Category: Access & Inclusion

CUNY Chancellor Matos Rodríguez is everywhere these days promoting and advocating for a system he calls “the Ellis Island of education.” CUNY has a storied history where separate public colleges, many with famous alumni from underserved communities, came together over time to form the nation’s largest urban public university, serving more than 226,000 degree-seeking students each year. 

Matos Rodríguez, known as “Felo,” is a vital part of that story.  A historian, professor, and author, Matos Rodríguez grew up in Puerto Rico, received a degree in Latin American studies from Yale University and received his PhD in history from Columbia University. He was president of two CUNY colleges before becoming the system’s first chancellor of color and first Latino to hold the office in 2019. Now, after four years and a pandemic, Matos Rodríguez acknowledges many challenges remain despite the progress he has made to build relationships with industry leaders, improve infrastructure at campuses, and create more workforce opportunities for CUNY students. 

In his interview with LW, the chancellor talks about the strategies he is using to improve the career connection for his students, as well as his efforts to strengthen the system. He also opines on broader issues, such as the value of public higher education and how going to college can be both a stressor and a haven for his students. 

LW:  What are the priorities you are working on from a systems-wide level?  

FMR: CUNY is probably the best institution in the Unites States to boost social mobility. Nobody does a better job of moving people from the bottom quartiles of the socioeconomic ladder to the middle class and above than CUNY. We’ve done that by remaining an affordable institution—75% of our students graduate debt free and about 68% attend tuition-free, thanks to state and federal aid. We also have top-notch faculty and staff. Affordability and quality staff are two of CUNY’s strengths. 

What we have not done as well, particularly for a place where half the students are first-generation, is career preparedness and the whole connection to the world of work.  There has been vast underinvestment, historically, in career services, and not a lot done to integrate that world of work with curriculum and academic departments to really prepare students for careers. We’ve changed that with help from our partners in city and state leadership and the private sector.

LW: How do you tackle such a major issue at such a big place?

FMR: I break it into buckets.  The data we have on students participating, for example, in paid internships, tell us that those who participate in those programs graduate faster. When they go to get a job after graduation, they get it faster than their peers without that experience and their first-time pay is higher.  The other value here is the professional capital these opportunities create.  All college students come with assets and challenges, but the students with professional parents can often leverage their family’s networks once they graduate.  More than half of my students don’t have that. We need to be that connector to opportunities for them. Right from the start, I said, “I want to be known, at the end of my time, as the patron saint of paid internships for CUNY students.”

Nobody does a better job of moving people from the bottom quartiles of the socioeconomic ladder to the middle class and above than CUNY.

We have made a lot of progress in this area. A coalition of CEOs from some of the city’s largest employers was created three years ago to provide access to high-potential jobs for underrepresented New Yorkers. Another industry partnership, CUNY Futures in Finance, was formed by Centerbridge Partners, Bloomberg, and Goldman Sachs to connect financial services to CUNY talent.  We’ve also launched a number of public-private partnerships which, thanks to a strong backing from Governor Hochul and Mayor Adams, put millions of dollars to work on paid apprenticeships and internships for CUNY students.  

The point I really drive home to industry in New York is that our paid internships do all the things that paid internships do everywhere but because of our price point, it can really be an extra agent of advancement. Our tuition is approximately $7,000 a year for senior colleges and $5,000 a year for community colleges, for New York State residents. That paid internship that they have for a semester, if they were going to a community college, could pay for their semester. If they’re on financial aid, then that extra money can be used for food and housing, and all the other expenses we know make it challenging for them to stay in school. It’s like a scholarship. When I was president at Queens and a donor or alumni would come and say, “I’m going to give you $7,000, for a scholarship for a year,” I said, “No, give it to me in a paid internship.” At the end of the day, it will do the same thing financially for the student, but give that student a lot more in experience.  

