 HBCU Digest Radio, welcome back to intriguing conversations with leaders from the historically black college and university sector. Today is a distinguished pleasure for me, a friend of the show, a dear brother who appears in as many commercials as you can without being named LeBron James, but remains elusive on the Digest and gave me 20 minutes today, so I am eternally grateful, the former president and CEO of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, and now the same namesake for the Society of Human Resources Management, he is also the chair of the White House Board of Advisors on Historically Black College and Universities, Johnny Taylor, Jr., so Attorney Taylor. First, it is an honor to always have you on, and I ask you this question as we ask all guests, how are you doing in managing during the pandemic, brother? Man, I appreciate you asking, you know, it's like everyone, we're trying to balance the demands of a child at home, and I know you have several of them, luckily, I just said yeah, I got it in there, but you know, I have, you know, the little one and not being able to go to school every day and all the frustration that she and, you know, they experience and so all of that, just, you know, making it happen. But I got to tell you, the bigger concern is, and I know we're going to talk about it, but what's happening to our schools and our community broadly, right? Because this, you got the effects of the pandemic on the black community, HBCUs, add to it all of the social unrest, and the dynamic is a lot for 2020, let's say that. It is indeed a lot, and you know, I will start you off with this, this statistic. When you started at TMCF in 2010, there were 266,000 students at HBCUs, enrolled at HBCUs, and as of 2018, that number was now 224. So we're down plus 30,000 students. And for all that you have seen as a fundraiser, as a lobbyist, as an advocate at state and federal levels, what is the common thread that you think creates that? Because this is a precipitous drop in less than a decade. Yeah, so you know, and you know, I was talking about this, gosh, 10 years ago, to your point, in 2010, exactly a decade later. And sadly, almost as if I was writing the book, The George Orwells 1984, much of this was predictable. And now I don't want to make it sound like it, we can't fix it. But we've got to fix it, because for the people who were looking at me saying, no, no, that won't happen. Sadly, I was right. And those of us who stayed real close to the HBCU space and the higher ed space generally knew a couple of things were at play. One, Americans stopped having children. Since the year 2000, the birth rate has been on a decline, period. And that's black, white, the Latino community has been growing. But largely, the rest of us have not been having as many children. So we started out with a birth rate problem. And that's going to persist for a little while. At least another five or six years, we're seeing, you know, we have tough economic times, people decide, well, I can't afford to have children. So they have even fewer children. We saw that from 2008, the economic crisis. So that's number one. Number two, you got to be careful what we pray for. In some ways, and I've said this repeatedly, as much as we are pushing for the majority institutions to be more diverse, where do you think they're getting the diversity problem? So they are now directly competing. Years ago, I talked about Georgia State and it become it ultimately having more black students in the Atlanta market than Spelman, Morehouse and Clark combined. So the reality is, the majority institutions, we put pressure on them to be more diverse, specifically to recruit more African American students. And they did it, which means they're putting serious pressure on HBCUs. So that's the second thing. The third thing, and COVID really made it real clear for us is all of this focus on technology. You remember back in the day, making it sound like, you know, five, six, seven years ago, when I was really pushing us to focus on partnering with, if we didn't have the resources, partnering with the for-profit colleges just to get the infrastructure, technology infrastructure. And there were all the naysayers and the people who said, I'm selling out to them and they're competitors. And I said, guys, if we can find a way for the Strayers and the Phoenixes and those folks that they'll allow us to use some of their technology and white label it, we're going to be better for it. And so many schools didn't do it when we had a lead time on it. And by not doing it, COVID made it nearly impossible. I mean, we were scrambling trying to put together virtual learning online options. Had we done that five, six, seven years ago, we'd be prepared for it right now. So it isn't interesting, all of those three things together. Birth rate, you know, what the online technology, and I admit it takes a ton of investment dollars, but we knew that. And then, you know, the fact of the matter is the majority of institutions have gotten a lot more aggressive. Now, all of this, frankly, was made worse because of parent plus loan situation. And that's, we were already vulnerable, but when you suck $50 million out of a group of institutions that are financially living on the edge anyway, most, not all, but most, you create just the perfect situation for what we have right now, which is some stress on our institutions. You and a lot of folks that are in the orbit of the White House have done an extraordinary job of advocating for more resources to come to the HBCUs in creative ways. So we've seen, you know, loans being deferred, loans being