 Mark's the beginning of National HBCU Week, both in the nation's capital and around our great country. Here to join us to talk about HBCU Week as centered in Maryland's perspective, a dear brother of mine, a proud graduate of Morgan State University and the Senior Vice President and Chief Content Officer of Maryland Public Television, Mr. Travis Mitchell. So, brother, it is a complete honor to have you on this evening to talk about MPT's offering for HBCU Week, which kicked off last night, continues tomorrow. I'm going to be a part of that. We'll get into it in a little bit. But first, can you tell us more about your efforts as the grain trust behind HBCU Week on MPT? No, it's certainly a pleasure to join you and to have this conversation today. I think really you and I began this conversation a year ago when I was envisioning it. I wanted to tap into the best and brightest minds HBCU graduates and say really what's missing. And I believe that in public media, the platforms of public media belong to the people of the state or the local region that the outlet serves. And what had been missing and has been missing on public media is using the platforms to truly support institutions that are pillars within the African American community. And one of those institutions happens to be HBCUs. And so it was important for us to use our platforms here in Maryland and also elsewhere by taking content about HBCUs, showcasing it in the DMV, and then finding unique stories that we could also distribute nationally to public media affiliates across the country. And so the design of HBCU Week was designed to really think global and act local. And I think we've been able to do that. This is the second annual HBCU Week. We kicked off things last evening with a one hour special on the six HBCUs here in the DMV and the DC, Maryland area, followed by the national release of Shaw Rising, which is the documentary of the oldest HBCU in the South Shore University. And we ended up with a documentary on the Freedom Riders. And what it did is it placed the contemporary relevance of HBCUs as a needed component of a key driver of the American economy as it relates to developing the talent that America needs in order to remain globally competitive. But it put the value proposition of HBCUs in historical context. So the activism and the leadership developed by HBCUs, this generation, we are the beneficiaries of the sacrifices of students 50, 60 years ago who have continued to their work has continued to open up doors for and continues to open up doors for generations yet unborn. And so I thought that was why it was important to launch HBCU Week at a time such as this. Let's talk about the effort to unite kind of the historical value of HBCUs, which so many of us have great pride in and great appreciation for. And that contemporary value that you're talking about, because I think that sometimes we kind of trend the tradition more over than the utility or the necessity of today. So how does MPT or public broadcasting period and you've been around in places, you've been in Carolina, you know, in Maryland, you told that story again and again. How do you bridge those two things so people get the connectivity between past and present? Well, one of the things that the most effective presidents are able to do is quickly articulate the value proposition in a contemporary context to make the university's offerings relevant to the regions that they serve. And so higher education in general is going through a seismic shift in terms of its business model. And the HBCUs I believe that are thriving can articulate the competitive advantages of their university. So both they are able to serve a historic population and not abandon that population, but they have to be able to communicate to that population how the offerings of the university will graduate that student to be competitive in the workforce. And then secondarily, I think they have to be able to communicate to the stakeholders in the region what is the slice of pie that they have carved out to truly feed the community of the educational offerings that they have. If you can only rely on what you did yesterday and you cannot articulate the competitive advantage you have among the crowded field of higher education offerings, particularly as it relates to so many low cost I would dare say cheaper alternatives that really don't have the substance or the quality, but they are crowding the marketplace. You have to be able to shift and sift through that crowded field to really articulate what's unique about your university's present day abilities to provide opportunities to students. Let's talk about some of your background because I think for HBCUs it's always important for esteemed graduates to be able to articulate that how do you get here from their opposition. Talk about some of your roots in Carolina, particularly at Shaw University, which leaves your involvement in the Shaw Rising documentary. How does that translate to Morgan and then activism at Morgan and now today's success? Jared, I appreciate the question. HBCUs are in my blood. I grew up on the campus of Shaw University. My father was a all-CIAA basketball player there. He was a basketball coach at Shaw University. My mother was an outstanding student at Shaw University. My uncle was on the board of trustees. All of my cousins, aunts, and uncles went to Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. That is where I grew up from the age of three all the way until I was 18 years old. I was always on the Shaw University campus through