White House HBCU Initiative Chief Quits During Contentious Board Meeting
On the job for slightly over a year, White House Initiative on HBCUs Executive Director Charles Greene has called it quits. This came at a meeting of the President’s Board of Advisors on HBCUs last week, in which several members expressed frustration with Greene for failing to deliver on time a completed 2004-05 report on federal agencies’ grant activity with HBCUs.http://diverseeducation.com/artman/publish/article_9270.shtml
September 17th, 2007 at 2:41 pm
The need for not only African American Presidents, but also for African American faculty, at all levels among HBCU’s, has become acute. Whereas predominantly white colleges and universities hire a small percentage of non-white faculty and staff, many HBCU’s are now hiring a majority of whites and other non-African Americans to fill their faculty and staff positions. There is more at stake, here, than cosmetic tradition. People tend to hire people like themselves. Institutions tend to be concerned with the problems and the aspirations of people like themselves. It is in black, particularly American black, self interest to develop leadership tracks from the Presidency on down, as well as from lower paying positions on up, or the black college/university will cease to be what it has always been, i.e., a haven for the development of the black youth of each generation who know who they are, both historically and as they plan for the future needs of the many black people in our communities who continue to need black leadership.
Many among us are losing sight of the meaning of what it is to be a black person in the U.S. Yet racism and white supremacy are on the rise. The underpinnings of our very survival depend upon our continued vigilence, our passing on strategies, so that coming generations do not find themselves unable to make forward progress because they have lost sight of their history and knowledge about their identities and what has allowed us to succeed in the the past.
This report on the dirth of black presidents, especially in the days ahead, is a wakeup call. If HBCU’s are to survive as intended, the leadership must continue to come from within our communities, where there is a significant understanding of what the majority of black people still face, every day, as they try to break the bonds of poverty, poor schools, poor-to-no health care at all, devaluation of our elderly, disenfranchisement through disruption of voting rights, illicit drugs, guns in the wrong hands and subsequent epidemics of violence, misplaced values which encourage thug behaviour, and so many other problems which do not directly concern whites.
I hope we might address the need for a concerted effort to purposely groom such greatly needed leaders at the Federal level, through this U.S. Presidential Board. If a concerted effort isn’t made, our leaders will be lured away, and integration, which was supposed to help us, will again become a case of divide and conquer.