CUNY is the ideal partner for New York industry.  I say to them, “We are a one-stop shop, come and deal with CUNY because we have 25 campuses, so if you’re an employer and you don’t want to have 25 conversations, we have a whole operation that can do that for you.”

LW: What other “buckets” are you working on in this area? 

FMR: We are integrating career preparedness into all that we do, including in the classroom and to get students to think about career options as early as possible and not in a narrow way. You want to make students think about career possibilities and begin to explore them and determine whether there’s a path, a liking, or not. And we don’t want them to wait until junior year or senior year and say, “Oh my God, I need to get a job. Now I need to think about all these things.” 

The second reason why students drop out of college—finances is the first one—is not knowing why they’re in college in the first place, and also not being able to make a connection with what they’re doing in college with what will happen in life later. So that entire career exploration is what I think we owe our students. And that’s why we want to get to career options early, to make students think about it. We’re actually trying to map for every major—and in fields within majors, not just the courses—some of the activities that you should be engaged in.  A lot of our students think career services are only for high-performing students with really good grades. My role is to get them introduced to careers, make them feel worthy of them, and then go out and compete and kick some butt.

LW: You mentioned incorporating this work into the classroom.  What does that entail? 

FMR: Curriculum revision is another bucket we’re working on. The New York Jobs CEO Council is a key partner in helping us think about updating curriculum. It is also a main focus of our new Office of Transformation, headed by an amazing senior faculty advisor Cathy N. Davidson, one of the best writers out there on education, to help us think differently about our pedagogy.  The key to that is to make sure that faculty value this work and have the tools to do it.  So many of them do this already but we are asking them to be more intentional about it so that their students understand that this exercise that you did here, or this test or this essay or this project, creates skills that they can go to an employer with.  But what I hope that our students do is that, as they’re building a portfolio, either personally or through career services, they think that what they have learned in a class is something they can then go tell someone, “I learned X, Y, and Z in this class, and here’s a concrete example. You need me to work in groups? Let me tell you about the project I did in my history or anthropology class.” 

Faculty have to be our partners in this. We need to help them think about that value, that engagement, because for students, even though they talk to advisors and other staff, faculty are still their key role models. 

Already, faculty have competencies in this area through NACE (National Association of Colleges and Employers), that are embedded into the curriculum, but they’re not necessarily thinking about it that way, so we decided that we need to have champions.  We’ve been working with the president of NACE and with a group of career fellows out of the Office of Transformation. We started with 20 faculty from across CUNY. The fellows have been thinking together about the best ways that CUNY faculty, in all fields, can support our students in their future lives and careers. This year, CUNY will scale the pilot to nearly 50 faculty, with the goal of promoting strong relationships between classroom learning and career success.  

LW: Has your experience as a community college president influenced some of the changes you are working on system-wide?

FMR: Absolutely.  Transfers have always been the key driver in the system. The transition from community college to four-year schools has to be improved, so that students aren’t set back in time and money by needless requirements.  This is a challenge for two and four-year schools everywhere, but at CUNY where we’re working within a system, we have no leg to stand on if we don’t get this right. 

The second reason why students drop out of college – finances is the first one – is not being able to make a connection with what they’re doing in college with what will happen in life later.

At the same time, when I came on board as chancellor, since I was president of a two-year school, I told all the presidents, “We have to improve the two-year experience.”  What often happens is if you come to CUNY and you are not college-ready, you need to start out in a community college. Part of the challenge has been that not every student starting at a community college really wants to be there. So, I told the community college presidents, “You need to create a rationale of why people want to come here. Not because we tell them to, but because either you have the student life or signature programs that they want to engage with.”  This is particularly important at this point in time when we’ve lost so many students to the pandemic.  We need to ask ourselves, outside of the personal circumstances, “Why is it that students don’t want to return or to start in the first place?” 

LW: Do you think one of the reason people stop out, or never enroll, has to do with public perception about the declining value of a college degree? 

