November 6, 2013
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State of Emergency for Black Colleges
Funding inequities shortchange students
by M arc
H. M orial
Current financial problems
facing the storied Grambling
State University football pro­
gram are a sign of funding
inequities that are short­
c h an g in g stu d e n ts and
threatening the very existence of a growing
number of Historically Black Colleges and
Universities (HBCUs).
Last month, in protest of severe budget
cuts that have decimated the football facili­
ties and led to the firing of Coach Doug
Williams, the Grambling State Tigers players
refused to take the 160 mile trip to Jackson,
Miss, for their scheduled matchup with Jack-
son State. The p la y e rs’ boycott sent
shockwaves through the Southwestern Ath­
letic Conference and highlighted the dire
financial status of many of our nation’s 105
HBCUs.
Draconian higher education budget cuts
in Louisiana being pushed by Gov. Bobby
Jindal are a big part of the Grambling problem.
According to the New York Times, state
funding for Grambling is “down 56 percent
since 2008.
In response, the university has laid off
more than 120 staff members and reduced the
number of degree programs to 47 from 67.
This has left the football program in shambles,
with players forced to practice and play in
unsafe and unsanitary facilities while some­
times enduring thousand-mile bus trips for
away games.
The Grambling football experience is
unique, but it is also symptomatic of a larger
problem that extends beyond the football
field to the financial offices and classrooms
of the institutions that have traditionally
produced the lion’s share of African Ameri­
can professionals.
With lower endowments, cut-rate tuition Chair, Marcia L. Fudge has responded to this
fees, fund raising challenge and a dispropor­ crisis by demanding a return to the previous
tionate number of first-generation, low-in­ credit policy. She says, “The issue must be
come students, HBCUs have been hit espe­ addressed and the policy must be fixed now.”
cially hard by the economic downturn.
The contributions of HBCUs cannot be
Recent cuts in government aid and other overstated. While the 105 HBCU institutions
funding streams have been the last straw for represent just three percent of the nation’s
several of them. St. Paul’s College in south­ higher education establishment, they gradu­
ern V irginia closed its doors in June. ate nearly 20 percent of African Americans
Atlanta’s Morris Brown College recently who earn undergraduate degrees. They also
declared bankruptcy. And a board member at graduate more than 50 percent of African
Howard University, considered by many to American professionals, half of black public
be the nation’s premier HBCU, recently wrote, school teachers, and most of the African
“Howard will not be here in three years if we American students who earn bachelor’s
don’t make some crucial decisions now.”
degrees in STEM fields.
In addition to the financial strains on
For decades HBCUs have been the back­
HBCUs, prospective students are finding it bone of a growing black middle class and a
harder to scrape up the money to enroll. A stronger America. We must do everything
recent change in credit history criteria in the we can to prevent their decline and keep them
federal Parent PLUS Loan Program has re­ alive.
sulted in the denial of loans to 28,000 HBCU
Marc H. Morial is president and chief
students and a loss of $ 154 million in revenue executive officer o f the National Urban
to HBCUs. Congressional Black Caucus League.
Gun Violence Epidemic is Not Inevitable
It’s Not Rocket
Science
by
M arian W right E delman
“In the 1960s, when my grand­
father was teaching me to drive in
his little red Ford Falcon, there was an epi­
demic of deaths on the highways in the
United States, and young people were dying
in very large numbers.” That’s how Dr. Mark
L. Rosenberg, president of the Task Force for
Global Health, former assistant surgeon gen­
eral, and former director of the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention’s National
Center for Injury Prevention and Control,
recently began talking about today’s public
health crisis for young people.
He continued. “And this country said, ‘We
can’t let this happen. W e’re going to stop it,’
and they took $200 million and said, ‘W e’re
going to invest in research on how to stop
young people from losing their lives on the
highway,’ and they did an amazing, amazing
thing. The research that they supported, and
they started the National Highway Traffic
Safety Administration, that research led to
redesigning cars completely... The front end
of the cars we drive today crush like an accor­
dion to protect us. We have side-impact pro­
tection, rollover protection, air bags . . . We
redesigned the roads...W e’ve gotten drunk
drivers, to a huge extent, off the roads... What
we did in the ’60s, redesigning the car, rede­
signing the roadway, redesigning the drivers,
was a result of scientific research, and as a
result we have saved, between the ’60s and the
beginning of this century, 325,000 lives. That’s
the result of science.”
