'The Kamala Effect:' Harris's Nomination is Bringing Attention to HBCUs

The Democratic National Convention held in Chicago was a celebration of Vice President Kamala Harris, now the party’s official nominee for President of the United States. Researchers Dr. Terrell Strayhorn and J’Quen Johnson noticed it wasn’t just Harris in the spotlight, but her alma mater and sorority as well.

Harris attended Howard University, one of the country’s 101 historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and became a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA) Sorority, Inc., one of the historically Black sororities and fraternities known collectively as The Divine Nine.

J'Quen Johnson, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of the Cumberlands and director of research at Do Good Work.“Multiple times throughout the convention, [political leaders or attendees] shouted out HBCUs — you can hear the crowd cheering and screaming. It’s bringing ‘HBCU’ into the American lexicon, it’s becoming a household term,” said Strayhorn, a professor of education and psychology at Virginia Union University (VUU), an HBCU in Richmond. “There are also people who are likely hearing the term and getting familiar with it, are associating it with Kamala, and that correlation is at the center of this report.”

‘The Kamala Effect’: Measuring Harris’s Influence on HBCUs, was published this month by Do Good Work LLC, a consulting group working to improve student success. Strayhorn is CEO and president of Do Good Work, as well as the director of research at VUU’s Center for the Study of HBCUs. Johnson is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of the Cumberlands and director of research at Do Good Work.

To conduct their research, Strayhorn and Johnson used an online tool which scraped data from Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X (formerly Twitter). The two began looking for six key performance indicators within social media posts, assessing for mentions, sentiments, interactions, likes, and shares associated with Harris and HBCUs.

Posts were analyzed over two set periods of time: just before Harris announced she was officially running for president (July 15–20) and shortly after (July 21–26). They looked for hashtags like #HBCUgrad, #HBCUpride, #HBCUlove, and #madamepresident.

“We saw an uptick across the board in interactions, shares, and likes,” said Johnson.