One, two.
I often get asked the question "Are HBCUs still relevant?"
and I think that is a ridiculous question,
that's an asinine question.
The question is, how could you take so little
and do so much.
How could you take so little
and produce some of the greatest graduates
our country has ever known.
We were not allowed to attend the majority institutions.
We had to come to our own institutions,
the historical black colleges and universities,
but to be successful as a university requires funding
and this was one thing withheld from TSU.
We cannot talk about fairness and equality
if you do not provide the equal amount of funding
that you're required by federal law,
it speaks louder than any words about equality and justice.
This has been happening for decades
and decades and decades,
it is an example of institutional racism.
The states were supposed to give these schools money,
and quite frankly, they didn't.
How many more students could
these institutions graduate
if they had received their proper funding.
How many more research opportunities
would have been made at Tennessee state?
How many more lives would have been changed
if Tennessee state did not have this huge and huge amount
owed them by the state of Tennessee?
We don't want to continue to promise
to do what was in law
and continue to just say no.
That was done too many times to Tennessee state.
My name is Janet Lorin and I write about finances
of higher ed here at Bloomberg.
I decided to look into about 20 public schools in the south
when I heard about how they have not been funded
for decades and decades from their states.
An important job at Bloomberg is following the money
and it was clear in this case
there wasn't as much money to follow.
HBCUs use are very important historically,
they launched the careers of luminaries
such as Martin Luther king, Jr.
Thurgood Marshall, Toni Morrison,
Vice President Kamala Harris and Oprah Winfrey.
Cause I didn't go to Stanford.
I went to Tennessee State University.
We have a lot of first generation college students.
They come to Tennessee State University,
go to other HBCUs because they want to break
their cycle of poverty.
Education is the first step to breaking that cycle,
to live in a new economic base.
That's what we're seeking and that's why HBCUs
have become so important.
During the civil war in 1862,
the United States under the leadership
of President Abraham Lincoln created
the land grant system of universities.
And that essentially created
a type of university that was public.
Previously people in the United States only went to college
if they were extremely rich,
think of Harvard, Yale and Princeton
or they were going to become a minister.
The government decided to help create public universities
where students could learn about
agriculture, military, farming.
After the civil war, during reconstruction
the states in the south did not want to educate
former slaves and black students.
So the United States government came up
with a second moral act in 1890
and they said if there is going to be discrimination
in admissions, that there should be
a second land grant university.
So this gave students the opportunity
to be educated at another place
if the University of Georgia or the University of Florida,
or the University of Tennessee didn't want
to educate black students.
There's the federal funds that had to be met
by the state, then there's a state funding that's provided to land grant institutions.
And in both of those areas we have fallen short.
TSU got the short end of the stick.
I get calls regularly from other HBCUs that are land grant
and the same matching funds are owed to them.
There are new developments
in the death of George Floyd,
the unarmed black man in Minneapolis
who died in police custody.
Post the death of George Floyd
these issues are being discussed
in the Tennessee state legislature.
Several legislative committee were held
over several months to discuss
what Tennessee State University didn't get.
And I think that is a turning point and that hasn't happened
in other southern states before.
Some legislators say they didn't know about it.
Good afternoon. I would like to call the
Joint Land-Grant Institution Funding Study Committee
to order.
Harold Love is a state legislator in Tennessee.
He went to Tennessee state,
his parents met at Tennessee state,
his grandmother went to Tennessee state.
She became a teacher, his wife went to Tennessee state.
Last year we were, the legislature,
charged with discovering if there were funding inequities
for the two land grants we have here in Tennessee
and I along with Senator Richard Briggs
were charged as the chairs of this committee.
And so our task is to investigate to see
if Tennessee State University may have been underfunded
by the state of Tennessee.
This is going to be a deep dive
into land grants and the benefits, how we'll fund it.
And I really hope that
we come up with some idea of going forward,
how we can be a model for other states.
We looked into the situation and discovered that indeed
Tennessee state was being underfunded at that moment
by at least $1 million per year.
And that's a state requirement that is supposed to match
federal funds for the land grant funding.
What we found was the primarily white institutions
always received the funding and the predominantly
black HBCU institutions
did not receive their funding.
We have funding mechanisms in place
that creates a difference in between them,
that is discrimination.
We began with a study of about 2000 to 2016, those years,
discovered that there was $37 million
that was not funded to TSU that time.
But this still was not the major piece.
I knew that there was more there than just this $37 million,
but we did not have the data.
I needed to first go and look in the budget books
to find out if the state
had put anything in the budget books
for Tennessee state.
So I go up to the state archives library that we have
in the building and I start with 1957,
open the book to see where Tennessee state's deficiency is,
I want to see how much they have not funded Tennessee state.
So I noticed that there's no entry, like literally
Tennessee state is not listed for their land grant funding.
So I said, okay,
this is one year when there was nothing in the budget.