FMR: I think that accounts for some percentage. Whatever I tell you will be a guesstimate. What I do think affects us is the perception that higher education is unattainable. Many of our students, particularly the ones who are low-income, assume it will not be affordable because the larger discourse is about debt and lack of affordability. They assume because we’re a part of higher ed that this place is going to be expensive without even thinking about applying for financial aid, or seeing what options are out there, so I think that we are being really affected by a mindset, which is the debt discourse. But that is not our story. Our average debt, for the 25% of the students that end up with debt, is, I think, between $12,000 and $14,000. But it’s hard to get that story out. There’s no validator in many families that can say, “This worked out,” and there might be a validator that somebody went and dropped out and said, “Yeah, look at what happened to cousin so and so.” We need to crack that. I tell people, “Listen, there’s probably no state more generous with financial aid than the state of New York.”

LW: Speaking of New York, what case do you make for why CUNY is worth investing in? 

FMR: The value and the importance of what we do is huge, and 80% of our students stay in New York so they are part of their communities. Graduates get higher paying jobs, which adds to our tax base, and they are less dependent on social service programs. There are also social and civic gains when you think about where all of our immigrants or sons and daughters of immigrants learn about democracy and what it means to be an American in New York City.  There’s another important category of work there of civic engagement, what I like to call civic mobility. That is also a key part of what we bring to the table. 

LW: We know so much about the stresses of college, particularly for students who have the added burden of poverty.  How do CUNY schools and others like them impact their students’ wellbeing? 

FMR: Obviously, there is some stress generated by going to school from a financial perspective.  “Can I pay? Can I stay?” And then there are the exams and the stress that comes from managing your life as a student. In that sense, we do add some stress. 

But we are also such havens for our students.  They’re commuter students and, in many places, the little campus corner where they can sit down and study quietly may be the only place they have some privacy. In my first presidency, every nook and cranny that we could put a desk, a chair, whatever, we used because some of those South Bronx students were in apartments with three or four siblings and they needed quiet space.

For parents of small children, there is often campus childcare. There are also mental health counselors and extracurricular activities that can provide some stress relief. It really is a balance in helping them to manage and overcome the stress of going to college. 

In his recent book American Whitelash, journalist Wesley Lowery offers a stark portrait of contemporary American society, describing burgeoning levels of polarization and partisanship as signaling a “soft civil war.” Throughout his treatise, Lowery reminds readers that “One of our historical blindspots is thinking multiracial democracy—what America should be—is a settled question. Many people are not sure of that.” The recent Supreme Court rulings in the cases brought by Students for Fair Admissions against Harvard and the University of North Carolina confirm Lowery’s analysis. 

By striking down the use of race-conscious admissions, the current Court upended forty-five years of established precedent in cases spanning from Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) and Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) to Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin (2013) and (2016), each of which affirmed a compelling state interest in a diverse student body as facilitating a critical educational goal. In the absence of a special justification or strong grounds for doing so, the majority’s rejection of the principle of stare decisis, from the Latin “to stand by things decided,” constitutes a monumental setback for higher education and for American democracy.

When Justice William Powell announced the landmark decision upholding affirmative action in the Bakke case, he not only noted the educational benefits that flow from racial diversity on campuses but also held that in order to promote “the most robust exchange of ideas,” an institution of higher education is “entitled as a matter of academic freedom to make its own judgments as to the creation of its student body.” Among the cases informing the majority opinion in Bakke was Sweezy v. New Hampshire (1957), in which Justice Felix Frankfurter argued compellingly that a “free society [depends] on free universities.” Frankfurter proceeded to warn of “the grave harm resulting from governmental intrusion into the intellectual life of a university,” according four “essential freedoms” to colleges and universities—to determine who may teach, what can be taught, how it is taught, and who will be admitted.     

By striking down the use of race-conscious admissions, the current Court upended forty-five years of established precedent.

