How Black colleges and universities have been underfunded by billions for decades

In 1862, the first Morrill Land-Grant College Act awarded every state in the union a tract of federal land — 30,000 acres per member of Congress — to create new public colleges or universities or expand existing institutions.

In 1890, a second Morrill Act was extended to the former Confederate states and required the states either to admit Black students to their land grant institutions or create separate public institutions for them. The law required “a just and equitable division” of funds.

More than 130 years later, state funding for these land grant historically Black colleges and universities, known as HBCUs, is neither just nor equitable.

Tennessee has been the worst offender, underfunding Tennessee State University by $2.1 billion over 30 years. Overall, 16 of the nation’s 19 Black land grant institutions have been underfunded by $13 billion.

But instead of acting to rectify the years of unlawful shortchanging, Tennessee’s state legislature and Gov. Bill Lee voted to dissolve the university’s board of trustees.

“By underfunding public HBCUs and denying the value of Black students on non-HBCU campuses, these extremists are making very clear the kinds of students they do and don’t want to succeed,” political analyst Gevin Reynolds wrote. “They also are the same ones waging war on the teaching of our nation’s full history. But if we studied that history they seek to quash, we would know that the news out of Tennessee is just the latest example of conservatives rejecting the notion that Black people possess the capacity for self-governance.”

Aiming for equity in higher ed funding

Illinois does not have a land grant HBCU, but in recent years, increasing numbers of Chicago students have chosen these institutions, along with private HBCUs founded before 1890 such as Howard and Morehouse. Closer to home, Chicago State University, a predominantly Black institution, has been disproportionately battered by an overall 46% decline in state funding over the last quarter-century, a 30% drop in enrollment, and a state funding distribution formula with “no documented rhyme or reason.”

Illinois has established a Commission on Equitable Public University Funding and is considering its recommendations for a new, equity-centered funding formula.

Tennessee, in contrast, appears to have no plan to rectify historic injustices. After the legislature’s own study found that TSU had been shortchanged by as much as half a billion over decades, it appropriated a one-time infusion of $250 million in 2022. The following year, however, the state underfunded TSU by nearly $5,700 per student, allocating TSU about 55% of the per-student funding for the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. Excluding 2022, per-pupil funding for TSU averaged about 55% percent of the per-pupil funding for University of Tennessee-Knoxville since 2012.

Despite the fact that the Tennessee legislature had previously acknowledged its own failure to comply with the law, Senate Education Chairman Jon Lundberg responded to the report by accusing the education and agriculture departments of “using TSU to stoke political and racial division in our state.”

Lundberg’s response is sickeningly reminiscent of the “outside agitator” response to the racial protests of the Civil Rights era, when opponents of racial justice insisted Black Americans in the South were content to live under the terrorism of Jim Crow.

Lundberg is correct that evidence of persistent racial discrimination is bound to stoke “division,” even outrage. But instead of healing the division by eliminating the discrimination, as Illinois is trying to do, Tennessee is retreating back into its dark history and ignoring it.

Marc H. Morial is president and CEO of the National Urban League and was mayor of New Orleans from 1994 to 2002. He writes a twice-monthly column for the Sun-Times.

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