Presidential transitions - the appointment of the president of Smith College

Black Issues in Higher Education, Jan 11, 1996 by Ronald A. Taylor

Fundraising Highs & Lows

For HBCU presidents, the year was marked by a new urgency for finding money to keep the doors open.

The flow of federal funds was already in decline with the end of the Cold War. Add in the budget-cutting fervor that has gripped Washington, and the task of fundraising has never been higher on administrators' agendas.

Although the Clinton administration and the Republican-controlled Congress showed an eagerness to reduce the federal funds earmarked for Black students, the year marked a plateau for fundraising for historically Black colleges and universities.

With former Rep. William H. Gray III (D-PA) at the helm, the College Fund/ UNCF exceeded its $250 million goal by more than 12 percent.

"Campaign 2000," the organization's most ambitious capital drive, generated $ 280 million for HBCUs. The campaign was launched in April 1990 with a $50 million challenge grant from Walter H. Annenberg which provided one dollar for every four raised by the campaign.

Closing the Technology Gap

While the nation remains split into groups of technological haves and have-nots, Black college students are driving aggressively to close the computer gap between them and their white counterparts.

"It's a footrace to the future and we're running. Now that we have been given the opportunity, Blacks are doing well," says Tepper Gill, director of the Computational Science and Engineering Research Center (COMSERC) at Howard University (DC).

He is referring to a recent flurry of interest in academic arid social computer use among Black students in higher education. Within the last 18 months there has been an explosion of electronic gateways, known as World Wide Web home pages, for historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) on the Internet. The Internet is a massive cyberspace umbrella for the global network of computer bulletin boards and electronic research outposts and forums.

The number of World Wide Web sites, known as home pages, has soared from 0 to 32 for Black schools. In addition to the growing Black presence within the Internet, Gill says, "I've got kids here who aren't getting paid and are here till 8 and 9 at night working on the computers."

Risky Investments

As the pressure builds on colleges and universities to acquire and maintain a healthy investment portfolio, so do the risks associated with investments, as several institutions discovered in 1995.

Four community colleges in California's wealthy Orange County were hit hard by the county's $2 billion loss from investment in derivatives, an investment vehicle tied to low interest rates.

Similarly, when Odessa College (TX) officials bought mortgage-backed derivatives, they had little inkling that the securities would result in a $10 million loss.

In both instances, the exotic securities proved profitable at first. Then, when interest rates rose, the portfolios began to lose money because the value of the derivative securities is tied to real estate values.

The lesson community colleges drew from the crisis is "that you have to question where your money is," said Dr. Vivian Blevins, president and chancellor of Rancho Santiago Community College, one of the four Orange County schools affected. "You can't assume that people who are responsible for those funds are managing them responsibly," he said.