With the continued rise in anti-Asian violence fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic, President Joe Biden signed an executive order last month to establish the White House Initiative on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders.
On the same day, Krystal Ka’ai, executive director of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, was selected to lead the initiative.
As the White House continues to fill key leadership positions, the executive director position for the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) remains noticeably vacant.
Given the “insurmountable amount of mess cleaning” the Biden administration has faced since taking office in January, Dr. Marybeth Gasman, the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Endowed Chair in Education and a distinguished professor at Rutgers University, assumes the focus has been on addressing those tasks at hand—like mitigating COVID-19—first.
“The Department of Education and the White House have been doing a lot of damage control since Trump was president,” she said. “I am hopeful that they will have an executive director in place within the next month or two and that this timeline shouldn’t have a negative impact.”
Acknowledging the many responsibilities of the Biden administration, Grambling State University President Richard J. “Rick” Gallot, Jr. stressed that identifying an executive director should be a top priority.
“We appreciate the work being done by United Negro College Fund, Thurgood Marshall College Fund, National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education (NAFEO) and others but an executive director with direct access to the administration is important,” he said.
