Entrepreneurial Appetite
Entrepreneurial Appetite
Black Colleges and the Future of American Democracy with Dr. John Silvanus Wilson
Support the From A&T to PhD Endowed Scholarship: https://fundraise.givesmart.com/form/6Xj-Yg?vid=16qnlf
What if Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) hold the key to saving our democracy and our planet? This episode promises to reveal compelling insights into how HBCUs foster socially responsible leaders equipped to tackle both. Join us as we celebrate Dr. Langston Clark's 40th birthday with a mission to secure 40 new donors for the From A&T to PhD Endowed Scholarship, supporting educators on their journey to graduate degrees. Hear transformative stories from A&T alumni and discover the scholarship's powerful impact on their careers.
You'll also gain unique perspectives from Dr. Wilson, who shares his experiences navigating the cultural and academic landscapes of Morehouse College and Harvard Divinity School. Understand the stark contrasts and learn about the importance of fostering inclusive environments in higher education. We emphasize the evolving role of HBCUs in shaping leaders who prioritize communal progress, especially in times when predominantly white institutions struggle with diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
Finally, we explore the metaphorical "fluttering veil" over HBCUs—are these institutions on the brink of their finest hour or facing decline? Delve into the financial sustainability of educational institutions, comparing the fortunes of HBCUs and well-endowed colleges like Grinnell. Learn about the critical role of strategic leadership in securing financial stability and how investing in the goodness of graduates can drive societal change. This episode is a call to support educational opportunities for Black educators and underscores the transformative power of education.
What's up everybody. Once again, this is Dr Langston Clark, the founder and organizer of Entrepreneur Appetite, a series of events dedicated to building community, promoting intellectualism and supporting Black businesses. I want to welcome you to a special series of our podcast celebrating a milestone that is close to my heart my 40th birthday. As part of this celebration, I'm setting an ambitious goal to gain 40 new donors for the From A&T to PhD Endowed Scholarship in North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, an endowment that I co-founded to support teachers and educators who are on their journeys to get graduate degrees. For those of you who have joined our live discussions, you know that typically, 10% of the profits from the podcast go to support this endowment. However, for the months of June and July, I'm thrilled to announce that 100% of the profits will be dedicated to the From A&T to PhD Endowed Scholarship. If you are inspired to support this cause, a link to contribute to the endowment can be found in the show notes.
Speaker 1:We're asking listeners to generously support the From A&T to PhD Endowed Scholarship to help more educators increase their education so that they can better support the students in our community. This special series will feature testimonials from A&T alumni who have gone on to earn their PhDs, sharing their journeys and impact of their education on their lives and career. It will also feature some new episodes from authors who have written books about HBCUs and a few throwback episodes of Morehouse College from 2013 to 2017 and is currently the Managing Director of the Open Leadership Program at the MIT Media Lab. Before we get into the conversation about the book, dr Wilson, would you just begin by telling usa little bit about your story and how you became what's known as a string shooter a concept that we'll get into a little bit later on in this conversation and then also tell us a little bit about the history of the book, how you came to this work.
Speaker 2:That was the definition of good behavior doing well in school and so we came to value it in our own right, and there was never a question about whether we would go to college. So it was all about education. Only debate was whether I was going to be in the ministry or be an educator, and so I was between being more like my mom or my dad for a long time and basically felt called to be in education, although my brother and I, as I said, went to Morehouse and we both went to Divinity School. Afterwards I was at Harvard, he was at Union, and we both felt more called to be in education. So we both got doctorates, you know terminal degrees, and I'm quite comfortable in the pulpit, but I'm in the classroom and on the campus for most of our lives in my case, all my life. So that's my story and basically, you know, I was, I was tracked into this, but I felt called, so it didn't matter. Didn't matter, but I felt called, so it didn't matter.
Speaker 1:Didn't matter, and so, before we get into some concepts that are in the book, can you tell us the story of the book? What was the reason that you wrote this book?
Speaker 2:and why is this book so important for what's happening right now? Yeah, so the book really comes out of my biography. Um I um, by the time I was in middle school, my mom and father were divorced and, um, my mom, I got out a stepdad and we moved from Philadelphia to suburban Philadelphia and we attended a church back in Philadelphia and I was K-12, not K-12, probably middle school through 12th grade and predominantly white environments, predominantly white suburban school. My brother and I were athletes and that's kind of what was an island of sanity because we were good of sanity because we were good and so. But academically we were, we were quite good and that wasn't always appreciated, so it was not a healthy academic environment.