good times, through bad times. I was a fixture on that campus and it was my first exposure to what I'm going to call Wakanda. It's a place where you looked around and you saw black people empowered, leading, affirming and confirming young people every step of the way. It was because Shaw University was in my DNA that when it was time for me to choose a university, I chose to go to Morgan State University because Morgan offered me a double scholarship. I was an athlete. I played basketball and I was an honor student. It was a place where I needed to be to really sort out what the next steps were going to be for me, but it was a place similar to what I experienced growing up on the campus of Shaw University. What I say is that had there been no Shaw University, there would have not been a Morgan State University. No Shaw, no Morgan, no me. Then once I got to Morgan State and I realized that my path forward was not going to be on the basketball court. In fact, you're a journalist, so I'm going to tell you right now if you Google my points per game, you won't find it in my GPA. It was higher than my points per game or my assists per game and it might have been higher than my minutes per game. I like to say that I was a- Morgan was highly competitive then. Morgan was indeed highly competitive. I had to find my own competitive niche and develop my own value proposition. I found that where I could contribute most, I was actually going to redshirt on the basketball team and it was when I redshirted that I could take my first journalism class. I fell in love with journalism and I became the editor of the campus newspaper and the S'morgan Spokesman, which you are a former editor of the campus newspaper. Then it led me to become the spokesperson for our student movement that maybe we'll talk about in a moment, but it was at Morgan that I learned who I was. I wasn't just a leader on the basketball court. Morgan taught me to transfer those leadership skills off the court. I was a point guard so I could see things before they happened and that's what a visionary does in business. Morgan taught me that I had innate abilities, gifts, talents that I had not tapped into. Morgan developed those gifts, talents and abilities and enabled me to rise within the media world where at the age of 28 years old I was the youngest chief operating officer in the cable industry and I scaled a new digital cable channel from two cities to 3,600 cities, 31 million homes and a four-year period. It was because Morgan had prepared me to do so that I was ready for the challenge. Let's get into that part of the student movement at Morgan because if HBCU culture's greatest generation is the civil rights generation, the second greatest is those in the 80s and 90s who fought hard to realize the efforts of their forebears and you certainly were part of that at Morgan. Following civil rights in the 80s and 90s, the students were very active about facility improvement on the campus, academic equity, pushing back against efforts to derail the campus' growth, so to speak. Talk about your experience there as an activist and how does that shape your design as a programmer, as a content officer, as a vice president and MPT? Well, I will say this at the time. Remember this is the late 80s, early 90s. There was in our culture, particularly in hip-hop culture, the culture of hip-hop at that time was very political. It was very conscious. We were public enemy, we were poor righteous teachers, we were brand-nubians, tribe call quests, we were really about the culture and about fighting for systemic change, getting our peace of the pie and not apologizing for demanding it now. That's the age that I grew up in and found myself in at Morgan. It was a very politically astute time where students were very plugged in to what was happening around the world and what was happening in their communities and the culture. When I was a student at Morgan and edited a student newspaper, we had really discovered that the university had been historically and systemically underfunding because of Jim Crow laws and because of systemic racism. We were tired of being tired of having inadequate facilities as a result of underfunding and we wouldn't believe the hype. The hype at that time, sold to us by the powers that be, were to believe that the reason why Morgan struggled was because of fiscal mismanagement of our leadership and nothing could be further from the truth. You cannot make, you cannot get blood out of a turnip, as my grandmother used to say. The reality is that if Morgan had been underfunded for a 40-year period, you were going to have infrastructure issues, you were going to have dilapidated buildings that really no maintenance could solve at that particular point because deferred maintenance is one of the big areas where HBCU struggled. There's never enough money to upkeep new buildings. The only remedy is to tear the building down and build a new brand new building. Our president, Dr. Earl S. Richardson, had a vision for the future that had been blocked by the powers that be. We as students said, our president has a vision. We have a responsibility. We're going to marshal our resources. We're going to band together. We're going to take over our administration building, not as a sign of protest against our president, but as a sign of protest against the state of Maryland and the sitting governor at that time, William Donald Schaefer. Because we paid tuition and fees, we had the right to be on any building at any time. We just couldn't leave. And so we did leave. We