The Supreme Court’s recent abridgement of these freedoms and their strict adherence to the notion that “the law is and must be colorblind,” even in the face of persistent structural racism, will inevitably exacerbate the growing economic and racial segregation in American higher education by creating further barriers to educational opportunity and social mobility for historically marginalized and underserved students. Evidence for this comes from the nine states that have already banned race conscious admissions, which include Arizona, California, Florida, Idaho, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, and Washington. These states have witnessed a steady, long-term decline in their share of African American, Latine, and Native American students being admitted and enrolled at their public universities. For instance, after the University of California System passed Proposition 209, barring consideration of race in admissions at state colleges and universities, the enrollment of underrepresented minority groups dropped by 50% or more on UC’s most selective campuses. Similarly, when Michigan outlawed affirmative action, Black undergraduate enrollment declined from 7% in 2006 to just 4% in 2021, highlighting the fact that alternative policies designed to increase representation have proven inadequate. Two of the dissenting justices in Students for Fair Admissions, Sonya Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, outlined several   contributing factors, such as students of color being more likely to attend under-resourced schools with fewer Advanced Placement courses and extracurricular activities, alongside less qualified teachers, a less challenging curriculum, and lower standardized test scores.         

The negative impact of eliminating race-conscious admissions extends to the entire student body, however. A multidisciplinary analysis of the research literature on the benefits of diversity at colleges and universities, conducted by Jeffrey Milem, demonstrates that the educational experiences and outcomes of individual students are enhanced by the presence of a multiracial and multiethnic campus community. It also illustrates the ways in which diversity enhances organizational and institutional effectiveness, while positively impacting quality of life issues in the larger society. Additional studies have shown the significant role that engagement with others who are racially different from oneself plays in identity construction and cognitive growth. Moreover, research on the effects of classroom diversity and informal interaction among African American, Asian American, Latine, and White students on learning and democracy outcomes has revealed the educational and civic importance of informal interaction with different racial and ethnic groups during the college years. 

Despite the availability of this evidence, and the expert claims offered by Harvard and UNC detailing the importance of a diverse campus for training future leaders in the public and private sectors; preparing graduates to adapt to an increasingly pluralistic society; producing new knowledge stemming from diverse outlooks; preparing engaged and productive citizens and leaders; and enhancing appreciation, respect, empathy, and cross-racial understanding, while breaking down stereotypes, Justice Thomas admitted to being “unable to understand how diversity yields any educational benefits.”

The negative impact of eliminating race-conscious admissions extends to the entire student body.

The decision that any use of race in the college admission process constitutes a violation of guarantees under the 14^th Amendment to equal protection under the law comes amid a flurry of legislation aimed at eliminating Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs, policies, and practices; banning the teaching of Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, and reproductive rights, even in medical schools; and eviscerating protections for LGBTQ+ students. Forty bills in 22 states have been introduced in support of these measures at a time when there are skyrocketing mental health issues on campuses, intertwined with a heightened sense of belonging uncertainty. The hidden and overt messages embedded in Students for Fair Admissions around who deserves a place at our nation’s elite colleges and universities creates a new sense of urgency for campus leaders around reassessing how we admit and enroll students, how we create spaces of welcome and belonging, and how we might employ pedagogies of kindness to fulfill the promise of American higher education for all. 

The American Association of Colleges and Universities’ mission of advancing the democratic purposes of higher education by promoting equity, innovation, and excellence in liberal education is grounded in the conviction that equity and excellence are inextricably linked, and that academic freedom is a prerequisite for a truly liberal education. A politicized Supreme Court has imperiled the capacity of colleges and universities to promote genuine diversity, which necessitates active, intentional, and ongoing engagement with difference in people, in the curriculum, and in the co-curriculum, as well as intellectual, social, cultural, and geographical communities, as a means of increasing one’s awareness, content knowledge, cognitive and empathetic understanding of how individuals act within systems and institutions. By engaging in blindspotting, a majority of justices in Students for Fair Admissions have handed down a decision that is likely to have negative repercussions for generations to come. The result will be a thwarting of the multicultural democracy to which Lowery refers, where all students are positioned for success in work, citizenship, and life within a globally interdependent, multiracial, and multiethnic world.  

