It’s 9:00am on March 28, 2022. Inside the Rayburn House Office Building, Representative Alma Adams and her team are kicking off day one of a week-long advocacy campaign for America’s Historically Black College and Universities, or HBCUs. HBCU STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) Days of Action will put HBCU leaders, corporate partners, and stakeholders in Zoom calls with members of Congress to advocate for key investments in America’s many HBCUs.
At the top of their agenda: passing the IGNITE HBCU Excellence Act, commonly referred to as IGNITE. In response to the 2018 Government Accountability Office’s report that found that 46% of buildings at HBCUs were in need of repair or replacement, four members of Congress — Representative Alma Adams (D-NC-12), Representative French Hill (R-AR-02), Senator Chris Coons (D-DE), and Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) — introduced IGNITE. If passed, the bill will support HBCUs in obtaining historic investments to repair, modernize, and build new facilities on their campuses.
Nothing about this story sounds particularly unusual. Members of Congress advocate for initiatives all the time. Most bills never gain enough support to navigate the complex legislative process, receive a favorable report out of committee, and make it to the floor of either chamber of Congress. The few bills that overcome all these hurdles often pass or fail on party lines. But something different happened in HBCU STEAM Week. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle attended and pledged their support for IGNITE.
In March of 2022, Pew Research found that Congress is more polarized than any time in the last fifty years. Despite this, both conservative Republicans and progressive Democrats are lining up to support historic investments in HBCUs. In the House, IGNITE has 18 Republican co-sponsors. In the Senate, it has an even number of Republican and Democratic co-sponsors. In both Houses of Congress, the bill has co-leads on both sides of the isle that are determined to see it pass in this session.
Before I can analyze how this issue has become bipartisan, I want to offer some context on HBCUs in the United States for any non-American readers (since this is a British publication):
A History of HBCUs
The Hunt Institute defines HBCUs as “institutions of higher education (IHEs) established during the era of legal segregation prior to 1964, with the mission to provide Black Americans with a postsecondary education.” Before the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery, Southern states had barred Black Americans from attending institutions of higher education, regardless of their free or enslaved status. In Northern States, few higher education institutions educated Black Americans. Those that did were usually schools established specifically to educate the children of formerly enslaved Black Americans and served as the primary educational institutions for Black Americans at every level of their education.
Following the Civil War and Reconstruction, Southern states broadly established segregated public education systems. In response, Congress passed the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1890, which required states with segregated higher education systems to establish land-grant institutions for Black students whenever a land-grant institution was founded for white students. The Act required a “just” distribution of funds but did not require that distribution to be equal. This legacy has continued into the present: today, HBCU endowments on average are 70% smaller than their non-HBCU counterparts.
New HBCUs continued to be founded and existing HBCUs continued to grow well into the twentieth century. Every President since Jimmy Carter signed an executive order creating a White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities at some point in their term. Even with unequal funding, these institutions succeeded in uplifting Black, low-income students and became major drivers of Black economic mobility. While America’s schools are no longer legally segregated, many students still choose to attend one of America’s 101 HBCUs because they achieve phenomenal results for their students.
Today, America’s HBCUs such as Morehouse College, Howard University, Bennett College, and North Carolina Agriculture & Technical State University, account for three percent of America’s four-year non-profit universities, yet they enroll ten percent of all Black students and award roughly 25 percent of all bachelor’s degrees earned by Black students. In Southern states (where HBCUs are predominantly concentrated), the results are more pronounced. For example, North Carolina’s ten HBCUs make up 16 percent of four-year universities in the state, yet they enroll 45 percent of the state’s Black undergraduate students. Additionally, HBCUs are responsible for roughly $15 billion in economic impact to their communities every year. They’ve produced over 134,000 jobs and $46.8 billion in alumni career earnings. Every dollar spent by an HBCU results in $1.44 in spending for their regional economies — a critical investment given that over eighty percent of HBCUs are in places where the median wage is below the national average.
