Education

How secrecy is killing our HBCUs

FLORIDA COURIER — More than 70 percent of the nation’s historically Black colleges and universities are accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges.

Published

6 years ago

March 4, 2019

Oakland Post

By J.L. Carter

More than 70 percent of the nation’s historically Black colleges and universities are accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC). Pending a possible lawsuit, Bennett College for Women is no longer one of them.

(Editor’ note: Last week, Bennett filed a federal lawsuit against SACSCOC. A judge prevented SACSCOC from cancelling Bennett’s accreditation pending further judicial review.)

This is a difficult blow for the HBCU community, and not for the obvious reasons like losing a second campus in two years and being at the forefront of other closures which will be coming in the next few years. For more than a decade, we have seen this coming and pretended as if a combination of willpower and faith without good works would be enough to save our most vulnerable schools.

Other options

Bennett has many paths from which it can choose to survive as an accredited four-year campus. It can sue SACSCOC in order to maintain its accreditation through legal action. It can apply for accreditation through another organization, or it can merge with another institution. These are paths that could and should have been taken years ago.

All of us who have long been paying attention to higher education as an industry knew that after spending the better part of a decade on SACSCOC warning or probation for financial instability, Bennett’s survival would ultimately be tested and eventually succumb to the harsh reality of the changes. But seemingly, most of the families who care deeply for Bennett were not aware of her great struggle, mostly because campus leaders never fully disclosed the great scope of danger to the public.

Millions secured over the course of a month were not enough to save Bennett in the eyes of SACSCOC – a reflection of the same judgment passed down over the years by students who chose other campuses for enrollment, donors who chose other charities for giving, and Bennett campus leaders who made choices beyond cutting budgets to meet enrollment challenges.

Bennett is not and has not been able to survive under the power of its own mission; that is, as a four-year campus dedicated to the education of Black women. Bennett’s ranks of gloriously dedicated and accomplished alumnae simply do not have the wealth or the network to pull the college from the depth of its own debts and obligations. The city of Greensboro does not have a financial stake in the college surviving, as much as it has in being a college town with thriving campuses and growing industries around them.

Information kept secret

In the weeks where it appeared national goodwill would empower Bennett to do the impossible, that goodwill built against the tragic irony that the one thing which gave this historic and important institution a fighting chance at life was the threat of imminent death. It was the only time that the public had any inclination that Bennett could very well cease to exist.

This secret and silent suffering is what is killing our HBCUs. The unwillingness of leaders to be honest about enrollment and finance, the lack of instinct from most boards of trustees and the severe unawareness of students and alumni leaves many of our schools to live and die based upon the work of a few people with all of the information, who inevitably turn to the community when their ideas and luck inevitably run out.

SACSCOC’s decision is not a cruel death blow to an undeserving school. This is the most severe symptom of the kind of struggle that with or without accreditation could lead Bennett and HBCUs like it to suddenly close their doors, and to displace employees and students who would have no alternative for their lives and careers.

Our best efforts

Bennett as an institution and an idea deserves to live, but it also deserved our best efforts in preserving both. Our leaders failed to inform us, and we as stakeholders failed to demand the information.

Several HBCUs throughout the country will face a similar fate in short order. If we wish to save them, it is time to stop waiting on leaders to do what is best. We must demand that we see what the plan for the best looks like, along with details about finances and leadership decisions.

A national campaign wasn’t enough to save Bennett. Heaven help every other school which will have to raise even more money from a goodwill-weary public which will wonder if it is still worth even trying to save these Black colleges if their leaders can’t be trusted to tell us that they need to be saved.

Jarrett L. Carter, Sr. is publisher of HBCU Digest (www.hbcudigest.com).

This article originally appeared in the Florida Courier.

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Activism

LIVE! — TOWN HALL ON RACISM AND ITS IMPACT — THURS. 11.14.24 5PM PST

Join us for a LIVE Virtual Town Hall on the Impact of Racism hosted by Post News Group Journalist Carla Thomas and featuring Oakland, CA NAACP President Cynthia Adams & other Special Guests.
Thursday, November 14, 2024, 5 p.m. – 6:30 p.m. PST

Published

2 weeks ago

November 12, 2024

Oakland Post

Discussion Topics:
• Since the pandemic, what battles have the NAACP fought nationally, and how have they impacted us locally?
• What trends are you seeing concerning Racism? Is it more covert or overt?
• What are the top 5 issues resulting from racism in our communities?
• How do racial and other types of discrimination impact local communities?
• What are the most effective ways our community can combat racism and hate?

Your questions and comments will be shared LIVE with the moderators and viewers during the broadcast.

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Art

Brown University Professor and Media Artist Tony Cokes Among MacArthur Awardees

When grants were announced earlier this month, it was noted that seven of the 22 fellows were African American. Among them are scholars, visual and media artists a poet/writer, historian, and dancer/choreographer who each receive $800,000 over a five-year period to spend as they see fit. Their names are Ruha Benjamin, Jericho Brown, Tony Cokes, Jennifer L. Morgan, Ebony G. Patterson, Shamel Pitts, Jason Reynolds, and Dorothy Roberts. This is the third in the series highlighting the Black awardees.

Published

3 weeks ago

November 4, 2024

Oakland Post

Tony Cokes. Photo courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Special to The Post

Tony Cokes

Tony Cokes, 68, is a media artist creating video works that recontextualize historical and cultural moments. Cokes’s signature style is deceptively simple: changing frames of text against backgrounds of solid bright colors or images, accompanied by musical soundtracks.

Cokes was born in Richmond, Va., and received a BA in creative writing and photography from Goddard College in 1979 and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1985. He joined the faculty of Brown University in 1993 and is currently a professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media.