Lynn Pasquerella is the president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities and served as the 18^th president of Mount Holyoke College.               

After a decade as president, Dr. Wayne A.I. Frederick will leave Howard University a very different place than he entered it.  He came to Howard as a 16–year-old undergraduate from Trinidad and Tobago who went on to graduate from both its medical and business schools.  His unusual profile as a surgeon and an academic have served him well as he steered the prestigious HBCU through a remarkable time for Black Americans – starting with the Obama presidency, the Black Lives Matter movement, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the insurrection of January 6^th, 2021, which occurred just a few miles from his campus. 

He describes the school’s transformation over the past several years almost as if it were the personal growth of an individual, not an institution. As he prepares to leave the place to which he has long belonged, Dr. Frederick provides a perspective on the country, on young people, and on higher education that is honest and well worth hearing. Here is an excerpt of our interview. 

LW: How has Howard changed under your leadership? 

WF: Howard has always had big potential and a big legacy, and I think today Howard is fulfilling its potential and living its legacy. I think that’s the biggest difference: while we’ve existed on what has happened before, I think we now have a contemporary experience of excellence, and a contemporary expectation of being excellent. And I think that that’s very different.  This is true across categories. We are poised to be an R1 research institution. Financially, we’ve come out well from a very unstable financial existence which, to be quite honest, has been something that has plagued us throughout our history until now.  Our enrollment is the largest it’s ever been, so we’re serving more students than ever before, and also graduating them at a higher rate than ever before, so we are really fulfilling our academic mission.  I would say the third thing is we’re taking care of each other in a way that we haven’t done before. We are a community that’s inclusive, that recognizes the importance of holistic health including mental health. 

LW: What did it take to make these significant changes?  What were the obstacles?  

WF: As I look in the rear-view mirror, bringing my tenure to an end, I would say the biggest obstacle was making sure that we had self-belief.  I think that we believed to a certain extent in our past, but I’m not sure that we always believed that we could be what we are today. And I think that self-belief was something that we had to build.  Our graduates are such an accomplished group of people who become national and international figures, that that legacy of who we are took on a life of its own. But the actual numbers, the actual data, did not necessarily bear that out.  We started really looking at ourselves, doing the introspection but at the same time, setting out a plan to become that. The graduation rate has increased by over 25% during my tenure, as an example. We’re starting to really live out our legacy.

We started to be bold about stepping into spaces and places that we weren’t always welcomed.

The second obstacle was overcoming long-standing issues around how we fund our institution, looking at the business model, looking at what we did with respect to fundraising. And I think we really looked at those things very differently as we moved forward.  We started to be bold about stepping into spaces and places that we weren’t always welcomed. And once we were able to get in there and tell our story, people were very impressed and willing to invest in us.

LW: Your enrollment and graduation rate increases—I’m guessing they had something to do with the work that you’ve been doing on affordability?

WF: Yes. The number one reason that Howard students did not graduate was because of finances.  That financial barrier then led to other things—people working extra jobs, not getting enough sleep, not being able to focus enough on their schoolwork, that type of thing. Coming in, that was an issue that we looked at.  We were not raising enough endowed funds to help offset students’ bills, so we started doing things differently. We started what’s called a Grace Grant, which is a grant that we give to students who have an expected family contribution of zero. They get the maximum Pell [Grant]. We fill the rest of their gap on their tuition in order to help them matriculate.  We immediately started seeing a big difference in the graduation rate. Those students who did not get the full support graduated somewhere in the low 60s percentage-wise. The graduation rate of those who got it was 90-something percent.

