The announcement this week by Morehouse College that it was parting ways with its president after four years on the job adds additional grief for the larger community of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in America, say higher education advocates who have seen a stream of implosions of university leadership teams over the past decade.
“The turnover messages to the broader philanthropic community [that] this entire sector [HBCUs] is unstable,” says attorney Johnny Taylor, president and CEO of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, the Washington-based nonprofit that raises funds to help students pay to attend historically Black colleges.
The stream of presidential departures makes the philanthropic community “question the wisdom of investing” in this group of institutions, says Taylor, who focuses on courting philanthropists into supporting HBCU institutions’ education costs.
The joint announcement was made Monday by the Morehouse College Board of Trustees and university president Dr. John Wilson that his contract would not be renewed when his current agreement ends on June 30. This was also the national holiday celebrating the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights champion who is the university’s most distinguished graduate.
No reference was made in the announcement to King’s holiday, causing some knowledgeable observers of higher education management to ask about the timing of the announcement of a decision that had been made a few days earlier.
“Something really bad took place that had to be addressed as soon as possible,” speculated Dr. Leonard Haynes, the recently retired U.S. Department of Education veteran official. Haynes has worked with Morehouse and other HBCUs over his two decades in the federal government and at time with Wilson during his brief stint as director of the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges.
“They had to stop the bleeding,” said Haynes, hastening to add he was offering his views from a distance, not as someone with real-time direct knowledge of what prompted this week’s announcement.