Speaker 2:So the idea of going to a black college grew on me, but I wasn't really zeroed in. We ended up going to a church. My stepfather was not a pastor, so we ended up going to a church that was pastored by a Morehouse man, and that's when Morehouse came onto my radar. And as I tell people about that church, the church is Salem Baptist Church and the pastor was Robert Johnson Smith and he talked about Morehouse as much as he talked about Jesus in the pulpit. I mean it really was extraordinary, a disproportionately high number of guys coming to that church went to Morehouse. I mean it was just automatic and we thought I joke. I say, you know, we thought Jesus was a Morehouse man and so you know it was the pastor. You got Jesus, you got the king. I mean, where else are you going?
Speaker 1:to go yeah.
Speaker 2:I went to. I went to Morehouse, my brother went to Morehouse, a large number of guys went to Morehouse and, I have to say, langston. That was relief for me. That was the first time that I was not othered or minoritized or marginalized. It was very powerful for me. I went from object to subject At Morehouse they of my life. Yeah, it was really, really a powerful experience for me. And I did well because I'd gotten accustomed to doing well academically and so I was aspiring to do a lot. But I had all these questions from my upbringing, theological questions, and so I decided I was going to go to Divinity School.
Speaker 2:I got into Harvard at Yale and chose Harvard, even though Yale gave me more money. But again, it was an influence of professor there. Bill Guy of the church I attended while I was in college was a Morehouse man who went to Harvard, divinity, and I went to him for his advice and he said you should go to Harvard. And so I did it. And boy, when I got up to Harvard, it was amazing to me the difference between Morehouse and Harvard. I was astounded. I was like whoa? I mean the sprawling campus you know, well-paid professors, um, huge endowment, um, it was just a different world. It was a gated community man. It was like it was. It was very different.
Speaker 2:And so at that point in my life, beginning of grad school, I was at Harvard, not long, and I said you know what Morehouse has, exactly what Harvard needs, and Harvard has exactly what Morehouse needs. I said Harvard has emphasized capital optimization, they have optimized capital, they have all this well-appointed environment to educate people and they have enough money to do that. So money is not the issue at Harvard, morehouse, the emphasis there was on character and Morehouse did it quite well. And so those two things are the pillars in my book capital and character, right. So, and I decided at that point this is before I decided to go get you know focus more on education. I said you know, there is no college or university that has ever optimized those two things at the same time on the same campus. I said that's the holy grail to optimize character and capital on the same campus at the same time. So you're asking me where this book came from. That's where this book came from and that's why I wrote it. I said that that's the Holy Grail. And so, basically, I define that as this unprecedented garden. Find that as this unprecedented garden.
Speaker 2:I lost. Over 200 of my classmates who entered with me freshman year at Morehouse did not graduate with me by senior year. I didn't see one single human being at Harvard, be that student, faculty member or staff, really leave because of insufficient funds. It just did not happen. Not one. And I said, okay, morehouse and other Black colleges have done so much for the world, why are they the ones with all these needs? And the white colleges, which have a different history, are not distracted by precarity. And so I said that combination is where we need to go. That's pretty much why I went to the Graduate School of Education at Harvard after that, and pretty much why I started my career with a 16-year stay at MIT is because I wanted to figure out, make my way toward influencing an institution to have capital and character in the same place at the same time, and I've been about that my entire career and that is why I wrote the book.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I want. I want to get into some concepts in the book, and there's some. I guess it may not be concepts, it may be context for why it's important to emphasize capital and character, given what's happening in our society and also what's happening in our world right. And so part of the book talks about, as HBCUs, having some responsibility for saving our American democracy. And then there's also this emphasis on like HBCUs you know as saving the planet, and I want to note that we hear a lot about the history like we know the history of historically Black colleges and universities expanding our democracy a lot of different.
Speaker 1:The civil rights movement and civil rights movements within the broader civil rights movement came about because folks who went to HBCUs but the what is it? Grandfather, the godfather of the environmental rights, environmental justice movement, dr Robert Bullard, like he works at Texas Southern University and went to an HBCU. So those are things we don't hear as much about. So could you talk about those two great tasks that are upon us right now and what role HBCUs have to play in both of those?