We went to investors and donors and said to them, “Look at this data.”  And people started giving money, and we’ve now raised in excess of $45 million in that one area, with a goal of getting all the way to $100 million.  That’s an example where we did something different. We used the data…and convinced our investors that they should invest in us.

LW: Student activism is something that Howard is known for, but it has also been a challenge for you.  How do you reflect on those experiences now?   

WF: When I look at students who come to Howard, they’re very concerned about their place in society and what society has done and not done for them. That’s important and not lost on me.  However, there is some romanticism among students that activism is really all about protesting, none of which I have a problem with. But what I do want to make sure we have is the right balance, that we take our activism and advocacy, and we test it. We use all of the tools of negotiation, of interrogation, of debate, so that we do get the outcome we want. I think we’ve often had this in the wrong order.  Particularly later on in my tenure, I’ve been trying to put the students’ activism to work in a proactive fashion and not wait for there to be an issue to get somebody engaged in a conversation.

LW: What would you say about the politicization of higher education today, the roll back efforts around DEI, the sense that it is too biased, less valuable? 

WF: Let me start by saying that I think the issue in this country right now with extreme partisanship is real and it is causing our young people to question so many things about our society, including the things that we, over time, have come to love and hold up almost as a moral compass.  

We live in a country where we tout our democracy. We tout the ability for free elections. We tout our ability for the transfer of power, unencumbered.  And these young people have now lived in an era where every single one of those things has been questioned.  We’ve portrayed ourselves to the rest of the world as an arbiter of democracy and now we question everything about our elections. We question who should vote, how it should be managed. Young people see that, and they say, “There’s a hypocrisy taking place here. While you guys are casting aspersions afar, we have a problem right here. And you’re not solving it.”

As a result, they have started to turn away from a belief in that system. And I think that has hurt us. And as it seeps into this debate about liberalism in our education system, and turning back the tides on DEI, I think what people have started to say is, “I’m not sure that I believe in any of these things anymore. I feel that you guys are not honest about what it is you’re doing.”  

Young people are questioning even more. They’re questioning the very existence of why we are doing this and how we get here. How are we going to turn this off?  So, in my humble opinion, I think that our young people have to be redirected. How do we solve for this going forward as people question whether higher education is important anymore, in terms of being able to live a better life as a result?  I think what we have to do in higher education is to continue to tout and sell what higher education has been to this country. We have to lift those things up. 

And we do have to question and interrogate how we are providing information.  Is it allowing students to practice critical thinking? I would say that right now, it is not. On the average campus, it’s leaning left or leaning right, and when we bring people from the opposite side to speak on campuses, we’re shutting them down. We’re not having rich debate. And if it is not happening on our campuses, you have to believe it’s not happening in our barber shops, or in our grocery stores. And if we are a country that is not going to speak to each other because we have different views, we’re not going to be as strong as we could be. It’s a very critical time for higher education. I think we have to recognize how disappointed our young people are in our larger societal constructs, and we have to provide a solution for that in our higher ed institutions.

We need to remind our young people that we all belong to this construct, and we all have to figure out a way to make it work. It’s our responsibility, and in doing that, we don’t leave anybody behind.  Right now, we almost have a sanitary view about all this and we just avoid each other.  There are certain things we just don’t go to or participate in. And I think we need to change that, and say, “You know what? That’s not the right thing to do. Let’s go out with the goal of amplifying each other’s humanity.”  

We have to question and interrogate how we are providing information. Is it allowing students to practice critical thinking? I would say that right now, it is not.

And if we make that our goal, then we have a responsibility when we see an issue to jump in; whether we have an expertise or not, we need to learn about it and to understand it.  I don’t live in rural America, but there are challenges for people living in rural America. So the question is, “Do I have a responsibility to learn what those challenges may be?  And, when I do, is there something I could do about it?” Instead, what we say is, “if somebody lives in rural America, that’s not my problem.” And I think we have to get away from that because our goal, our responsibility, as a higher ed institution, is to amplify other people’s humanity.