So I said, well let me look in the next year
and see if there's, maybe this was just one year
when it wasn't there.
I looked in the next year, there's no money there.
I skipped ahead and said, well,
maybe that was just that decade,
but come back to 1950s, but it goes to 1960s.
There's no money there.
So I decided to spend the whole day there
looking through all the budget books
from the 1957 period to 2007.
And in each instance what I discovered was
there was not an entry in the budget books
for Tennessee state.
And unfortunately my worst fears were confirmed
by the house budget office.
They too did their research and discovered
that Tennessee state was not allocated
their funding in those decades.
That's not even the word land grant in the budget book.
My father served in legislature from 1968 to 1994.
And upon winning my election,
I went to my parents' house
and was going through my father's office,
just trying to find some things
that I may be able to take to my office.
I discovered this book called
the Special Financial Needs of Negro Universities.
At that time didn't look into and read
because I'm gathering documents.
I'm trying to figure out how I can make the point
a bit more salient for my colleagues downtown.
It's not getting much traction.
And then I get this sense of this voice saying to me,
"Read the report."
So I read the report.
In this report it details how Tennessee state
had been underfunded and how they had
appointed a legislative committee in 1970
to investigate this.
But nothing was done.
Not one recommendation was followed that the committee made.
But something's wrong if Harold Love, Sr
was making his recommendations,
in 2021 Harold Love, Jr is having to make
those same ones, something's wrong.
It disturbs me that 50 years later,
I'm making the same argument.
That document became I think the catalyst for getting
Tennessee state their state match funding that year,
but also became the catalyst for us having documentation
for this new committee that we were starting.
The unfortunate reality is the state did not value
Tennessee state as much as the
University of Tennessee at Knoxville.
And some may view that as a harsh statement that I'm making,
but I'm looking at the data.
Thank you for the opportunity to present here today.
So during the hearings,
some budget analyst looked through the books
and came up with a couple of calculations
from $150 million to $544 million
that could be owed to Tennessee state.
So the question is what happens next?
North Nashville, as we mentioned,
a hard hit area by Monday night's tornadoes.
You walk around the campus of Tennessee state
and you see the facilities some were destroyed
by a tornado in March of 2020
and the agriculture dean tells me
they likely will not be rebuilt
for at least two years after that.
So you get the sense of what potentially
could have been if the school had more money.
And as we pan across here to the more agriculture center,
these are the greenhouses here at TSU,
you can see all the panels
on top that would cover those, just flew off.
The greenhouses and a bunch of other facilities
they were completely now bulldozed down.
These were beautiful greenhouses,
where we were doing a lot of outstanding research work
and now you got a bunch of rubble here.
We lost several facilities in our research station,
the Nashville Research Station.
It's a big disappointment.
You can see if you talk to any of our faculty,
you'll get more frustration than I can express really
and then if the university is taking two years
to build something that we lost in a tornado
that doesn't generate much confidence either.
When you look at the poultry house on TSU's campus
you see a building that was destroyed by the tornado,
but one that is still left,
but it is in bad condition because
that building was built in 1970.
If you bring a Falcon member here and say,
we want you to do research here, they see this equipment
there's no way they're going to agree to come here
and be a Falcon member to do research
with equipment this old.
No, you're driving them away.
This is just an example, though.
We got all of our buildings are so dated.
We can't attract them.
The high schools have better facilities these days.
Wow. Yeah.
So you create this environment where
you have deferred maintenance on buildings,
you have lowest scholarship offerings for students,
you have lower salaries for teachers
and you most certainly have lower
endowment levels for your university.
It is now our responsibility as stewards
of state government to ensure that
this state institution is properly funded.
TSU has gotten more money from the state in recent years,
they've been able to get better resources
and they've been able to get more competitive grants.
But the question is what could these schools
have looked like if historically
they had gotten a lot more money.
The arrearage amount that the state of Tennessee
owes Tennessee state represents generations
of African-Americans that could have been educated.
It represents countless opportunities for the community
to be enhanced because of TSU's presence in Nashville.
When he mentions the word arrearage,
that's looking back, we've already been over that.
We have to look at where we're going to be,
what we're going to do going forward,
not trying to remedy completely something in the past.
We can't look backwards and go forward.
We don't need to be trying to operate
looking in the rear view mirror.
I hear some of our members saying that we can't look back.
I do think that we have to take in consideration
some of the things that have happened in the past
in order for us to build on the future.
To this year's HBCU graduates and to all your loved ones,
who've helped you reach this day, congratulations.
The Biden administration has earmarked
and given money to HBCUs in a way
that we really haven't ever seen before.
The administration has made HBCUs a priority.
And while in some cases that doesn't make up for
decades and decades in the past,
it is a new page going forward.
It's not just a dollar figure because it goes beyond that.
It affects the lives of the community.
A grave injustice took place.
But right now we want them to make the correction.
Causeit's never too late to do what's right.