Speaker 2:Yeah, great question. I just think that any responsible book about HBCUs has to have a window on the world in which we live. That was the DNA of HBCUs. That was the DNA of HBCUs. They had been cultivated in the classrooms and in the campus culture. A very different perspective. They were about mindsets and they really curated the mindsets of people and, as I say, giving them a dual capacity, a skill set for a better me, which means they gave them a set of skills, a tool set and a skill set to get a job and to live a responsible life. But in addition to a skill set for a better me, they gave graduates a mindset for a better we. So it's not enough to go out and get a job and, you know, get the nice car and private school for the kids and all that you know. Bling. You have to be concerned about.
Speaker 2:The society movement did not happen 100 years before it did, and it's a simple reason. It's because Harvard and Yale and Princeton and those that launched this thing called higher education in America the first institutions. They were not about that at all. Campuses in this country were literally taking democracy seriously. The civil rights movement a civil rights movement should have happened after Reconstruction went down. And it's worth wondering why didn't the graduates, why didn't the students and graduates of Harvard and Yale and other such institutions as taught by and kind of conditioned by their faculty and leaders, why didn't they pull off a civil rights movement when Reconstruction was shut down back in the day? Well, it's because they weren't doing democracy, they were doing aristocracy, they were really not focused on the way. So that's why you fast forward today, langston, and you see all of these institutions come into grips with and apologizing for their past ties to slavery. So you have Harvard, acknowledging that its first three or four presidents owned enslaved Americans. You have Yale, taking the names of enslavers off of some of their buildings enslavers off of some of their buildings. You have Georgetown, apologizing to the generations of the African-Americans whose ancestors they sold in order to keep Georgetown alive. You have UVA, confessing, acknowledging that there were once more enslaved Americans than there were students on the campus of UVA pampering the lives of those. You have Princeton, confessing that they not only raised money from enslavers but they had slave auctions outside the House of the President of Princeton, on campus slave auctions. I mean, that's how tied in, that's how invested they were in that world. So the reason why the Civil Rights Movement didn't happen long before it did is because those institutions had a big blind spot. They were irresponsible and it took HBCUs to come around the middle of the last century to do what had never been done, and that is, they deliberately and aggressively shaped the foot soldiers and the generals of the civil rights movement to improve democracy, the civil rights movement to improve democracy. We did not save democracy entirely, we improved it.
Speaker 2:Democracy is in deep trouble again, and that's why I say we face two big challenges right now in this world. We face a large number of challenges, but two of them stand out more than the rest. One is our imperiled democracy, the other is our imperiled planet. And in order to address them the way they need to be addressed, we need American higher education to do something that it's never, never done. American higher education to do something that it's never, never done. And I say we need America, all of American higher education, to do a version of what HBCUs did in the middle of the last century, and that is to deliberately and aggressively shape the foot soldiers and the generals of a movement to repair and save both the democracy and the planet, and if we don't do that, then it could be game over, not just for democracy but for human existence.
Speaker 2:This is very, very real. It is not debatable that the planet is warming. I think it's been three years in a row where the current year is hotter than the last one, and 2024 is no exception, and it's only going to get worse. So we need a wake-up call on that, obviously, but we also need a wake-up call on democracy and what I say. You know, I wrote the book Langston with a sense of urgency, but by the time I was completing the book, I said no, this is a sense of emergency, not just urgency.
Speaker 2:Why? Because a broken democracy cannot heal a broken planet. All right, democracy cannot heal a broken planet. If we're sitting here arguing over democracy, then the planet is going to continue to warm because it takes a scaled cooperative effort to do what needs to be done to save both. And you got to save the democracy in order to get the kind of cooperation that's required to save the planet. So the stakes are very high and that's why I enter HBCUs, as we need an encore. An HBCU encore this time. Not just HBCUs as custodians and saviors. We need HBCUs to go deep and teach Harvard and Yale and the rest of them what they should have done a long time ago and what they can and must do now.
