Federal Agencies Aim to Boost Research at HBCUs

In the 14 years Michael Curry worked as a chemistry and materials science professor at Tuskegee University, he and his colleagues got research funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies.

But the grants awarded to Tuskegee—a private historically Black university in Alabama that, like most HBCUs, has battled systemic underfunding dating back to its founding in the Jim Crow–era South—often weren’t nearly as big as the grants received by Curry’s peers at predominately white, Research-1 institutions, such as the University of Alabama or Auburn University. 

“We had a lack of infrastructure, a lack of proper facilities and a lack of resources that are critical for faculty being able to contribute to scientific innovation,” said Curry, who is now a nanoengineering professor at North Carolina A&T State University, which has a $202 million endowment—the largest among public HBCUs. “At Tuskegee we didn’t have as many resources as North Carolina A&T has been able to acquire, which presented some research challenges.”

North Carolina A&T is among a handful of HBCUs in line to become among the first to attain Research-1 status, an indication of high levels of research funding and output of doctoral graduates that can make a university more competitive for grants and other funding. That’s part of the reason why bringing HBCUs into the R-1 ranks (currently none have that status) has been a top priority for the institutions themselves and advocates for years.

Resource limitations have long stymied those and other efforts to expand research capacity of HBCUs. But as of late, momentum for better supporting them is building—a trend some HBCU leaders have said was spurred in part by the national racial reckoning that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020.

A lot of that support has come from federal agencies, which fund more than half of university research; the NSF and NIH are investing millions of dollars to create more opportunities specifically for HBCUs to grow their footprints in a national research enterprise dominated by white scientists at wealthy universities.

Addressing a ‘Legacy of Intentional Discrimination’

Most recently, the NSF launched an initiative, known as Ideas Lab, which aims to boost the competitive edge of HBCUs by building research networks to “further advance an integrated and collaborative vision for the most critical research capacity needs of HBCUs,” NSF director Sethuraman Panchanathan said in a Sept. 12 news release. The $10 million Ideas Lab grant is spread out across a dozen HBCUs.

The investment is a positive step after a long history of HBCUs struggling for both recognition of their past scientific contributions and support for future innovation, said Adam Harris, a senior fellow with the education policy program at the left-leaning think tank New America and the author of The State Must Provide: Why America’s Colleges Have Always Been Unequal—and How to Set Them Right.

“The fact that the harm in denying these institutions funds was so intentional, the efforts to address that have to be just as intentional,” said Harris, who noted that federal science and engineering support for HBCUs increased by nearly 20 percent between 2021 and 2022.

While “that’s huge,” he said, “There is a larger coordinated, collective effort that’s going to be necessary to address that legacy of intentional discrimination.”

The Ideas Lab is part of NSF’s larger HBCU–Excellence in Research program, which Congress established in 2018 in response to what it characterized as the NSF’s “troubling track record” of funding HBCUs.

Between 1999 and 2019, NSF grant proposals by white researchers were consistently funded at rates above the overall average, while proposals from most other racial groups—and Black scientists in particular—were funded at rates below the overall average, according to a 2022 article published in the peer-reviewed journal eLife.

The Ideas Lab award will be split into four groups of HBCUs, including Tuskegee, North Carolina A&T and Hampton University, that will collaborate on projects over the next three years “to identify and define the scope of the unique challenges faced by HBCUs in meeting education and research needs” and develop “novel ideas about how these challenges may be addressed,” according to the news release from the NSF, which sent $147.95 million to HBCUs in 2023.

Although about one-fifth of Black students who earn an undergraduate STEM degree do so at an HBCU, Black scientists remain significantly underrepresented in the STEM and health sciences workforce—which studies show can lead to racially biased scientific inquiries and disparate health outcomes.

“Many HBCUs have smaller research budgets compared to larger institutions, making it difficult for them to compete for research grants and collaborations with industry partners,” an NSF spokesperson said in an email. “As a result, students at HBCUs may have fewer opportunities to participate in hands-on research experiences at their home institution, which are essential for developing skills and building a strong STEM portfolio.”

Disparities in Partnerships

Perpetuating the predicament, HBCUs are less likely than their R-1 peers to become the prime awardee on a federally funded project. That designation allows an institution to list the federal agency as one of its funders, which carries cachet in the research world and makes awardees more competitive for future grants.

While HBCUs with some of the biggest research capacities, including Morgan State and Howard Universities, have been the prime awardee on numerous grants, it’s less common for scientists at smaller universities, said Curry, the North Carolina A&T chemist, reflecting on his time at the much smaller Tuskegee.

“When you pair [with] an HBCU that may not have as many resources as a typical predominantly white institution, it creates a disparity in the partnership and the research results,” said Curry, who is representing North Carolina A&T in an Ideas Lab project focused on broadening participation in the semiconductor manufacturing and research among African Americans. “That disparity remains even as the partnership has been completed.”

And that’s one of the problems the Ideas Lab is working to address. Since it’s limited to HBCU participation, the grant not only guarantees that an HBCU will have the opportunity to manage a project—and put the NSF on its roster of funders—but it also helps build a foundation that will allow HBCUs to spearhead more projects in the future.

While Curry acknowledged that the $10 million supporting the Ideas Lab “isn’t a large sum of money,” he said, “It’s not the amount of money that’s key.” Instead, “the key is that this is an all HBCU-led effort,” which he believes will “develop the necessary framework for really advancing research capacities, because now the cultural mismatch and disparities aren’t there.”

Challenge of the ‘Built Environment’

And more prime roles on federal grants typically lead to more philanthropic donations and corporate awards—and vice versa—said Bruce Jones, senior vice president for research at Howard, which is also closing in on R-1 status.

“A federal agency may offer opportunities to pilot research and take that pilot that began as a small federal grant and go to Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and secure a larger grant,” Jones said. “It’s in HBCUs’ best interest to broaden our support for research.”

That strategy has been working for Howard, whose medical school received a record-breaking $175 million gift from Bloomberg Philanthropies in August as part of a larger $600 million donation to the nation’s four historically Black medical schools. The money will go toward training “more medical professionals to care for communities of color,” according to a university news release.

But Chad Womack, senior director of National STEM Programs and Initiatives at the United Negro College Fund, said such access-focused initiatives need to be complemented by similarly large-scale investments in scientific research.

Having that would allow HBCUs’ medical schools and their undergraduate ecosystems to attract more talented new faculty with the promise of being able to “perfect and work on their craft just as a predominantly white school would offer them,” he said. “The built environment is really the challenge.”