When Leonard Haynes III came to Washington in 1989 as an assistant secretary of education, the Southern University-trained historian found a national government marked by bipartisanship, collaboration and cooperation on a wide range of topics of importance to people of color in higher education. Today, the landscape and environment are "more…

When officials at tuition-driven Fisk University raised the veil of secrecy a few years ago surrounding the university's financial condition, the details they laid out were less than encouraging. The Nashville-based university, home of the historic Jubilee Singers, was losing several million dollars a year and had not received any major private…

When veteran educator Dr. N. Joyce Payne handed the reins of the organization she founded, the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, to entertainment lawyer and board member Johnny Taylor, Taylor began pursuing a remake of the prestigious group that has turned it on its head in just a matter of months. Today, with just more than a year of leading the…

Despite a nascent economic recovery, education advocates, policymakers and other leaders continue to sound concerns over U.S. higher education's long-term viability and productivity. Foremost among current worries is the financial stability of colleges and universities, particularly now that federal stimulus support has dried up. Even while…

With local lumber mills shutting down, Robert Kenning, an instructor at Salish Kootenai College in western Montana, and the tribe's forestry director, came up with an idea. Kenning landed a $200,000 Department of Agriculture grant in 2010 to explore the possibility of turning logging scraps and smaller trees into chips or pellets that could be…

Faced with budget cuts, some cash-strapped state universities are stepping up their recruitment of higher paying out-of-state undergraduates, a move that critics say is unfair to the states' residents and could affect in-state minority applicants. The University of California system and the University of Washington in Seattle have openly declared…

While it has been just two years since Dr. Lorenzo Esters joined the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, or APLU, his efforts to orchestrate new partners while forging coalitions appear to be yielding fruit. Dr. Esters is charged with representing the interests of 18 Black land-grant colleges and public Black colleges and…

The United Negro College Fund has recently initiated the first round of competitive grant funding made available to several UNCF member schools under the organization's new Institute for Capacity Building. As one of the first major new programs to emerge during the presidency of Dr. Michael Lomax, ICB deepens the level of support the nation's…