Speaker 1:So, dr Wilson, I'm going to bring up something to you that I wrestle with, All right. So I went to A&T for undergrad, I went to Ohio State for my master's, I went to UT Austin for my PhD and when I was at UT Austin it was, it was almost I don't get in trouble, I don't get in trouble. It was almost like being at a black college, because there were black men there who were in positions of power and influence, who created this space for us, where we got supported, we got preached to by the professors and the mentors who were there, and it's like a group of 20, 25 Black men who are like in my extended academic family at the PhD level because of that. But we know what's happening in higher ed with the backlash against DEI and all of that stuff, and so, like I just like when I'm having conversations with my academic brothers and my homeboys and my homegirls, I always ask the question I don't know if the PWIs can be saved, and that's what I wrestle with, because it seems like it's something inherent just in who the PWIs are that they're only going to go so far, and so first I would like your thoughts on that being like the leaders and the guiding light for the other institutions to get on board with, you know, saving our democracy or democracy in general, but then also the planet. Do we need people like you, who have, you know, been birthed out of HBCUs, to infiltrate a school like at MIT or Harvard to be sort of like guiding and molding as much as you can Like? How do you see this potentially scale?
Speaker 2:Well, you have your finger on the right thing and what I will say is that your experience at UT Austin just because of the environment, the way the adults in that environment, particularly the African-Americans, set it up for you that was an HBCU experience. So it wasn't an HBCU but it's a hands-on education, it's a lean-in education. They knew your name, they set high expectations for you. They did not doubt, doubt that you could be your best. So that's what I got at morehouse. I mean, that's that's why I was like whoa, okay, that changed the taste of education. You know, on the day, because I was getting that at home, my parents were like you know, nobody's going to tell you what you cannot do, because you can. And frankly, to go back to that, we were quite, we were like stealth, we were like underground, we were not wearing our A's on our sleeve, we were just doing well, not telling anybody. Because you know this was in the 1970s, well before you were born, langston, and you know, doing well and and being black, you, you gotta be careful, you gotta be kind of under the radar. And obviously I didn't have to be under the radar when I got to Morehouse. So all I'm saying is your question about can they really be saved? I think the only way to save these institutions is to create the kind of phenomenon that you saw at UT Austin and to influence and kind of infect them enough with it that they will want to embrace that for the entire institution. Now that can happen, and there are places.
Speaker 2:There are a couple of individuals that were there for me at MIT. One is Clarence Williams and Phil Clay. These were African-American males who were higher up at MIT when I got there, who were guys for me. They felt like Morehouse to me. There's a well-known president named Friedman Hrabowski yes who was head of UMBC for all his years. Recently retired, he went to Hampton undergrad and basically he brought Hampton to UMBC. True, he made that environment safe for black folk to be high achievers. That was his formula.
Speaker 2:Here's the thing. You and I had great experiences at HBCUs, as have a number of other people, but I don't think HBCUs have been at their best as good as they've been. They have been facing too much precarity is what I call it, financial challenges to really be at their best, and so we had the brain drain. They started stealing our best athletes and students and professors, and you know back in the day, you know 95% of up through 19,. The mid-1960s, you know, up to the mid-1950s, 95% of the African-Americans in higher ed were in HBCUs. Now it's somewhere around 7%. So 93% of the African-Americans in higher ed are not in HBCUs.
Speaker 2:All right, and some are getting experiences like you had at UT Austin. Most are not, and so it's a secret what HBCUs can have done. Too much of a secret, because it shouldn't be as much of a secret as it is because of what HBCUs did in the middle of the last century. The legacy of that and the power of that can be applied again and HBCUs can really do much more for the world. And it's not just HBCUs per se, but the HBCU mindset and the HBCU approach needs to be adopted. Ironically, that's what I'm back at MIT trying to help them to do, but I still have my eye on it. One foot in the HBCU world, dr.
Speaker 1:Wilson, thank you for that answer, because I've been wrestling and I think Freeman Harboski is a great example, and so is UMBC to think about what it means to create an HBCU environment for a global citizenry, because UMBC has done great by Black students but it's a very diverse campus with folks from all over the world, and all of those students succeed, and so to me that's the perfect example of how an HBCU can be reproduced as an institution, like the ethos of that can be reproduced in an institution that isn't historically Black college. So you got me thinking on that one. So I appreciate that. Let's talk about how the book is structured. The book is organized into five perspectives, right? So you have the difficult birth, the humane aspiration, the unfinished business, the fluttering veil over HBCUs and the messianic promise, and could you talk a little bit about those perspectives and how the book is organized and some of the other things that you touch on in the book?
