A Scholar of HBCUs Shines a Harsh Light on the Institutions

Joseph L. Jones has spent his entire educational career at historically Black colleges and universities: He earned his bachelor’s degree at Philander Smith College (now University), completed his Ph.D. at Clark-Atlanta University and spent a little over a year as president of Arkansas Baptist College. He now serves as an associate professor of political science at Clark-Atlanta and executive director of its W. E. B. Du Bois Southern Center for Studies in Public Policy.

But in his forthcoming book, scheduled for publication next month, Jones doesn’t hold back from a sometimes scathing critique of the institutions he so clearly loves. In Black, Not Historically Black: Towards the Pan-Black College and University (Third World Press), he writes that HBCUs are faced with a “leadership crisis,” driven partly by rampant turnover and fractious relationships between administrators and boards of trustees. He calls on institutions to ditch “respectability politics,” suggesting they should be more introspective and less focused on proving their importance to outsiders. He describes the ideal Black college as one that explicitly focuses its curricula and research on improving the day-to-day lives of Black communities and cultivating “an organizational culture that demonstrates excellence through transparency, communication, professional development and accountability systems.”

Inside Higher Ed spoke with Jones by Zoom about the concerns and hopes for HBCUs he outlines in his book. The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: In the book, you talk about how HBCUs should strive to be “pan-Black” as opposed to “historically Black.” What does that distinction mean to you?

A: A lot of people don’t fully understand or appreciate how the term or the designation “historically Black” was given to Black colleges. Much of the history around desegregation and the whole civil rights movement … to some extent, at least in my opinion, [involved] a surrendering of Black institutions. The compromise in the Higher Education Act of 1965 was to designate these institutions as “historically Black,” i.e., no longer Black. Like, it was Black, it was created to be Black, but now, since we’re entering into this notion of a desegregated society, there’s no longer a need to self-identify or identify an institution as just being Black.

So, I played on that. Because prior to that, there was a lot of conversations, a lot of discussions, a lot of debates … around the necessity of Black colleges moving forward and what role would they play. And so, one of the claims that I make is that at that critical juncture, a lot of those conversations begin to start to dissipate … But what does [the label “HBCU”] mean? And that’s where I offer up this new term called “pan-Blackness.”

Now I’m a political scientist, political theorist, and pan-Blackness is a theory that I have developed. And the very core of it is just basically … that Black people are not a monolith, and that because we’re not a monolith, we’ve got to figure out ways to identify the various different factions in Black communities and figure out a way to pan them together in order to improve the quality of life for the collective communities. And I believe it starts at Black colleges … this pan-Black notion of having an institution that is focused on that—really, really trying to figure out ways to improve Black communities moving forward.

Q: The book has a chapter focused on leadership that describes HBCUs as having a “leadership crisis,” including high rates of presidential turnover, among other issues. What is the cause of that leadership crisis, and what ripple effects do you see it having on campuses?

A: That’s complex … The process of actually selecting a leader I think, in many ways, is antiquated, and it needs some reimagining. I talk about search firms and their limitations around selecting leaders for Black colleges. I talk about bad leaders, and I describe the characteristics of what I call a “misleader” president or a board member … And the thing that I really stress in this chapter is talking about systems of accountability … A lot of presidents are able to kind of come in and just have carte blanche on what they want to do with the institution. They can remake it in any way they want to. And when you have an institution that is cycling through presidents every two or three years, the institution itself goes through an identity crisis … Somebody comes in afterwards and just forgets what the other person has done, and they try to remake it in their image, and it’s just a continuous cycle of dysfunction.

But there’s also tension between presidents and board members. Another part of the leadership problem is board members at Black colleges. And I make the claim that a lot of board members do not come to the job with the necessary skills to be able to actually manage … A lot of them come with a very corporate mindset, and corporate America and higher education are two totally different industries … And so having strong accountability systems at the board level and the presidential level, I think, is important to ensure that presidents actually stay longer.

Q: How much do those feel like HBCU problems versus overall higher ed problems?

A: Higher education itself is just a very funky industry. It’s dysfunctional by its very trade. But I think there’s something more pronounced and profound among HBCUs. And the data just clearly shows it. Last I checked, just a few months ago, there were almost 28 open HBCU presidencies out of 105, and it goes up and it goes down and it’s a constant cycle of presidents coming and going and interims and so on and so forth. And also, it kind of speaks to what I described in my chapter “Culture, Not Dysfunction,” about some of the internal contradictions that are going on within our institutions, the organizational culture itself and the lack of efficiency, the micromanaging, the lack of systems of accountability or policies that are in place to make sure that organization can function at a high level. And that kind of comes back to leadership. If you don’t have a leader who understands the importance of that, then it all kind of blends together.

Q: In the book, you talk about how the media tends to fixate on HBCUs’ dysfunction, which they portray as “pathological.” What context do you think media outlets are missing when they cover HBCUs?

A: I make the claim that a lot of our institutions are dysfunctional, not pathological, because, if it’s pathological, that means it can’t be changed … I think that if you put really, really good policies and procedures [in place] and have really good leaders, you can overcome those kinds of things.