LW: How can higher education help address these issues? 

WF: I think we have a real gap in civics education in our country. Most students who come to college aren’t aware of who their state reps or senators are, or even how bills get passed, or how laws are made. I think that’s another thing that we have to try to do a better job of—to explain how the country works so that when a Supreme Court decision comes down, students understand that that’s the tail end of a process that started in somebody’s court, in somebody’s jurisdiction. And I don’t think most students recognize that at all.  

Take students’ frustration with, for instance, the overturning of Roe v. Wade. They don’t recognize that the case that led to that started way back, and because nobody was paying attention, it didn’t get the type of activity around it when it should have. And for higher ed students in particular, they should be the most active among us, and they have the most resources to do that. And so, we should be supporting them better in this area.

LW: The January 6^th, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capital: How did that impact the Howard community? And the reaction to that in America—what does that say about the separateness you are concerned about?  

WF: Several things about that day I think just encapsulate so much of our reality today. One was that I came out of my office and noticed a significant number of individuals associated with the Proud Boys movement parking their cars in parking lots around Howard. And I realized, subsequent to that, that it was because there was a train station there. But initially, we had no idea why it was happening. Was it because the vice president had gone to school here? So my security chief started setting up cars to kind of block access to the street. And then you go from that, down to the Capitol and all that was going on that day.  I got home and my kids were looking at the television. And I said to both to them, “Listen, you guys have been in front of CNN for the past two-to-three hours.” They were very distressed obviously and I said, “Let’s change the channel. Let’s go on Fox News for a little bit.” And so they did.  

The goal was to stay there for 30 minutes. I think they lasted 10 or 11 minutes and said they couldn’t watch it anymore.  And I said to them, “There are some kids who just did what you guys did. For three hours, they watched Fox News and their version of what is happening is very different from yours. That doesn’t make them bad. That doesn’t make them love this country any less. But it means that they have a different perspective. And part of your responsibility is to see how you can bridge that gap—not to become who they are, but to understand who they are. And to recognize that they have every right to their position as you do. And the more you’re empathetic about their perspective and understand it, even if you disagree with it, the more harmony there could be.”

Unfortunately, we are not giving our young people good examples. There’s a senator who called me to ask about coming to speak to my grad students after the 2016 election.  And I said to the person, “I would love to have you, but I want you to do me a favor. I want you to come with another senator from across the aisle, with whom you’ve worked on something difficult, so my students can see that that’s how you guys work.”  And the person just calmly looked at me and said, “Nah. At least, not this time.” And I thought to myself, “These are the people making laws in our country. If they don’t want to speak to each other, then we can’t expect our young people to take anything else away from it.”

For me, what is worse than the yelling is the silence.  There is a distressing silence in this country and that is the sound of people not speaking to each other. That is even more dangerous. And that’s why I started with why I think young people are so jaded today. They have the attitude of, “Why are you trying to tell me what to do when you guys can’t get it together yourselves?”  And the thing is, our young people actually are much more flexible and much more empathetic about people who are not in their circumstances, so we have an opportunity in the country. Young people are much more altruistic. They’re much more willing to understand a person’s sexual orientation or a person’s financial or social circumstances than older generations are. So, I think that we have to jump on that opportunity, because they have that openness. 

LW: As president of Howard, you are very active in the HBCU community. What are some of the biggest issues facing the sector right now? 

WF: I would say funding of infrastructure is really the challenge. After George Floyd’s murder, giving to social justice issues really spiked and HBCUs got a lot of attention.  But it wasn’t the entire sector. It probably was 20-to-25 institutions out of a hundred that really got attention and got money. That money has since gone away in many ways. Howard’s infrastructure around fundraising was there so we will continue to do well, but I’m really, really concerned that if those institutions are not able to have sustainable growth and sustainable funding, we could get into trouble as an entire sector.  