Speaker 2:yeah, I, I, uh, I was very deliberate with those perspectives because those, to me, are that's the best way to understand not just the history of um hbcs but the history of the country. Um, because it was uh, it was a long time coming for them to be born. It was the wealth of enslavers that built this country. And I read a lot of books as I was writing this one and one of them really stuck out for me, and that is Ibram Kendi, stamped from the Beginning. That is one powerful book. He is powerful. He is an HBCU graduate Too bad he's not at an HBCU, he's at BU now and a lot of our really, really solid scholars I wish more of them were at HBCUs and I wish we had the kind of packages to attract them. But his book told me a lot about the debt that this country owes to HBCUs.
Speaker 2:Another book was as Powerful, by Ed Baptist. The half has not been told that to me. What he says in there is that human enslavement not only built America but built the Western world in ways hidden and obvious. That really informed my thinking about the difficult birth, because I wrote that it was only after midwifing white higher education that we finally, after 250 years, get a chance to mother our own institutions. So we were midwives for the birth of American higher education before we got a chance to mother our own institutions. And if that is not a metaphor I don't know what else is. Because we were nursing our women, were nursing the babies of our enslavers and depriving our own babies of the kind of nurturing. But we made it through, didn't we? I mean, it's kind of so. The difficult birth is very poignant for me Humane aspiration.
Speaker 2:I was astounded that when HBCUs were born, the curriculum was not about. It was not about revenge, it was not about despair, it wasn't militarized, it was high road. It was high road. It was to teach people now how to be human, to show them people now how to be human, to show them by who you are. This was, you know, I got to tell you to the degree we've had in former lives. I think I've run into the art because I'm not the kind of person who could say yes for very long. I was, you know I was. I didn't tolerate that kind of thing. I never have. And so that humanity impresses me. I am. I don't call myself a Christian. I'd say I'm a follower of the religion of Jesus. So I have. I know what humanity is, but that, close to human enslavement, coming out and not thinking about that kind of thing. That is amazing to me, because HBCUs were on our way somewhere and we had people within the HBCU world who believed in this concept. But the enticement of integration, of desegregation, made a lot of people crazy and all of a sudden it wasn't about what we're doing.
Speaker 2:This is why I put an analogy in there to Negro league baseball. I'm going to pause and say a little bit about that, because I grew up with an awareness of Negro league baseball. Again, my mom and her generation she has three brothers and one sister born and raised, well, raised in Philadelphia and happened to be just blocks away from the stadium where the Philadelphia Stars played the black baseball team. So my, my family, um, well before I was born, my mom growing up and they used to go and see the negro league baseball. This was a thing and I grew up with stories about negro league baseball. My brother and I, as I said, were athletes in high school in this white suburb and we were baseball players and we were stars and my uncles were saying they were inspiring us with what the possibilities were and we were like, looking back on it now. We were like Negro League baseball players in an all-white league at that point, because we were playing a different game. We were infielders, our double play wasn't like anybody else's players in an all-white league at that point, because we were playing a different game. We were infielders, our double play wasn't like anybody else's.
Speaker 2:All I'm saying is Negro League baseball was a phenomenon. What happened was there were some people in Negro League baseball who recognized that and said we've got to keep this. Then there was another mindset that said the best thing that could said we got to keep this. Then there was another mindset that said the best thing that could happen is we make it into Major League Baseball. And so they were downplaying what Negro Leagues had and ignoring it, de-emphasizing it, because their passion was to make it to Major League Baseball. And basically you're ignoring what we have. I think HBCUs when integration came, desegregation came, a lot of people in HBCUs dropped what we were doing and saw the best thing that could happen is we get recruited over at Harvard and Yale and we threw away what we had. So all I'm saying is basically that's why I say our best is yet to come. We have to really do this.
Speaker 2:The fluttering veil over HBCUs. So, regarding the fluttering veil over HBCUs, so regarding the fluttering veil over HBCUs, I say we're at a point nowgee while actually not while Booker T Washington was there, but the kind of aura of Booker T Washington was still around at that point and he describes the statue out front of Tuskegee that has the image of Booker T Washington lifting a veil from a formerly enslaved man, you know the end of slavery. And basically Ralph Elgin asked is the veil being lifted or put more firmly into place? That was his critique of Booker B Washington, critique of Booker B Washington. Well, so I say there is a fluttering veil over HBCUs and the question is is it lifting Meaning, are HBCUs going to realize the best days that we have that are ahead, or is the veil lowering and are we never going to realize our best, like Negro League baseball?
