Doing more with less: despite having fewer resources, HBCUs have outpaced majority institutions in producing black professionals, but experts say strong leadership will be the key to their long-term survival

Black Issues in Higher Education, June 17, 2004 by B. Denise Hawkins

Since their founding in segregation, the nation's historically Black colleges and universities have been studies in resourcefulness, contrasts, resoluteness, possibilities and miracles. But have the past 20 years marked the worst of times for these venerable, public and private institutions? Despite their problems--fractured budgets, ailing and aging infrastructures, and revolving door leadership--they continue to do more with less while managing to outpace majority institutions in training and producing the majority of the nation's Black teachers, preachers, social workers, lawyers, doctors, journalists, engineers and scholars.

For the first time in their history, a record number of HBCUs are embroiled in fiscal mismanagement or confronting serious financial problems, among them--Grambling State University, Texas College, Wilberforce University, Fisk University and Central State University. Atlanta's Morris Brown College and nearly a dozen other HBCUs since the mid-1970s have received warnings or been placed on probation by accreditation agencies, mostly for financial problems or have had to close their doors--permanently.

"The point is not to lose any of us," says Dr. Norman Francis, who has been president of Xavier University for 35 years. "Unless we all can compete, we are all at risk of closing. And every day that we open our doors it's a miracle because we are doing extraordinary things with so little resources," Francis says.

Xavier University in New Orleans, the nation's only Black Catholic university, was among a handful of HBCUs in the 1980s that began to set the standard by which other Black colleges and universities would be measured, not by Blacks, but by Whites. Some HBCUs are enjoying unparalleled prosperity, major corporate and foundation gifts, boosting endowments, and successfully recruiting the best and the brightest applicants.

In a recent address to United Negro College Fund members, Francis offered a lesson in "Marketing 101" and in staying competitive as a Black college: "Make sure that leaders in industry, business, state and local officials know what you do, and what you contribute ... This is a quid pro quo society.

"If it is thought that you have no contributions to make, then you must be a liability," says Francis, whose small university has been the nation's leading producer of Black medical students and pharmacists. Today they are attracting competitive research and science dollars.

Dr. Johnnetta Cole, president of Bennett College agrees. "There is enormous diversity among HBCUs, and there is a core of similarities among us. A large HBCU like a Howard has a string of differences from a small women's college called Bennett and yet, at the center of each of these institutions is a shared vision," says Cole, who led a successful $113 million capital campaign during her 14-year tenure as president of Spelman College in Atlanta. Cole, in 1987, snagged a $20 million gill Prom Bill and Camille Cosby, still the largest ever donated to a Black college.

But the reality is that some HBCUs won't be able to compete and will be left behind, Francis predicts. "None of us is safe because none of us has a huge (fiscal) safety net."

Record low numbers of Black students applying in the 1980s to HBCUs also left these institutions vulnerable and at risk, researchers say.

In the past quarter century, the number of Black college students in the nation has increased nearly 60 percent, to more than 1.6 million. HBCUs watched, unable to compete for academically prepared Black students who were being lured away by majority restitutions bearing scholarships and grants--not loans--earmarked for them and for other racial and ethnic minorities, says Dr. Leonard L. Haynes III, director of the U.S. Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education.

"At the same time that these better-prepared Black students were enrolling in White Southern schools, HBCUs were starting to enroll more and more students with education deficits," said Haynes, who served as president of Grambling State University. The result was an "explosion" in the early 1980s in remedial education on Black college campuses.

"Twenty years later we know bow to handle remedial students, but their high numbers remain an issue for many HBCUs," Haynes adds. Today, HBCUs graduate about 23 percent of the Black students who earn college degrees.

LEADING HBCUS IN THE NEXT 20 YEARS, BEYOND

Tough times and financial woes, while not a new phenomenon at HBCUs, especially in the past two years, have contributed to the departures of nearly a quarter of the presidents of these institutions.

Leadership is the key to HBCU survival in the next 20 years and beyond, declare some of the longest-serving HBCLI administrators and CEOs. For them that means strengthening existing leaders and identifying new ones who bring experience and commitment to students and Black colleges.

Dr. Ernest L. Holloway, president of Langston University in Oklahoma, stops short of calling the union between a new Black college president and his institution a marriage that demands responsible leadership and is bound by vows of for better or for worse.