stayed there. Now, the issue for us was, let's take our message to the state. Let's articulate our cause to the powers that be across the higher education and the legislative bodies that could make some decisions to invest and fund and expedite that 25-year plan. And so in the course of it, we began to link up with student movements across the country. There were student movements at Howard, student movements at Bowie State, student movements at Tennessee State University. And you began to see across the country, much like you saw in the 60s with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, you began to see a conscious effort of HBCU students banding together to fight for increased funding for their schools. And our case, the remedy was, let's expedite that 25-year schedule. Let's bring some of the dormitories down in advance of what the state wanted on an expedited timeline, which forced the state then to fund the building of brand new dormitories. And so we were very focused and intentional on what we wanted outcomes to be. And we were willing to risk our academic future so that future generations could benefit from brand new facilities that we see today. I think the net result of the 25-year plan that Dr. Richardson put in place, if I'm not mistaken, is close to two billion dollars in capital improvements over at Morgan over that 25-year period. So that's the era that I grew up in. And how it shapes me today is that, again, I can think of no greater cause for me than the support of HBCUs. Because when I close my eyes at night, I thank God that I was able to go to Morgan because that has created an opportunity for me to provide for my family, to provide for my daughter who's a Morgan student right now, to support people in my community, to pay off, pay mortgage notes and car notes when people are in need because I am a high wage earner. I'm a high wage earner not because I'm so smart. I'm a high wage earner because Morgan put something in me, developed something in me that I could give back to my community, which includes my immediate family and those around me. And that is why HBCUs are so important. That is why the greatest investment we can make as a community, as a Black community and the call for remedies to systemic racism, I believe, are directed toward investments in HBCUs. We're going to get into that in depth tomorrow on NPT's Conversations for Change. That's going to be tomorrow at eight o'clock, live stream. I'll be sure to click below. You'll see the link to register for that. But talk a little bit about the content because that journey that you're speaking about is the construct of what tomorrow's conversation will be, activism, policy making, all of these things that are central to HBCU advancement. Talk about or sneak preview for us what we can expect tomorrow. Well, you're going to see a panel of intergenerational HBCU leaders from around the country. And I'm very happy about that, that we have every age group represented. We have some presidents, both from public institutions and private institutions. We have student government leaders. We have HBCU advocates. We have policymakers at the state level who are grappling with the remedies in their state for past underfunding of HBCUs and what the remedies might be in their states based on precedent that may be set in other states. We're having a family conversation and we're asking all HBCU graduates to chime in and learn and listen and contribute to the conversation about their HBCU experience. You and I have shared this vision for some time and what I'm most proud of is you have WEAAFM, which is the Morgan State University radio station. You have Howard University radio station 96.3 WHURFM 96.3. The HBCU channel carried on Sirius XM satellite. And we have you, my brother, with the HBCU digest and education news flash, I believe it is now. And so we have a coalition of the willing that are using the platforms that exist to have this conversation. It's just the beginning, but it's not a conversation we need to have one time. It's a conversation that we should have every day to make sure that the focus of HBCUs is not shifted to other priorities within this administration or any other administration. And we have to keep our foot on the gas to press toward our destiny. And so if we don't push the envelope, if we don't demand change and we don't talk about these issues, nobody else will. One more time. Tomorrow night, conversations for change for HBCU week that will be at 7 p.m. streaming on Maryland public television and social media pages and online. And brother, we appreciate your time. But just one more time remind us how much people should be willing to participate in shaping this conversation tomorrow night. It's vital. We need to demonstrate that there is a big demand for this type of conversation. We're hoping that we have a record turnout tomorrow. We are hoping that the phone, that the social media platforms are pouring in comments. We need to hear from you. And I want to take that information, and I want to use it as evidence that we need to continue to have these conversations on a consistent basis. And also the time we find ourselves in. It's not just for us from a self-serving standpoint, but there's some very serious decisions and some legislation that's about to come up that's going to impact the future of HBCUs. We need to let people know that we're paying attention and that we're not asleep at the wheel. And we have to make sure that some of this legislation is passed so that HBCUs can take that next step forward.