Speaker 2:And the analogy is perfect, langston, because right now the NFL National Football League is 70% Black, that's right. The NBA is 70% black, that's right, the NBA is 75% black. That was well on target to happen first in Major League Baseball. But the Negro League used to play these barnstorming games. They called them exhibition games and the Major League Baseball just confessed this. The Negro League teams beat the all-white Major League teams 75% of the time and often it was embarrassing they were playing a different game.
Speaker 2:So the debate was there's a brother that I write about in the book.
Speaker 2:His name is Rube Foster. He was arguing I am for integration, but I say we integrate not one player at a time, but one Negro league team at a time. That scared some of the people in major league baseball to death because they said if we bring in these all black teams to play the Yankees and the Dodgers and all of our team every year, they're going to be two black teams in the World Series. Just based on the numbers, just based on and you know what would have happened is Major League Baseball would today be 70 to 80 percent black, just like the NFL and the NBA are. Now I'm not, you know, I'm not being overly focused on race there, but I'm telling you the talent that we had in the game was preserved in football and basketball in a way that it went away. So is the HBCU approach to education, where we focus on the mindset to going to be preserved and amplified and take it to its highest level, or is it going to be smothered in a quest to be just like the white approach?
Speaker 1:That's right, that's a good question, that's a real good question, and so that's that y'all don't know this, but uh, me and dr wilson talk about this, this whole negro league thing, because that's something I wrestle with um. Like, if we saw what happened with the negro leagues, we knew they went away after jackie robinson integrated. Why did we continue down this path? And I think that's that's the tension that we deal with with the DEI, stuff not to take away from us getting to the Messianic promise. But that's the thing I don't get about the decision making that the ancestors made about to integrate or not.
Speaker 2:Well, in fairness to them, some of them were thinking that we want our cake and eat it too. That's what the cake is for. So we think we can integrate and you can still want to be like HBCUs, and unfortunately we got too enticed by that selfish, narcissistic agenda where everyone's trying to. Well, you talk to most college graduates today they want to be the next Zuckerberg or the next Bill Gates or the next billionaire, because the aspiration today is not to be Martin Luther King or Ida B Wells, it's to be super rich. So that is a problem. So we're losing the emphasis on character and outcomes like that and skewing toward the material things. That's what's happening in the church too, with prosperity theology. So I do think, again, there is trouble on the horizon, but your question is about DEI. But your question is about DEI.
Speaker 2:Dei is the right thing to do, because the experiences of African Americans in white higher education do not need to be nearly as negative as those experiences have been. And DEI is there to try to solve that, tried to solve that. But we never needed DEI at North Carolina A&T or at Morehouse College, did we? We didn't have a Black Student Union at Morehouse. We were not othered, so nobody on the campus was othered, not even the white professors and white staff. They were not othered either. It was the way it was like an American ideal. Yeah Right, I agree, that's the way America is supposed to be by design.
Speaker 1:So I want to get into I'm going to say this wrong and I told you I was going to say it wrong. I want to get into I'm going to say this wrong and I told you I was going to say it wrong Grinnell College or Grinnell, Grinnell, grinnell, grinnell, grinnell College. Okay, so there was this interesting part about the book, about Grinnell College, and I call it a financial fort. You use different words, but my mind said financial fort, and so Grinnell College is a small school. Was it in Iowa? I think it was in Iowa, grinnell, iowa. They had this visionary president and board members who were supportive, who raised an endowment for the university. That, like I don't think I ever heard of before reading it in this book. Talk about the importance of HBCUs, in my words, as financial forts, but still able to do the mission of preserving our democracy and saving our planet, but not getting so caught up in the arms race of building your endowment for the sake of just having to pick an endowment.