eliminated. We've seen higher increases in funding. We see an unprecedented farm bill. There's so much stuff that we've seen over the last several years, but we have a lot of folks, including presidents, who say, you know, that ain't a lot. You know, that ain't nothing. What do you think when you have actors within the sector who are detracting from our political gains because of who's at the head? I mean, but you're at the same table saying, oh, you know, we need more, we need more, we need more. Man, you nailed it. Listen, I understand that you've had years and years of neglect and failure to invest that, you know, listen, this is the, they want a message that there's a need for more, but you can't keep asking for more without thanking the people. And by the way, that's Congress and the White House and the advocacy organizations like UNCF and TMCF, Thurgood Marshall, a lot of folks are working to get the resources that we're now getting. And here's what scares us is if it's never enough, if the response is, oh, that's not enough, that's not any money, then what incentive does the White House, no matter who's in it, what incentive does Congress have to continue investing or to increase it if it's never enough? So I would ask those in the space, not that you should be grateful in the traditional sense somehow that, you know, somehow you should vote for the president because he's funding HBCUs. But what I am saying is you got to give credit what credit is due. And there's no given that the president is getting, you know, at the last election got eight, depending upon what the numbers are, 9% of the black vote. You know, it could be very, very compelling for him to say, let me fund the groups that will fund, that will vote for me. But instead he gave, you know, and continues to support HBCUs. And those are some tough arguments. I took this role as the advisor to the White House on HBCU issues because they made a commitment to fund us. And frankly, over these last three and a half years, no one can take that away. And I think the universe of HBCUs, the community, would do itself well to at least acknowledge that, vote for whomever you want to vote for, but at least acknowledge that the funding that we've received over the last three and a half years has been frankly, significant and significantly more than that we've gotten any time. COVID, we continue to get special COVID funding. And when they do the next stimulus bill, I think HBCUs are going to be very, very pleased, I hope, with the level of investment in the institution. It's funny that someone pointed out today, well, you know, that's not a lot of money. I said, you know, we use the 3% number a lot. We say we make up 3% of higher educational institutions, but have an outside delivery in terms of the number of professionals and graduates we produce black graduates. And that's true. The flip side is you get 3% of the institutions got 14% of the stimulus funding this last time. So, you know, if you want to talk about punchin' above its weight, the administration on this issue, specifically HBCUs, is doing more than, frankly, it could argue that many argue that it should. What do you say to the institutions that are running a substantial risk on enrollment? For a lot of reasons. We're seeing a lot of data that says students want to go back to campus, they are, you know, willing to take whatever risk maybe associated with being on campus, that the institutions are trying to balance that with the notion that, you know, we got to outfit this place for to be safe. What is some of the political calculus as you see it, when you have an administration that's saying, hey, look, we, y'all, we got to get used to this thing. The virus ain't going away. So at some point, you got to figure out how to do business versus the reality of, you know, the disproportionate impact of COVID on Black folks, the fear of some Black folks to be back on campus. What do you think the political considerations are that we have to take and then share with each other to try to figure out how we do this? Right. So, I'm going to take for just a second the politics out of it and try to just focus on real hard data and policy so that we make really strong policy decisions. Let's start with the fact that you ultimately have to say, are you necessarily going to be safer back in your communities? Right. That's the big question. If the answer is no, then even if you are relatively, you know, safe, you're safer on campus is my point. And we know this. We know that we're seeing this over and over. This COVID is ravaging many of the Black communities. So frankly, in some ways, the kid might be safer coming to your campus, because you can control for it. We can give them the right PPE, the personal protective equipment. We can socially distance. We can kind of give people an environment that they don't have. Think about it. If you live in a two or three bedroom house with five or six, seven, eight people, many of whom have to work every day because they're in those essential jobs, you're being exposed every day to whomever it is, your mom, your dad, your sister, your brothers are exposed to when they go to work. We have a better shot, I would argue, at making, creating a safer place, safer. Not 100% safe, but safer for our students if we can get them back on campus. But here's the reality. If we don't, and I'm telling you, we collect this data at Charm, my day job, these kids are saying, I've been at home for 17, 18 years waiting for this moment to go away to college. And so if my HBCU doesn't open, then guess what? I'm going to go to the majority institution that does. And