I should have everybodies HBCU responses at this point!
There is meeting for HBCUs, as well as, a day out to visit them. For that reason, I thought this just published article is quite relevant for anyone considering these schools.
Assignment: on Thursday, read through the article and answer the questions below. On Friday, be prepared to discuss the article. Send along the questions. Thank you.
1. Who is Kayvon Thibodeaux and what is his significance in terms of football?
2. Explain this quote: “Nobody wants to eat McDonald’s when you can get filet mignon”
3. How have multi-billion dollar white institutions been funded?
4. How does the money compare that the athletes brought in between the HBCU schools and Division I schools?
5. What is the ratio of black athletes at Division I schools to non white?
6. Why should this matter to anyone beyond the administrators and alumni of the HBCUs themselves?
7. Explain the racial economic gap. Check the figures.
8. What careers have been fostered by HBCU?
9. Why do some students prefer an HBCU?
10.But what if a group of elite athletes collectively made the choice to attend HBCUs?
In the summer of 2018 Kayvon Thibodeaux, who was then ranked as the top high-school football player in America, visited Florida A&M University, in Tallahassee. When a player of Thibodeaux’s caliber visits a perennial football power—say, Alabama—it’s called Wednesday. But when he visits a historically black college or university (HBCU) like Florida A&M, it threatens to crack the foundation on which the moneymaking edifice of college sports rests.
I really just
wanted to learn the history of FAMU,” Thibodeaux, a defensive end who received
a scholarship offer from the school after his freshman year in high school,
told me. “And I wanted to show there were more opportunities out there than
just big-time Division I schools.”
Ultimately,
and perhaps inevitably, Thibodeaux announced that he was going to one of the
top football programs in the country, the University of Oregon. “Nobody wants
to eat McDonald’s when you can get filet mignon” is how Thibodeaux put it. But
over the course of the five months between his visit to FAMU and his decision
to enroll at Oregon, Thibodeaux—who gushed about
the historically black university on social media—galvanized alumni and boosted
national awareness of the institution. It was a moment of hope for HBCUs, and
it should have been a moment of fear for the predominantly white institutions
whose collective multibillion-dollar revenues have been built largely on the
exertions of (uncompensated) black athletes.
The NCAA
reported $1.1 billion in revenue for its 2017 fiscal year. Most of that money
comes from the Division I men’s-basketball tournament. In 2016, the NCAA
extended its television agreement with CBS Sports and Turner Broadcasting
through 2032—an $8.8 billion deal. About 30 Division I schools each bring
in at least $100 million in athletic revenue every year. Almost
all of these schools are majority white—in fact, black men make up only 2.4
percent of the total undergraduate population of the 65 schools in the
so-called Power Five athletic conferences. Yet black men make up 55 percent of
the football players in those conferences, and 56 percent of basketball players.
Black
athletes have attracted money and attention to the predominantly white
universities that showcase them. Meanwhile, black colleges are struggling.
Alabama’s athletic department generated $174 million in the 2016–17 school
year, whereas the HBCU that generated the most money from athletics that year,
Prairie View A&M, brought in less than $18 million. Beyond sports, the
average HBCU endowment is only one-eighth that of the average predominantly
white school; taken together, all of the HBCU endowments combined make up less
than a tenth of Harvard’s.
Why
should this matter to anyone beyond the administrators and alumni of the HBCUs
themselves? Because black colleges play an important role in the creation and
propagation of a black professional class. Despite constituting only 3 percent
of four-year colleges in the country, HBCUs have produced 80 percent of the
black judges, 50 percent of the black lawyers, 50 percent of the black doctors,
40 percent of the black engineers, 40 percent of the black members of Congress,
and 13 percent of the black CEOs in America today. (They have also produced
this election cycle’s only
black female candidate for the U.S. presidency: Kamala Harris
is a 1986 graduate of Howard University.)
In a country
where the racial wealth gap remains enormous—the median white household has
nearly 10 times the wealth of the median black household, and the rate of white
homeownership is about 70 percent higher than that of black
homeownership—institutions that nurture a black middle class are crucial. And when
these institutions are healthy, they bring economic development to the black
neighborhoods that surround them.
Moreover, some
black students feel safer, both physically and emotionally, on an HBCU
campus—all the more so as racial tensions have risen in recent years.