The question we need to answer is why is it even important to have strong HBCUs? Well, the data show that we produce and diversify so many fields—way above what our collective capacity is—and that we have to exist in order to diversify other, different fields.  Howard still sends more African Americans to medical school than any school in the country, as an example.   

But I do worry that this attention that has occurred over the past two or three years to some segment of the sector, which has already started to go away, will ultimately hurt the sector, because of longer-term neglect.  People now are going to say, “Well, listen. We jumped in and gave you guys some support and funding. And now we don’t have to do that.”

The second thing that I think is important for us to be thinking about is that we have to be competitive on an even playing field. The product that we supply has to be one of excellence. And I know that I speak for Howard in particular, but that has been our focus. We’ve been very focused on having the best programs, the best exposure that our students could get. And I’m very proud of what we’ve built around that.  Students who come here have very strong track records in terms of where they end up in their jobs and in life. That’s something that we’ve invested in, and that we’re committed to long-term.

LW: Speaking of improvements, you have made headlines with some of your hires.  How does that fit into the story? 

WF: It’s a good question because again, I think this is a demonstration of what I’ve been talking about. These are people that make a big splash. There’s no doubt about it because of their celebrity. But my attraction to them was really because of their excellence and their commitment to that excellence.  I developed a relationship with Ta-Nehisi Coates that was very personal and that started off with me convincing him to finish his degree. A little-known fact is that this famous author who is on my campus as a faculty member and teaching and holding a chair, is also matriculating to finish his degree. And that shows his commitment to excellence. I think when people see what Ta-Nehisi is producing, they’ll know this is far more than having a big name join you.  He had a writing workshop for students in the summer that he began before he started teaching. I will predict that several of those students are going to go on to become great authors like [him].  And that, ultimately, is going to be his legacy as well.  But that’s the type of excellence that he’s bringing. 

With Nikole Hannah-Jones, that was obviously a bit more opportunistic but, again, she had lots of other schools trying to step into this and I think the conversation that she had with me was quite different. I was not promising the bells and whistles. But what I was promising is that we would fulfill her mission to make sure that the role that journalism plays in our democracy would be alive and well. And I think that that intersection of our principles and mission is what attracted her to Howard. 

There is a distressing silence in this country and that is people not speaking to each other.

With Phylicia Rashad, I have to admit, I got a great assist from Chadwick Boseman, having him help me convince her to become the dean [of the College of Fine Arts].  Because [Rashad] could see so much in [Boseman], that she would then see in our young people, I knew what her commitment was. 

By the time this is published, I will have made another important hire.  All of these people, in my opinion, whether it’s Stacey Abrams or [a future hire], they have been excellent in their own right.  In my recruitment of them, we’ve been having conversations about what that excellence looks like, and how that fits in with what we are trying to do at Howard.

Unfortunately, sometimes that celebrity has overshadowed the other incredible faculty we’ve hired – nobody is going to put them on the front of the New York Times but, the reality is, I think in terms of academia, they are stars. That’s the other thing that I think hasn’t been well-told about our story – we’ve certainly been consistent.  It just so happens that the public personalities have gotten a lot of attention. 

LW: You have less than a year left as president, will you give us a hint as to what you are going to do next?  

WF: My intent is to retire, to really just take some time. I have committed to the board that when my successor gets here (Ben Vinson III, current provost of Case Western Reserve University), I will actively help him with the transition.  We’re already meeting once a week right now. Subsequent to that, I have a son who plays soccer in college and a daughter who plays volleyball—she’s a rising senior in high school—and I’m going to try to make it to every one of their games. I’m going to continue to travel with my wife. I want to travel to places where I could do some medical missions as well. I want to try to do about four medical missions a year. The other thing I’m committed to doing is going to Trinidad once a month to help mentor kids and that includes helping them to apply to higher ed in the U.S.

LW: That’s wonderful. Your wife, is she also a physician?

WF: No, she is the smart one in the family. She has a degree in computer science.