Perhaps no one makes the argument better for HBCUs than Representative Alma Adams, dubbed “the Godmother of HBCUs” by Essence Magazine. I reached out to her office to ask her why she felt HBCUs were still necessary in modern America. “Historically Black Colleges and Universities are engines of opportunity for Black Americans,” said Rep. Adams. “In fact, HBCUs helped build the Black middle class in the United States. Half of all African American lawyers and public school teachers attended HBCUs. Forty percent of all African American engineers and 80 percent of African American judges attended HBCUs. Like no other institutions in the United States, HBCUs know how best to serve Black students, first generation college students, low income students, and so many others. As an HBCU graduate twice, as well as an HBCU professor for four decades, I know firsthand how transformative these institutions are, and how much our communities would lose if they went away.”
Bipartisan Agreement
The last two Presidents have loudly highlighted their investments in HBCUs. President Trump’s White House touted historic HBCU investments he signed into law in the second paragraph of his education policy page. The Biden administration has promoted the $3.7 billion in HBCU funding in the American Rescue Plan and other pandemic relief programs.
Bipartisan HBCU support has extended out of the White House and into the halls of Congress. In 2019, Congress passed the FUTURE ACT (spearheaded by Rep. Adams) which increased funding for HBCUs and minority-serving institutions. In the House, it passed 319-96, including nearly half of the House Republican caucus and virtually every Democrat. In the Senate, Republican Leader Mitch McConnell successfully motioned for it to pass with unanimous consent. No Senator objected.
How has legislation supporting HBCUs like IGNITE escaped, thus far, the trap of polarization?
1. Local Ties
Republican-leaning states in the South are home to the largest number of Black Americans by percentage. A majority of Black Americans (56% to be exact) lived in the American South in 2019 according to Pew Research Center. As a result, states with Republican Senators and congressional districts with Republican representatives are often home to HBCUs. In a conversation I had with the office of Senator Tim Scott (R-SC), the Senator’s support for HBCUs was tied to their presence in his state. One of the first details they highlighted when explaining their support was that South Carolina is home to eight HBCUs.
Sen. Scott is not alone. While support for HBCUs among Democratic members of Congress is geographically disbursed, Republican support is strongest among members representing the South. Every Republican co-sponsor of IGNITE in the Senate and over half of the Republican co-sponsors of IGNITE in the House come from a Southern state with a substantial number of HBCUs within their borders.
For Republican members of Congress in the South, HBCUs are a local issue. Voting to support HBCU funding is not a vote to support an abstract investment. Money spent on HBCUs will go back home to their districts and states, creating jobs and increasing economic investment for their constituents. With so many issues becoming nationalized in recent years, IGNITE and HBCUs more broadly show that issues with local roots are still able to attract bipartisan support on the basis of their local impact.
2. Bipartisan Origins
The language of IGNITE and other pieces of legislation supporting HBCUs was written by both Republicans and Democrats in coordination with key stakeholders.
For IGNITE, the office of Sen. Scott told me that both lawmakers on both sides of the aisle agreed HBCUs desperately needed funding after the 2018 Government Accountability Office Report.
Sen. Coons and Rep. Adams kicked off the drafting process. These members of Congress weren’t aiming for a messaging bill — that is, a bill introduced by members of Congress to signal their belief to voters but is unlikely to pass because of partisan opposition. Instead, they wanted real, substantive legislation with a chance to become law. They started by working directly with HBCU leaders and HBCU interest groups like TMCF and UNCF to identify what HBCUs needed and how best they could achieve their goals.
From there, the two Democrats needed to find Republican support. While both sides recognized the problem, the risk for disagreement was most pronounced when creating a proposed solution and drafting its language. To combat this risk and earn buy-in from their Republican counterparts, the offices of Sen. Coons and Rep. Adams brought the draft language of the bill to the offices of Sen. Scott and Rep. Hill for their input. Sen. Scott’s office explained that their Democratic counterparts had been very amenable to making reasonable changes in the draft language.
According to Sam Spencer, Communications Director for Rep. Adams, this focus on bipartisanship has governed all of Rep. Adams’ work on HBCUs. “The Congressional Bipartisan HBCU Caucus Adams founded has enabled her to pass landmark legislation for HBCUs and MSIs,” said Spencer. “The caucus has always had Republican members and bipartisan co-chairs, giving it more credibility on both sides than ideological caucuses. It has been the foundation for much of Adams’ legislative work.”
By engaging with the other side in an early stage, taking their input seriously, and making changes to the bill text to accommodate both parties, the authors of IGNITE increased the bill’s appeal to both parties, raising their odds of earning bipartisan support.