Navigating a predominantly white campus as a black student can feel isolating,
even for athletes. Davon Dillard is a basketball player who transferred to Shaw
University after Oklahoma State dismissed him for disciplinary reasons. “Going to
a school where most of the people are the same color as you, it’s almost like
you can let your guard down a little bit,” he told me. “You don’t have to
pretend to be somebody else. You don’t have to dress this way, or do things
this way. It’s like, ‘I know you. We have the same kind of struggles. We can
relate.’ It’s almost like you’re back at home in your neighborhood.” Perhaps
partly for this reason, black students’ graduation rates at HBCUs are notably
higher than black students’ at other colleges when controlling
for factors such as income and high-school success.
But
what if a group of elite athletes collectively made
the choice to attend HBCUs?
Black
athletes overall have never had as much power and influence as they do now.
While NCAA rules prevent them from making money off their own labor at the
college level, they are essential to the massive amount of revenue generated by
college football and basketball. This gives them leverage, if only they could
be moved to use it.
“I
have a hard time saying this,” LeVelle Moton, the head basketball coach at
North Carolina Central, an HBCU that has won three consecutive Mid-Eastern
Athletic Conference titles, told me. “Black people, I love us, but everyone else
understands that we’re the culture, except for us.” Audiences and money “are
going to come wherever the product is. We don’t understand that, and we
continue to give ourselves away for free.”
Kayvon Thibodeaux (left) made news when he visited Florida A&M University, an HBCU—but he ultimately decided to attend the University of Oregon. Davon Dillard (right), a basketball player at Shaw University, says that being at an HBCU is “almost like you’re back at home in your neighborhood.” (Logan Cyrus; Icon Sportswire / Getty)
Some
people point to September 12, 1970, as the day HBCUs lost their corner on the
nation’s best black football talent. That’s the day an all-white Alabama team
got their asses handed to them by the University of Southern California’s
heralded African American triumvirate of quarterback Jimmy Jones and running
backs Sam “Bam” Cunningham and Clarence Davis. After that, football programs in
the Deep South realized that if they were going to stay competitive, they would
have to recruit black players. (In other areas of the country, colleges had
already begun to recruit African Americans: The Michigan State team that fought
Notre Dame to a 10–10 draw in the fall of 1966—a contest that many still
consider to be the best college football game of all time—had 20 black
players.)
In the era
before big television contracts, HBCUs more or less had a monopoly on black
athletes, because there was little money to be made from them. But when college
sports became big business, the major sports schools proved to be relentless in
recruiting players away from HBCUs. William C. Rhoden, the author of Forty Million Dollar Slaves, an account of how
black athletes have historically commanded big audiences but had little true
power, places some of the blame for the exodus on the HBCUs themselves, which
operated as if they would have a monopoly on black talent forever. “The HBCUs
probably felt that racism was so deeply entrenched that white people would
never go after black kids en masse,” Rhoden told me recently. “Had HBCUs known
then what we all know now, maybe they could have figured out a way to say, ‘How
can we, with the window we’ve got left, make a great product, so when white
people finally get religion, we’ll still be in a good position?’ ”
The flight of
black athletes to majority-white colleges has been devastating to HBCUs. Consider
Grambling State, in Louisiana, home of arguably the most storied football
program in HBCU history. A 57 percent decrease in state funding over a period
of several years had made it difficult for Grambling to maintain its football
facilities. In 2013, things got so bad that players—fed up with the school’s
dilapidated facilities and the long bus trips to road games, as well as the
firing of the coach—staged a boycott that led to them forfeiting a game. Though
the walkout prompted Grambling to spend $30,000 on a new weight room, and it
has since raised nearly $2 million for upgrades to its Eddie Robinson Stadium,
the ordeal was embarrassing for the university.
Today, most blue-chip recruits in football or basketball don’t
even consider attending black colleges. This has forced HBCUs to become
proficient at identifying and developing diamonds in the rough—prospects who
were passed over or jettisoned by bigger programs. “These are guys who were
thought to be not big enough or not fast enough,” Buddy Pough, the head
football coach at South Carolina State, told me. “Our niche has been that we
take the guy that nobody seems to want.”
To attract the best football and basketball players in the nation,
HBCUs have to spend money to improve their facilities—but to generate the
athletic revenue necessary to improve their facilities, the colleges need more
of the best players.
“We really have to get monetary support in upgrading facilities,”
LeVelle Moton told me. “These kids want to know: What does this weight room
look like? What does this athletic facility look like? What does this practice
facility look like? It’s tough to compete.”
Kayvon
Thibodeaux said much the same. “In this day and age, it’s about money,” he told
me. “Unless HBCUs upgrade drastically, I don’t know if things will change.”
