Dr. John Silvanus Wilson on the new administration’s approach to supporting Historically Black Colleges and Universities
Harvard Political Review: You have a long history in higher education especially involving HBCUs, but why did you decide to accept the position as executive director of the initiative?
John Wilson: Well, my experience in higher education professionally has been in white higher education. I have been between two institutions, MIT and George Washington University, but the focus of my dissertation at Harvard was on black colleges, and as I was raising money at MIT for all those years between 1985 and 2001, I was in touch with a number of black colleges through the United Negro College Fund. I was advising them and was a board member at several Foundations and their initiatives to strengthen black colleges. So I’ve had a hand in the world of HBCUs throughout my career, including co-teaching a course at the Harvard School of Education on black colleges and universities. The professional experiences that I’ve had at MIT raising money, at GW raising money, and working on a strategic plan along with my interest in black colleges, laid a pretty good foundation for me to assume this role at the White House.
HPR: Upon your acceptance President Obama said, “We’re delighted to have someone with the breadth and quality of experience that Doctor Wilson brings to address the challenges that our HBCUs face.” What challenges were he referring to and how do you plan to address them?
JW: Well, I’ll just cite a couple of key challenges. One, a lot of what’s going on in black colleges is unknown. A lot of the good things that are happening at black colleges are unknown. There seems to be a tendency to emphasize and accentuate all the bad things, all the negative news coming at us. Someone gets injured, or a faculty member gets in trouble, or a lot of students are leaving for financial reasons, then there are big headlines. But when there is breakthrough research going on, or students winning special awards, or major gifts coming in then there isn’t as much publicity. So we want to shift that. The way I’ve talked about it is that black colleges have a low signal to noise ratio – that is the noise of their vices is much louder than the signal of their virtue. We want to reverse that. We want to give them a stronger signal to noise ratio, and in order to address that, we’re going to be working with the black colleges to get the best news out about them. Another problem is, another major challenge is, what I call capital impairment. Black colleges simply do not have the financial base that some of the stronger institutions in higher education have, and yet we have disproportionately needy enrollment. So we need a stronger financial base. And that’s another reason why my background in fundraising comes into play. I don’t think there’s been an executive director yet of this office with the kind of fundraising background that I have, so I know that the President expects me to employ those skills in this role as well.
HPR: How do you think having an African American president affects the HBCU system, if at all?
JW: I think it’s not so much that he is African American, though that obviously matters in some important ways, symbolic and otherwise, but the fact of the matter is that he really is an education president. A central goal of his is to ensure that by the year 2020 we have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world. So it is his emphasis on education that makes him a very good president and partner for black colleges and all of higher education.
HPR: Is the initiative involved in any current policy or legislation?
JW: We have several important opportunities emerging from the Department of Education that are great fit with the challenges and strengths of black colleges. There is an access and completion fund that will be available. That is a brand new approach to strengthening higher education, and access and completion are two very important matters for black colleges. … The initiative is going to ensure that black colleges are well-positioned to tap some of those innovation fronts because we believe there are more than a few innovative ideas coming out of a number of our HBCUs. We want to make sure that we are partners with the federal government in pursuing that 2020 goal in both of those categories — that is completion and innovation.
SJ: Is the innovation fund the same thing that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has been going around the country looking at schools for?
JW: In a sense yes, but this is different. There are innovation funds and ideas that are targeting K-12, and then there are some innovation funds and ideas that are targeting higher education. I think Arne’s emphasis for several months has been on the schools K-12. The higher education emphasis has been announced very recently.
HPR: Would you like to say anything more about HBCUs in general? Because I feel like they’re a group of institutions that people outside of the system know very little about or aren’t very aware of.
JW: I think it’s important for people to know that HBCUs are not the same, and though I’ve spoken about them as a group, and people ask me about them as a group, there is a same range of strengths or weaknesses within the HBCU world as there is in the general world of higher education. There are some really strong HBCUs. Spelman College is particularly strong. Morehouse and Hampton and Howard and Tuskegee are typically mentioned among the strongest institutions in the HBCU world. There are some kind of mid-tier institutions that, based on what happens with the economy and a number of other things in the next coming years, could either shift to the stronger category or not. And then there are some institutions that are in real trouble. And Morris Brown College and Barber-Scotia College are two institutions that are in real trouble. … So there is a range, and it is important to see it that way, because I think people tend to regard HBCUs not according to the strongest, but according to maybe the mid-tier or even the weakest of the institutions and that’s unfortunate. That connects back to what I was saying about the signal to noise ratio. We have to strengthen the signal to noise ratio.
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