so you want to talk about an added threat. And once you lose that kid and they go on to these majority campuses and make it their credits and get that experience, it's going to be harder and harder to find that student to replace him or her. So the reality is you just got to do, life is full of risk. I fundamentally believe life is full of risk and you're taking some risk. All of us, the day we get behind a wheel to get in a car every day, you take some risk. And I think we have to teach our students and our community, our professors and everyone to be healthy and try to reduce the risk, the chances that it will do serious harm. But I just don't know any other way. But to get our campuses back open, and then we should do it in a hybrid fashion. And for people who just absolutely either have health risks themselves or, you know, there are things you got to do. I'm not saying going live and opening up your campus for every person is ideal, but we simply can't just have a rule that says online because we also know that the virtual learning while good is not great. It's suboptimal, especially for kids who have many of whom have had substandard K through 12 education, they come into college, they need assistance, and there's nothing like think about what we've sold the HPC experience, we nurture you, we take care of you, we, you know, we do all of that stuff. Well, that's really hard to do, not impossible, but it's really hard to do virtually. So all in all, my sense is that when you balance the risk of not some of these kids not enrolling at school at all, or getting a substandard virtual education that, you know, and all that comes with that, then I think it's worth us trying to figure out how to open our campuses. I will say this though, anyone listening, if the leadership of the institution cannot create some level of safety, not guaranteed safety, but take the necessary precautions, then I think the right thing is not to open, but that's going to come with some serious risks to the institution's long term viability. Let me ask you this because I know you got to run to another meeting. I always appreciate your time, brother. One of the things that you introduced to the sector some years ago was a conversation about how a lot of public systems were running around presidential search processes. They weren't giving the campus the opportunity to meet, greet, and then vet their own presidential and chancellor candidates. And that's still going on a lot today. When you think about that and other threats to HPCs at the state level, particularly, and we, excuse me, we see stuff like Cheney, you know, in conversations with merger, we see stuff happening in Georgia all over the place. What can alumni do to support what the stuff that you're doing at the federal level with having conversations about, hey, can you rein some of this stuff in some of the things that we're doing on the state level? Can you rein some of this stuff in can alumni and students, even in a pandemic mode, be aggressive about pushing certain HBCU nuances to the forefront and saying, look, we're not going to tolerate this because we know that in a pandemic where everybody's focused on getting through it, there may be some actors that'll say, this is the time to do what we've always wanted to do to some of these black colleges. Well, without a doubt, and you know how passionately pissed, maybe that's the the way it is to say it on the podcast. I was about that, but we saw this. I mean, I saw it in Mississippi at Alcorn State, if you recall, and what they what I predicted at the time was they were testing to see if the community would fight back. We saw it in some of the North Carolina jobs and we didn't respond. We seemed to sort of let it go and you established precedent that it was okay. And when you do that a couple of times, they were testing this system out three, four, five years ago and the alumni associations didn't stand up and speak out against it. And so now, unfortunately, they're doing it brazenly. It's like, this is a path that we've gone down. If you ask me in an election year, I think, you know, when you think about what our platform should be, sure you want to know who the president is, sure you want to know who members of Congress are. But at the end of the day, in these states, these state legislators need to know that they're going to be held accountable by our groups, by HVCU alumni, if they make decisions for us, as if, I mean, you want to talk about the height of disrespect, the idea that you all know best for us and you know what leaders we should have. Some will say, well, you know, some of the schools haven't done a great job selecting leaders. Well, that's the case with a lot of the majority institutions too. They too have their problems. But it has these institutions are for us and by us. And anytime you allow others to make those decisions for you, then shame on you. So if you ask me in this big election year, again, the presidential election is everyone, everyone's focused on that. But the people who really impact your lives are local elected officials and state officials. And if I'm in a state, and I know you're specifically talking about what North Carolina has just recently done, and I think the HVCU alumni need to take that to the election box, or in this case, if you're mailing in, you need to hold these folks accountable for making these decisions. If you don't make it an issue, then it's not going to be an issue, and they're going to continue doing it. So there's such an opportunity for us to collectively raise up and say enough of this, like we will decide who runs our institutions.