Dr. Rosenberg is confident that America
can save lives being lost in the current epi­
demic of gun violence that is the second
fa d in g cause of death among children
SL and teens ages 1 - 19 and the number
9
one cause of death among black chil-
F dren and teens. He believes this public
health threat must be attacked just like
all others— by using the power of sci­
ence and evidence-based research: “We
can apply the same science to firearm injuries
and deaths of children, and it’s not rocket
science.”
The Children’s Defense Fund partnered
with Washington National Cathedral in a
forum last month with leading experts on gun
violence where Dr. Rosenberg shared his
only did having a gun in your home not
protect you, but it increased the risk that
someone in your own home would be killed
by a gun, not by 10 percent or 20 percent,
that's how much of a risk you have to show
to take a drug off the market; not by 100
percent or 200 percent, but 300 percent in­
crease in the risk. And the risk that someone
in your home would die from suicide with a
gun, and I need to remind us that two-thirds
of all gun deaths are suicides, the risk that
someone in your home would die from gun
suicide went up not 300 percent, but 500
percent.
These were extraordinary findings that
bringing a gun into your home increases the risk
that someone in your home will die from a gun. . .
. these research findings have been replicated
again and again in many studies. So they’re not
something that we question. This is the truth.
— Dr. Mark L. Rosenberg
experience from key research from the 1990s.
“We set out to show that you could start
a research program to find out how to pre-
vent gun violence, just like you could reduce
the number of fatalities on the roads, and I
think one of the most striking findings from
our research was designed to answer the
question: Does having a gun in your home
protect you, or does it put you and your
family at risk? Because the people who make
and sell guns and the National Rifle Associa­
tion had a very strong vested interest in
telling people, ‘You should get a gun and
have it in your home for protection.’”
“So we tried to answer that question sci­
entifically, and what we found was that not
These were extraordinary findings that
bringing a gun into your home increases the
risk that someone in your home will die from
a gun---- these research findings have been
replicated again and again in many studies.
So they’re not something that we question.
This is the truth.”
This research was not well received by the
gun lobby, and Dr. Rosenberg says they
started a campaign to get rid of the whole gun
violence prevention research agenda. The
NRA successfully lobbied their allies in
Congress to stop the CDC’s gun violence
prevention research funding. As a result
funding for gun violence prevention research
at the CDC fell from an average of $2.5 million
peryearin 1993-1996 to half that in 1997-2000.
Two decades later, the CDC is spending
just $100,000 per year on gun violence pre­
vention research. Meanwhile we are spend­
ing 2,500 times that amount on research to
prevent traffic fatalities, even though traffic
accidents and guns kill a similar number of
people every year. We must not let this
continue to happen.
The President has requested that Con­
gress authorize $ 10 million for gun violence
prevention research at the CDC, and another
$20 million to set up a nationwide system to
better track gun deaths. This would still be
only a tenth of what we are spending on
traffic deaths, but it would be a vast improve­
ment over where we are right now.
Dr. Rosenberg also said: “There’s this
sense of fatalism that people sometimes have,
and you say, ‘Oh, there’s 300 million guns
out there in the country. The problem is so
big, there is nothing we can do about it, and
besides, we’ve lived with violence from the
beginnings of mankind. It’s just out there’. .
. But w e’ve learned that violence is not ‘just
evil,’ but violence is specific types of prob­
lems: child abuse, child neglect, dating vio­
lence, youth violence, intimate partner vio­
lence and gender-based violence, rape and
sexual assault, child sexual abuse, elder
abuse, and suicide. Violence is a set of spe­
cific problems.”
Our nation’ s gun violence epidemic is not
inevitable. Scholars must be allowed to do
the desperately needed scientific research
that will help parents, policymakers and the
public determine how we can all work to­
gether to stop it. The NRA cannot be allowed
to continue to block the truth at the cost of
so many lives.
Marian Wright Edelman is president o f
the Children’s Defense Fund.