3. Legislative Tactics
The concept of legislative tactics is critical to understanding the success of HBCUs on Capitol Hill. For HBCUs, advocacy has been a grassroots endeavor. Sen. Scott’s office made it clear that HBCUs have done an outstanding job of advocating for themselves at the federal, state, and local level. In coordination with supportive members of Congress and advocacy groups like TMCF and UNCF, HBCU leaders have been able to take their asks (specific legislative requests from interest groups or other involved parties) directly to sometimes-skeptical Congressmembers and win their support.
HBCU STEAM Days are one amongst a set of tactics used by HBCU supporters to increase their support on Capitol Hill. It’s rare that a Congressional office transforms into a highly effective lobbying machine for a specific issue for a week, but that’s exactly what Rep. Adams’ office does for HBCU STEAM Days.
STEAM Days are well-organized and tailored to address specific needs. Attendees identify committees of interest and attend meetings with the leaders of those committees to make issue-specific asks. This puts HBCU advocates with expertise in specific issue-areas in front of members of Congress that understand those issue-areas best and have the power to impact them. Rep. Adams’ office organizes the meetings and ensures members of Congress attend the meetings with advocates. STEAM Days have enjoyed high-profile support. Speaker Pelosi, House Majority Leader Hoyer, and House Majority Whip Clyburn all attended meetings with HBCU stakeholders as part of HBCU STEAM Days of Action. Additionally, powerful committee chairs and ranking members in both houses of Congress held meetings with advocates focused on their issue-areas. As these meetings occurred, IGNITE supporters and stakeholders posted coordinated messages and graphics across a variety of social media channels to generate more support in real time through a comprehensive communications strategy.
Another tactic has been to introduce legislators to HBCUs by encouraging them to visit HBCUs in their state. By giving legislators direct exposure to the HBCUs in their area, supporters of IGNITE have been able to make bipartisan gains. Sen. Scott’s office told me of a recent interaction with a Senator who signed onto IGNITE as a co-sponsor after being encouraged to visit a local HBCU. The Senator became convinced that HBCUs needed more infrastructure funding after seeing the state of disrepair many of the university’s facilities were in. To the Senator, it became clear that these schools were already producing outstanding results for their state and could achieve even more with modernized facilities.
These tactics share something in common: they foster a direct connection between legislators and stakeholders. Rather than having members of Congress advocate for an issue to each other, HBCU leaders have worked with members of Congress to advocate for themselves. Supportive members have helped get HBCU leaders in front of legislators and arranged for legislators to go directly to HBCUs, but the HBCU leaders have done the bulk of the talking. The approach is not unique, but it is uniquely effective precisely because it is being used as the primary means of persuasion for legislators on the fence.
The Takeaway: Bipartisan Success Is a Multi-Faceted Project
Through a combination of geography, bipartisan origins, and effective legislative tactics, HBCUs have become a bipartisan success story.
What can we learn from the success of HBCU advocacy at the federal level that could apply to other debates? For starters, issues with strong regional ties might be more likely to cross partisan lines because they can bring deliverable gains and unite ideological opponents with similar district or state factors. A Democrat in a state with a large presence of HBCUs like Sen. Coons has an incentive to work with a Republican with a state with many HBCUs like Sen. Scott, even if the two Senators are not ideologically aligned.
Additionally, it seems like tactics still mean something. HBCUs have succeeded in large part because they’ve been their best spokespeople. Smart legislative tactics and the foresight to prioritize bipartisanship early in the legislative process have created an environment where HBCUs have access to members of Congress and can make asks that are designed to minimize partisan resistance.
Will the IGNITE HBCU Excellence Act join the list of successful, bipartisan HBCU bills signed into law? The midterm elections are creeping ever closer, and the current Congress will soon come to an end. The threat of divided government is starting to feel more like a guarantee come 2023. Even with bipartisan support, the consequences of divided government – such as the risk of government shutdown, gridlock, and increased polarization – could put HBCU funding on the backburner. The clock is ticking to pass this legislation.
Yet for all this uncertainty, one thing remains true: whether IGNITE makes it to the President’s desk, the success HBCUs have had on Capitol Hill so far can teach us all a thing or two about breaking down partisan divides in a polarized country.
The author would like to express his gratitude to the offices of Senator Tim Scott and Representative Alma Adams for providing their insight for this article.