According to Wikipedia, Cokes and Renee Cox, and Fo Wilson, created the Negro Art Collective (NAC) in 1995 to fight cultural misrepresentations about Black Americans.^[^5]

His work has been exhibited at national and international venues, including Haus Der Kunst and Kunstverein (Munich); Dia Bridgehampton (New York); Memorial Art Gallery University of Rochester; MACRO Contemporary Art Museum (Rome); and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (Harvard University), among others.

Like a DJ, he samples and recombines textual, musical, and visual fragments. His source materials include found film footage, pop music, journalism, philosophy texts, and social media. The unexpected juxtapositions in his works highlight the ways in which dominant narratives emerging from our oversaturated media environments reinforce existing power structures.

In his early video piece Black Celebration (A Rebellion Against the Commodity) (1988), Cokes reconsiders the uprisings that took place in Black neighborhoods in Los Angeles, Detroit, Newark, and Boston in the 1960s.

He combines documentary footage of the upheavals with samples of texts by the cultural theorist Guy Debord, the artist Barbara Kruger, and the musicians Morrisey and Martin Gore (of Depeche Mode).

Music from industrial rock band Skinny Puppy accompanies the imagery. In this new context, the scenes of unrest take on new possibilities of meaning: the so-called race riots are recast as the frustrated responses of communities that endure poverty perpetuated by structural racism. In his later and ongoing “Evil” series, Cokes responds to the rhetoric of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror.”

Evil.16 (Torture.Musik) (2009–11) features snippets of text from a 2005 article on advanced torture techniques. The text flashes on screens to the rhythm of songs that were used by U.S. troops as a form of torture.

The soundtrack includes Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” and Britney Spears’s “… Baby One More Time,” songs known to have been played to detainees at deafening decibel levels and on repeated loops. The dissonance between the instantly recognizable, frivolous music and horrifying accounts of torture underscores the ideological tensions within contemporary pop culture.

More recently, in a 2020 work entitled HS LST WRDS, Cokes uses his pared-down aesthetic to examine the current discourse on police violence against Black and Brown individuals. The piece is constructed around the final words of Elijah McClain, who was killed in the custody of Colorado police. Cokes transcribes McClain’s last utterances without vowels and sets them against a monochromatic ground. As in many of Cokes’s works, the text is more than language conveying information and becomes a visualization of terrifying breathlessness. Through his unique melding of artistic practice and media analysis, Cokes shows the discordant ways media color our understanding and demonstrates the artist’s power to bring clarity and nuance to how we see events, people, and histories.

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California Black Media

On Your November Ballot: Prop 2 Seeks to Modernize Public Education Facilities

Proposition 2 would authorize the state to issue $10 billion in bonds with $8.5 billion dedicated to elementary and secondary educational facilities and $1.5 billion for community college facilities. If approved, the proposition will make changes to the formula used to determine the amount each district is required to contribute to be eligible to receive state funding from the bond revenue. It would also require the state government to cover between 50 and 55% of construction project costs and 60 and 65% of modernization project costs.

Published

3 weeks ago

November 4, 2024

Oakland Post

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond (Courtesy Photo)

By Edward Henderson, California Black Media

Proposition 2 would authorize the state to issue $10 billion in bonds with $8.5 billion dedicated to elementary and secondary educational facilities and $1.5 billion for community college facilities.

If approved, the proposition will make changes to the formula used to determine the amount each district is required to contribute to be eligible to receive state funding from the bond revenue. It would also require the state government to cover between 50 and 55% of construction project costs and 60 and 65% of modernization project costs.

Supporters argue that the money is critical for making safety improvements in schools, as well as modernizing science labs, performing arts spaces and kindergarten classrooms. School districts in lower-income areas have no other way to pay for these improvements.

According to the Public Policy Institute of California, 38% of students attend schools that don’t meet the state’s minimum safety standards. The research shows that schools with sub-standard facilities tend to have students with lower attendance rates, lower morale and lower overall academic performance.

California Black Media spoke with a Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) spokesperson on why she believes it should be a YES vote on Prop 2.

“Measure US, Los Angeles Unified’s Local Public Schools Safety and Upgrades Measure on the November ballot would provide $9 billion to upgrade Los Angeles public schools for safety and 21st century student learning and college and career preparedness. The average annual cost to property owners is estimated at 2.5 cents per $100 of assessed (not market) property value. The Los Angeles Unified Board of Education adopted a Resolution on October 22 to support Los Angeles Unified’s Measure US, and State Propositions 2 and 4,” the spokesperson said.

Opponents argue that the state should include school repairs in its regular budget instead of putting the burden on taxpayers. Opponents also argue that the proposition would not directly impact students. The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association is on record as one of the organizations opposing the proposition.

“Proposition 2 is $10 billion of bonds, new state debt, to pay for school facilities. It is almost certain to result in higher property tax bills, because school districts must provide a ‘local match’ of funds in order to receive money from the Prop. 2 state bonds. That will lead to districts issuing new local school bonds, which are paid for by adding new charges to property tax bills,” said Jarvis.

Opponents also have voiced concerns about what they view as an inequitable distribution of funds. They believe that lower-income school districts should receive a greater share of the state’s sliding scale for matching funds.

“Enrollment is declining in both K-12 district schools and community colleges and the declines are projected to continue. But Proposition 2 commits California to pay an estimated $18 billion, including interest, for school buildings that may not even be necessary. Vote no on proposition 2.”

A “yes” vote gives approval to the state to issue $10 billion in bonds to fund construction and modernization of public education facilities.

A “no” vote will prohibit the state from issuing $10 billion in bonds to fund construction and modernization of public education facilities.