Compared to their predominantly white counterparts, the nation’s Black land-grant universities have been underfunded by at least $12.5 billion over the last three decades.
Compared to their predominantly white counterparts, the nation’s Black land-grant universities have been underfunded by at least $12.8 billion over the last three decades. Many are in dire financial straits—and living under a cloud of violence.at Tennessee State University , the heating and cooling unit is a rusted relic from the 1960s. Nearby, in the studio art building, yellowed paint is peeling off the cracked plaster walls.
To some extent, the greater state funding of the predominantly white land-grant schools can be explained by those institutions’ strength as research universities. A handful of states, like North Carolina, reward that strength with extra dollars earmarked for research. In 2020, for example, the North Carolina legislature gave NC State, just 7% of whose 32,000 students are Black, an extra $79 million for research .
According to various laws enacted as far back as 1887, federal land-grant university funding must be matched from a non-federal source, typically the state. In 2020, the Tennessee General Assembly provided $69.4 million in land-grant dollars, $2,460 per student, to the University of Tennessee, where 77% of the students are white—more than four times its required match. TSU and its 6,600 students got just $8.7 million from the state in 2020, 12% above its match.
Glenda Glover on the Nashville campus of Tennessee State University. A 1974 graduate of TSU, she became its first female president in 2013. Says Glover: “It’s never too late to do what’s right.”Small endowments mean little money for faculty salaries, scholarships, research, expansion and, perhaps most importantly, day-to-day operations.
Some HBCUs are fighting back. In Tennessee, state Rep. Harold Love, 49, who earned an economics and finance bachelor’s degree from TSU in 1998, is trying to recover more than half a billion dollars in state land-grant funding he says his alma mater should have received. Working with a legislative committee, he has combed through documents and found as much as $544 million in state funds owed.
Although there has been an uptick in private philanthropy in the months since the murder of George Floyd—MacKenzie Scott , for instance, has given at least $560 million to Black colleges—most of the land-grant HBCUs haven’t gotten any extra funding from the states. “I think it’s because HBCUs have been overlooked for so long and they haven’t had champions,” says Heidi M. Anderson, president of University of Maryland, Eastern Shore.
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