Speaker 2:Yeah, again, this is the gap that I saw when I went from White House to Harvard. I learned all about that gap over the course of my education and career and I put a lot of that in the book, and one of the factoids that go to this is pretty clear and that is there are 100 HBCUs. Now pretty clear, and that is there are 100 HBCUs now. They raise somewhere in between $300 and $400 million as a group per year. That's how much they raise per year. That's 100 institutions, between $300 and $400 million for 100 institutions Harvard and Stanford and Yale and a few others. They raise $3 to $4 million every day during the year, throughout the year, every day during the year, throughout the year. So they're raising over a billion dollars, in some cases well over a billion dollars a year from the private sector. We're raising $3 to $4 million per institution. Grinnell was unique. They had a board chair who had a vision. He said the board has one job and that is to secure the future of the institution and I was getting fascinated with that story and I wrote about it because Grinnell did what any HBCU could have done if they had a visionary, a powerful enough board.
Speaker 2:You know that my chapter on trusteeship is pretty important, langston, because trusteeship, I say you know, presidents set the journey toward a destination, but boards set the journey toward a destiny. Presidents close gap between the campus and other best in class in the industry of higher ed, but boards have to ensure that gaps don't open in the first place. Presidents optimize the institution, boards optimize the presidency. So it's a different mindset. If you have an enlightened, powerful board, you will have a higher performing college.
Speaker 2:You show me a low performing, struggling, drama filled, broken down college and I'll show you a terrible board. You can almost there's no such thing as a great board and a terrible college. There's no president, I don't care who they are, you cannot outperform a terrible board. That terrible board will recognize how good you are and they will get rid of you because they recognize that the only thing that can happen is the our institution. Our board has to make our institution what he called financially impregnable. Nobody on campus, be they professor, student, staff, president, nobody on campus, will have a problem that requires money and be unable to answer that your problem is going to be imagination, not a need for money, and they define.
Speaker 2:What we have to do, therefore, is we have to build endowment. And from that moment and that was in the 1940s, 1950s they started focusing on endowment, and endowment only as a board, and they did what any black college could have done. And now they're focused on endowment. They focused less on fundraising than on investing and became clever investors and made their way. As I tell people, Morehouse, spelman and Grinnell had roughly the same endowment while I was there as a student at Morehouse in the late 1970s roughly around $20 to $25 million at that point. Today, morehouse has roughly $200 million, spelman has $550 million and Grinnell has $3 billion, 50 million and Grinnell has 3 billion. All right, because they were blessed. Now I was on the Spelman board. I know why Spelman. Spelman has an enlightened culture on their board. So they broke the tie with Morehouse years ago and they went like this they really kept going, but they didn't do as well as Grinnell. But nobody has Nobody in higher education, black or white, not even Harvard. Their growth rate was better than everybody else's and so, basically, for that reason, one of the first people I reached out to when I became president of Morehouse is a man who was one of the key people behind that story and I write about him in a book, and that's Warren Buffett. And I said, mr Buffett, can you help us to have for Morehouse to have an experience like Rennell did? And we were in touch, touch, and we got some money, some gifts from him at that time. But it can be done, it really can. It can be done and the reason to do it. I know we're almost to closure, but I want to wrap with this because I need to get at this point in the reason to do it, and this is where I hope the philanthropic community will hear the reason to do it and this is where I hope the philanthropic community will hear the reason to invest in a campus is not to make the individuals on the campus great. It is to make the graduates good. All right, we need to invest in goodness, and not necessarily greatness, unless it's greatness about being good. You know, martin Luther King was great because he was good. It's the goodness that matters, that matters the most. And that's why I end the book with a recommendation about the kind of people we need to create today. We need three kinds of people institutions need to shape today, and I insist that HBCUs have been good at this. Some are still reasonably good at this, but everyone needs to be much better.
Speaker 2:First kind of person we need is a destination people with a destination mindset. We call them destination citizens. It comes from WEB Du Bois, where he realized that he had made a mistake. At age 72, he wrote his third autobiography. He realized he made a mistake, that all of his life he had focused on inclusion, integration, as we just talked about earlier. He said I shouldn't have focused so much on that, being a part of a world that didn't want me. What I should have focused on was how to get better on who we are and where we are. And he says it's as if we were on a rushing express train. My only focus was as to where I would sit on the train and not to the train's rate of speed or destination. And so that destination mindset is what we need to educate people to have. The seat mindset is vocationalism People just trying to be Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, just trying to be filthy rich and that's the seat mindset Not worried about whether this train called America or Western civilization is going off a cliff, just worried about where I'm going to sit on the train, not worried about where the tracks are laid out. So, destination mindset, second day mindset, very simply comes from a phrase popularized by Mark Twain, who said the two most important days in your life are the day you're born and the day you find out why. And that second day, um, we need more people, uh, who know why they're here, people who are living on purpose. Lyson, you and everyone listening, you've met people who you look at and you observe and you say, wow, that person is doing what they were born to do. They've had their second day.
