With National HBCU Week now behind him, Dr. Ivory Toldson, who was officially named executive director of the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges Universities last week, said his “first priority will be to continue existing, and devise new, strategies to sustain and expand federal support to HBCUs.”
With one year remaining in the Obama presidency — which has been marked by an overall decrease in the share of federal funding to HBCUs and several federal policy changes from which the community is still trying to recover — and budgets already pretty much set for 2016, Toldson will have quite a task ahead of him.
Many have questioned the administration’s commitment to supporting the issues, concerns a White House official said the administration “takes issue with,” saying President Obama and “the First Lady have been strong and consistent supporters of HBCUs. They have both made frequent visits to these institutions — the First Lady most recently visited Tuskegee this past May for 2015 commencement. And the President has made historic investments in America’s HBCUs.”
“Coming in, there was expansion of Title III and then there was expansion of the Pell, which different people say different things about whether that was an investment in HBCUs, but the fact of the matter is 70 percent of HBCU students are Pell-eligible,” Toldson said. “These are things that I think carried the greatest benefit or opportunities or potential for HBCUs” from the administration level.
But he added, “I’m focused less on trying to get something from the White House, because I just really don’t see money per se coming from the White House. You have hundreds of millions of dollars in these various agencies that [could be directed to] HBCUs.”
Dr. Meldon Hollis, who served as the first executive director of the White House Initiative on HBCUs when the office was created by President Jimmy Carter, said the office has become increasingly less of a priority to the executive branch over the years and has lost its effectiveness.
“We had the support of the White House, we had the ear of the president” when Hollis headed the office, he said. “When I came back in 2010, the office was located on K Street and the director reported to the Secretary [of Education].” Since then, he said, the reporting order has gotten even farther away from the White House: the executive director reports to the undersecretary of education, who reports to the deputy secretary, who reports to Secretary (Arne) Duncan.