But we also gotta be clear about the historical context. We gotta understand that most Black colleges were founded by missionaries, were heavily influenced by white philanthropists who wanted a particular kind of labor class in the late 19th century or at the turn of the 20th century. That followed all the way into the mid-20th century. And a lot of these institutions were severely underfunded. And so, if you have outside interests pretty much controlling an institution … and then all of a sudden, in 1965, desegregation happens, and there’s this kind of retraction of that, of course you’re going to have institutions still trying to figure out how best to manage and to hold and to teach in these institutions of higher education.

As we talked about earlier, higher education is just dysfunction. But sometimes I think the media focuses in on Black colleges and makes it seem as if all of them are that way, and that’s not the truth, or [implies] it’s just something about Black behavior … which I categorically push back on because it’s just not true. I just think a lot of [issues] can be dealt with if institutions really take the time to really focus on how to create a better organizational culture.

Q: You make a distinction in your book between HBCUs striving for “legitimacy” versus “relevancy.” What’s the difference between the two for you?

A: A lot of HBCU presidents and HBCU alumni spend a lot of time going out trying to make the case that HBCUs are relevant, they should be supported. It’s an external argument, because you’re basically trying to [convince] others who you believe do not believe HBCUs are relevant that they actually are. And to me, to some extent, it’s a waste of time, because people are going to have their minds [made] up on how they perceive these institutions anyway.

But when I’m talking about legitimacy, I’m talking about the power that Black communities have to actually improve the inherent value of these institutions. Are we going to send our children there? Are we going to work there? Are we going to send money to these institutions to make certain that they’re viable? What are we doing to create partnerships? … The whole entire book, I’m speaking to a particular audience. I’m speaking to HBCU graduates, HBCU students, people who work at HBCUs. I’m very, very clear that this is an internal conversation, a public internal conversation, but it’s important that we have this kind of conversation.

Q: I can’t talk to a political scientist after a tumultuous election and not talk about our incoming president. In the book, you briefly touch on some of the challenges HBCU leaders handled during Donald Trump’s first presidency, particularly how HBCU presidents got backlash from their communities for taking a picture with Trump in the Oval Office. How do you think Trump’s second presidency might affect the future of HBCUs, and particularly the kind of vision that you’re laying out for them in your book?

A: I guess my immediate response is, if we were to take Trump at his word, or not even just Trump, but the Republican establishment and their very, very clear attack against diversity, equity, inclusion … it’s not a leap of logic for them to question why should there be subsidies going to Black colleges? Why should we even have a designation called “historically Black” for these institutions? And so it’s going to be interesting, because I think Trump in the first term … marveled at the fact that he had all these [HBCU] presidents in his office and he even on the campaign trail talked about how he helped [HBCUs] out—even though a lot of it was very, very inflated. But it’s different because maybe his desire to want to continue on with that constituency and helping them out and the other ideological desire of the right—getting rid of everything woke or DEI—I think it’s going to be a very interesting clash.

So, I’m not really answering your question, but those are the things I’m thinking about. And I think for Black colleges … we’re going to have to figure out how to work with the president. But I’m not certain if this is going to turn into a resistance moment or it’s going to come into a moment where you have to figure out a way to keep making the argument of relevancy to the president. So much about the way that Trump moves is just unpredictable. But then again, if you look at Project 2025—if they’re serious about dismantling the Department of Education, then that will clearly have a huge impact. If they’re talking about trying to cut costs and they want to get rid of Title III [a federal grant program to help institutions serve low-income students], which is the lifeblood for a lot of Black colleges, that’s going to be clearly detrimental for Black colleges. And so I think all of us are kind of nervous, but at the very least trying to figure out how this is going to play out. We’ll see. It can go either way. And I don’t have my thumb on the scale either way. This is a thought experiment.

Q: You spoke earlier about how your book is both a public conversation and an internal conversation for people who have been to HBCUs or who work at HBCUs. What was it like for you to apply a critical lens to the world you inhabit day to day, and how do you hope your HBCU colleagues take the criticisms you’ve raised?

A: I was very intentional by grounding and framing this book through the works of W. E. B. Du Bois. This book, in many ways, is written through that tradition of Du Bois, who was doing basically the exact same thing that I’m doing all throughout his whole entire life. He was very vocal, publicly and privately, about what he saw as issues surrounding what he called “the Negro college” during that time period. So, I grounded the book in his work to remind people that my criticisms aren’t new … What I’m trying to do is bring it back in the public sphere so that we can really have these really tough conversations. All of my education has been at Black colleges, all of my teaching career, all of my teaching appointments, so I love Black colleges to death. But I also disdain some of the internal contradictions we have to deal with.

How are my colleagues, how is the Black college community going to respond? I’m not certain. I would probably suspect there’s going to be a lot of pushback … Everybody knows about all of these contradictions. We just don’t talk about it publicly. And for me, I think that’s a mistake, because what happens if you don’t shine light on a situation? Then it’s never sanitized and things will never change. So, part of my critique is a part of love … I’m open to debating and talking with anybody who wants to have conversations with me about this book, but I also suspect that there are going to be a lot of people, a lot of students, a lot of alumni, who are going to say, “About damn time. We should have been talking about this for years.”