years, Lincoln will see an increase in first-year enrollment.
There’s also optimism about the future at Bluefield State College, in rural West Virginia. Robin Capehart, the college’s president, is making aggressive efforts to reverse an enrollment slide — and to bring a wider range of students to the campus.
Bluefield State is federally designated as a historically Black institution, but it has enrolled a majority-white student population since the 1960s. Today, 90 percent of students are white. Most students commute to campus from the surrounding area, which is 75-percent white.
In 1968, the university’s first white president closed the on-campus dorms, where most Black students lived, after a bomb went off in the campus gymnasium. “If there was a tug-of=war over what the college was going to be, many of the Black alumni and students felt they were losing,” Gene Demby and Shereen Marisol Meraji wrote in a 2013 feature for Code Switch, NPR’s podcast about race. “Bluefield State was quickly becoming unrecognizable.”
More recently, amid demographic changes and other challenges, Bluefield State lost 40 percent of its enrollment between 2010 and 2019. Capehart, who became the college’s president in 2019, announced that the college would bring back on-campus living and add a football team and other sports programs to try to attract more students.
In the fall of 2021, the college welcomed its largest first-year class in a long time. Nearly one-third of those students were Black.
— Sarah Brown
