Skip to content Skip to footer

Land-Grant HBCUs Underfunded by $13 Billion, Biden Administration Says

The underfunding limited HBCUs from competing for research grants other institutions pursued, the administration said.

Two cabinet secretaries from the Biden administration have sent letters to 16 U.S. governors, informing them that, over the past three decades or more, their states have drastically underfunded Historically Black Colleges and Universities that receive land grants.

The letters were sent on Monday by Department of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to the governors of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, North Carolina, Texas, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia.

Only two states that had land-grant HBCUs — Delaware and Ohio — provided an equitable distribution of funding.

Citing data compiled by the National Center for Education Statistics, the department secretaries said that a funding gap for these states’ land-grant HBCUs “could have supported infrastructure and student services” and would have “better positioned” HBCUs “to compete for research grants” that were otherwise more accessible to other institutions.

In a press release announcing the letters from Cardona and Vilsack, the secretaries said that states that had chosen “to open a second land-grant university to serve Black students were required to provide an equitable distribution of state funds” — but that standard clearly hasn’t been reached in the past few decades, they added.

In total, the funding gap for land-grant HBCUs was around $13 billion — meaning that, while other land-grant institutions were given the proper amount of funding, HBCUs were not. In five of the states mentioned in the letters (Florida, Louisiana, Tennessee, Texas and North Carolina), the gap in funding for land-grant institutions (between HBCUs and other universities) ranged from $1 billion to $2 billion.

According to the Association of Public & Land-Grant Universities, a land-grant institution is one “that has been designated by its state legislature or Congress to receive the benefits of the Morrill Acts of 1862, 1890, and 1994.” Land-grant institutions were formed to “teach agriculture, military tactics, and the mechanic arts as well as classical studies so members of the working classes could obtain a liberal, practical education.”

By not allocating sufficient funds to land-grant HBCUs, these states have done a grave disservice to students of these institutions, the Biden administration secretaries said.

Within the letters, Cardona said the following:

Unacceptable funding inequities have forced many of our nation’s distinguished Historically Black Colleges and Universities to operate with inadequate resources and delay critical investments in everything from campus infrastructure to research and development to student support services. … These institutions and the talented, diverse students they serve must have equitable funding in order to reach their full potential and continue driving innovation.

Vilsack reiterated that assessment in strong terms, and demanded that states take immediate action to rectify the differences in funding:

The documented discrepancies are a clarion call for governors to act without delay to provide significant support for the 1890 land-grant institutions in their respective states. Failing to do so will have severe and lasting consequences to the agriculture and food industry at a time when it must remain resilient and competitive.

Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn

Dear Truthout Community,

If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.

We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.

Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re shoring up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.

There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.

Last week, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?

It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.

We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.

We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.

Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.

We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.

With love, rage, and solidarity,

Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy