DISQUS

AS · 2 months ago

So THAT'S what you were referring to on twitter. Taking your second point, that should mean that the feds increase funding to ALL institutions, not just HBCU's. Which I would agree with. This country obviously doesn't believe in investing in the future, and investing wisely in the future, not through infrastructure, education, environment etc. And that must change or things get worse.

HOWEVER, I do think that, despite the value of a college education in general, there is something to be said about "forcing" schools to reach out to their alumni by cutting federal funding and raising donor funds. Maybe its me, but the primary reason I don't give to my alma mater isn't because I don't have the money (even though I don't) but because I don't believe in the direction the institution is taking. Because it is a state funded university up until recently there has not been a big push to reach out to alumni, now there is. And now we're also seeing improvements to what the university is doing in regards to alumni activities, and even alumni support etc. Since I'm not on campus I don't know what kinds of changes students are seeing.

I didn't attend an HBCU but I've heard a LOT of complaints about them from alumni, so maybe there is something to be said for reducing funding to encourage the interaction between schools, and their alumni.

facebook-724951158 · 2 months ago

interesting article... i just organized w/other alumni a foundation for PVAMU and one of the first things that we are doing is educating our alumni re giving...we recently finished a capital campaign for the university (hence, now the foundation) and our alumni actually did well in terms of giving... better than i expected... there is always room for improvement ... i agree that many corporations, foundations, etc... ask what is the alumni doing re giving? they based their giving on what alumni is doing.

E.C. Hopkins · 2 months ago

Too much focus on human capital arguments. Not enough focus on symbolic capital, cultural capital, and social capital arguments as they relate to alumni support levels.

High prestige (which correlates with higher symbolic, cultural, and social capital) => higher likelihood to be more economically productive and/or higher likelihood to accumulate above-average wealth => higher likelihood to give money to almae matres or higher likelihood to give lots of money to almae matres.

The average Ivy League graduate is out-earning the average HBCU graduate. Most people have to have a threshold amount of wealth or disposable income before they'll give anything to their almae matres. The average Ivy League graduate is more likely to have passed that wealth or disposable income threshold.

Moreover, this is a "takes money to make money" situation. It costs money to persuade alumni to donate money. Ivy League schools have more money to persuade with. Moreover, they are better at persuading their alumni than HBCUs. The fact that more of their alumni are very wealthy helps make their fund-raising business units more effective too. Wealthy people are not only likely to have more money to give, they are also more likely to get more pleasure out of having their almae matres court them for their money and more likely to want to flaunt their wealth to their other wealthy friends by adorning buildings, or programs, or scholarships, or professorships, or speakers' series with their names.

But let's put the relative effectiveness of Ivy League and HBCU fund-raising business units and the Ivy League's inherit advantage of having many more very wealthy and vain alumni aside for a minute. Assume HBCUs and Ivy League schools are equally effective at shaking down their graduates. There are at least two ways to increase HBCU alumni donations.

(1) Decrease the cost of HBCU tuitions and other costs to attend, which would in turn increase their average graduates' wealth or disposable income levels, which would in turn increase the likelihood they would give to their almae matres. (This is how the U.S. Government should be investing more, if it believes HBCUs are better at educating and training the students they primarily serve than non-HBCUs.)

(2) Increase the prestige of HBCU degrees, which would in turn increase their average graduates' wealth or disposable income levels, which would in turn increase the likelihood they would give to their almae matres. (This is a culture contest, and it would cost the U.S. Government much more to help HBCUs begin to compete very effectively in this centuries-old U.S. contest than it would to make all HBCU programs free to their students.)

Since I'm a strong believer that luck, then social capital, and then cultural capital control U.S. wealth accumulation among degreed white collar professionals far more than the relative quality of the education or training they get at U.S. colleges and universities (i.e. the human capital), I won't suggest that increasing the quality of HBCU education and training would be a way to increase HBCU alumni donations. That would assume the U.S. wealth building game is primarily a culturally impartial, socially impartial, and meritocratic one.

Michael David Cobb Bowen · 2 months ago

I was thinking about this just the other day. It can be taken for granted that the academy is the bastion of liberal thought, and I take it as fairly axiomatic that the black academy is firmly entrenched in all that Lefty thinking. And so the direct line of thinking I had was whether or not black academics have undergone the kind of media scrutiny in political matters that other outspoken individuals have. I am of the opinion that they have not. And I thought about the extent to which there may (or may not be) an ideological lock that the the black professoriate has on that fraction of the black middle class which was educated in the HBCUs. I had this discussion in person with Kali Tal many years ago, and she divided black professors into the old school and the new jacks. The old school were granted tenure almost en masse around the same time in American history as men like Charlie Rangel and Gus Hawkins and Willie Brown were making their bones - they started, these black profs, as the best of the best campus radicals and parlayed themselves into the nascent black professorial establishment - names we all know and many we don't who have been around for 20-30-40 years. Derrick Bell is never going away. Angela Davis is never going away. The new jacks live in a love-hate relationship with these chairs of African American studies departments et al. But I don't remember much else about that conversation.

It strikes me odd, however, that (predictably?) black wealth has not manifested itself in the taking over of serious real estate. I mean that literally and figuratively. Around the same time I was thinking about these things, I was writing about the ability (c.f. Escape) of Americans with money walking in and buying an apartment on the Upper West Side. So why isn't there a black owned building on Central Park? Is there some un-crossable line, or an unattainable crossover? That is to say that is it so that when one achieves wealth and success in America will there be no visibly black owned institutions? Preliminary indications say so.

So what of the HBCUs? Are they even worth spending on? Is their independence useful? Of them all, only FAMU appeals to my sense of propriety, and when they offered me a full four year ride in their business school, I had no idea what I was rejecting. None whatsoever. And my parents clearly didn't have the presence of mind to smack any sense into me. It was then likely as is now that black Americans do not have that sense of propriety - that we believe our fortunes are whimsical rather than built and conserved.

My premise has always been that the one thing black Americans ever lacked was capital, and that we lack it today in any purposeful concentration indicates to me a cultural deficit. Because no program of wealth for its own obvious self-interest has been sustained over time. Black Americans seem destined to continuously mine America for cultural capital rather than capital itself. In other words it is indeed a question of value, and apparently getting beyond the commonality of the common black man strips ambition from those who would lead black projects.

There are exceptions, of course. Shuge Knight comes to mind, oddly enough. And it's likely that Jay-Z and Puffy will do loudly what perhaps Bryant Gumbel and Michael Jordan are doing quietly. But either way, I can't put a finger on it- a finger as visible and as obvious as Omega Psi Phi is rich and the Omega HQ in Washington DC is called the Omega Building and you can't just walk up in there because the Omega Foundation is.. No finger as visible as Morehouse or Spelman with a network that gets you X.

I can't say because I'm an outsider to whatever that network is. It doesn't get to enough black folks to matter. The organization doesn't capture the imaginations of those on the outside. It's unlike the kind of venture partnerships that seem to be the rule in the rest of society. When your company gets funded by capitalists everybody is supposed to get richer. Black Americans by virtue of the relative poverty of their institutions are more interested in alleviating suffering - of being altruistic and self-sacrificing, not mutually profitable. We sustain myths of middle class political action saving the lot of the underclass, an interminable money pit. And so I think that our values have undercut the ability of our institutions to make big money. They are incompatible with a program of wealth attainment on a significant scale. None of us were hurt by Black Monday or Madoff because we already forswore those games. 1 Billion dollars is too much money for a black man. He must be a sellout.

Maybe we'd be more sanguine about states rights if we owned a state. Until then we will continue to make a Federal case about our funding.