Speaker 2:Morehouse, for me, was a second-day institution. You know one of my more popular classmates. You'll know his name. He was going nowhere freshman and sophomore year and in sophomore year he discovered his calling. It's a long story but I'll spread his story. But he found a camera and started getting interested in film, and that's my classmate and good friend, spike Lee. He had his second day because Morehouse helped him to get on a trajectory to become a filmmaker, just as Morehouse helped me to get on a trajectory to be an educator and eventually a Morehouse president. So Morehouse is a second-day institution. Other HBCUs have been second-day Fisk and Lincoln and North Carolina A&T, and there have been others.
Speaker 2:And the final recommendation I put in the book on the kind of people we need to create are string shooters. I'll tell that story very quickly. One of my heroes in life is Ikeway Arma. If you've never read his books, you need to read his books. Ikeway Arma, a-r-m-a-h is his last name. His most famous book is called the Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born, and I'd say anybody can come up with a title like that is my kind of person. Yeah, beautiful ones are not yet born. Uh, there's a book that he wrote called the healers, that I gave out to every freshman on when I was president morehouse. Uh, every year it's called the healers and in that book there's a book. There's a story about um, where the string shooters concept comes from. In a nutshell, it's this A young man was growing up in Africa just as the Europeans were coming in and there was this debate about how African they would stay versus whether they would be enticed by all things European, and they were bringing in alcohol and gold and weapons and just corrupting African culture and creating conflict between Africans.
Speaker 2:So Africa was being broken down in this period and in the midst of that there were some who were trying to preserve African values. They had on a regular basis, before Europeans came in this, this kind of like an Olympic style games and they were in that contest and some of the people who wanted to keep the African values wanted to keep the games the way they were. Others were wanting the European influence. To make a long story short, it comes down to the final day and one of the people who wanted to retain the African values his name was Denzu and he was trying to convince his contemporaries to let's stay who we are as African, maybe get some of their influence, but not much. And basically they were in the sports competition. They came down to the last day and the final competition was a game influenced by the Europeans. Because they had to. Each contestant had to.
Speaker 2:The judge would tie a bird to a string like a kite string and send it up the air and on the signal you shoot a gun and blow the bird out of the sky and the contestant can shoot. Use the fewest bullets to shoot the bird out of the sky will win. Came down the last three people on the last day. The first guy took two shots and blew the bird out of the sky, took three shots and the second guy took two shots. So it came down to Denzu, who was the one who wanted to stay African and if he could do it in one shot, if he could blow the bird out of the sky in one shot, he would be the champion.
Speaker 2:And the judge sent the bird up into the sky and gave the signal, but Denzu didn't fire and everybody was waiting around. What was he doing? And the bird was going higher and higher and Denzu took the time to look at the guys he was trying to convince. He looked at each of them and gave him a little wink and then took aim. And he looked at the judge and he took aim again and he fired. And you saw the bird flutter a little bit and then take off even higher. And the judge goes what did you do? And Denzu goes I missed the bird, so I lose your game. And the judge said you missed on purpose. And Denzel said I missed, so that's all that matters to you. And he looked at his guys and he walked away.
Speaker 2:The lesson is, instead of shooting the bird, he shot the string that freed the bird. So he communicated a different value in this. He said you know, we can have all the skills that they have, but if we use our skills for a different purpose a higher purpose, do a more difficult task because it's harder to shoot a string than it is to shoot a bird, then we could we can change society right. We can literally change society. You don't have to come out of college and be an exploiter, a wealth um, a wealth crazed person. You can come out and be focused on doing good. You can take your skill set, which is just like everybody else's, and use it to be a world-class force for good, instead of the wealthiest person in the world. Denzou's message is be a string shooter and preserve life and free life, rather than a bird shooter, which removes life and destroys it.