SPEAKER_03
ASEE's Race and Ethnicity and Higher Education Project has released the 2024 STAVIS report and updated the accompanying website. Supported by the Mellon Foundation, the report provides an updated overview of key topics in higher education, including undergraduate and graduate student enrollment, completion, student debt, and financing, by race and ethnicity. Explore the findings and download the report at www.

equityandhirehead.org. Hello and welcome to .edu, the Higher Education Policy Podcast from the American Council on Education.

Later in the episode, Mushdott Gunj and I will be joined by Adam Harris, a reporter for The Atlantic and the author of the recently published The State Must Provide, a deeply insightful and fascinating look into inequities in higher education. But before we get to that conversation, I am joined by my always delightful colleague, Sarah Spreitzer, to talk about the less than delightful scene here in Washington. And Sarah, how are you doing and what is happening?

SPEAKER_00
I mean, it is delightful, John. We're keeping busy, right?

SPEAKER_03
We have different definitions of delightful, Sarah.

SPEAKER_00
I mean, we talk every week how busy we are, but I think definitely when you leave everything until the end of the year, when you keep kicking the can down the road, it makes for a very exciting fall. So I...

SPEAKER_03
A very exciting and high-risk fall, yes.

SPEAKER_00
Very high-risk. And so I know you've been following the news on reconciliation really closely, and there's a lot in there, or at least was in the House bill being proposed for higher education. But that seems to have stalled a bit.

SPEAKER_03
Yes, stalled is maybe an overly positive interpretation of what's happened. As we record this last week, the reconciliation bill, which has always been tied to the infrastructure bill, basically the agreement between progressives who are in favor of the big reconciliation bill, social spending, moderates who are in favor of the infrastructure bill within the Democratic Party, the agreement was always they would do these together. There was an agreement they would do a vote on infrastructure by Thursday of last week.

Thursday came, they were going to do a vote. It became clear that without an agreement on what they were going to do in reconciliation, progressives wouldn't support it. So the whole thing fell apart.

It actually goes back to where it's been for a long time, which is moderates like Senator Manchin of West Virginia and Senator Sinema of Arizona don't want to spend the three and a half trillion that was previously agreed to on this bill. They think it's excessive. They are concerned about where some of the money is being spent and how it's being spent.

And so right now, after this deadline came and went, there's a whole lot less urgency, but the issue remains the same. How big will the bill be? And once you know how big it is, where do things start getting cut out of it? And frankly, can you make it small enough that moderates will join, but still big enough that progressives will support it? It's not really clear where any of those things stand. I think the belief in Washington right now is if it's going to get done, and I think fewer and fewer people are confident it will get done at this point, it's going to be a smaller bill, which means things will be cut out of it.

And there's a lot of jockeying already between the different constituencies. There's a huge range of constituencies who have interests in that bill, including higher education, which as you said, the House version had $111 billion through a number of programs, but most primarily a free community college program. Already there's talks about how do programs get shifted? Where does the money come from? Sir Manchin himself has said he wants to means test free community college and limit it really to people below a certain financial threshold.

All of those things are in discussion. It's a great case study of lobbying and issue advocacy. Unfortunately, however, it's all somewhat irrelevant until they settle on a top line number and that seems further away than ever.

SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it seems eerily quiet, right? Because the House, I think, was at $3.5 trillion, and then in the Senate, they've been talking about what their top line number is, but they can't even come to an agreement, right? I heard $1.5 trillion over the weekend, and then today I saw news that the White House was talking about a $2 trillion top line number.

You can't even start having those conversations until you actually decide on a number. And then on the infrastructure bill, it's interesting because it was called the bipartisan infrastructure package, right? Because it was bipartisan, but it seems that Republicans are being very hands-off right now because it's tied to the reconciliation bill.

SPEAKER_03
Yeah, it's an interesting process. A lot of it, your reconciliation is really an internal Democratic party debate. This is a bill that would move without Republican votes whatsoever.

The bipartisan infrastructure bill, like it's the bipartisan infrastructure bill, is bypassed with Republican votes in both the House or in the Senate and it would in the House. But the progressives, their only leverage to keep reconciliation, to have moderate support of reconciliation bill, is to say, we're going to hold the infrastructure bill hostage. These are paired together.

They have to go one way or the other. Even if it wasn't the strategy, it's simply the only way they would pass because that's the leverage each side has over the other. It's a mess, really.

It's a mess, but it's a pretty good example of modern congressional politics.

SPEAKER_00
But we did get a continuing resolution last week that takes us to mid-December, so we won't have a government shutdown.

SPEAKER_03
Not quite mid-December, December 3rd.

SPEAKER_00
Sorry, so beginning of December 3rd. But I bet many of our listeners are starting to hear about the debt ceiling and where that plays into everything. So you have reconciliation, you have infrastructure hanging out there, and now we have a debt ceiling that we believe will be reached on October 18th.

Is that correct?

SPEAKER_03
So Janet Yellen has said that they believe October 18th is X-Day. Today we hit our debt ceiling limits. That's, as we record this all less than two weeks away, you know, it's an interesting thing.

I saw the statistic. I think this would be the 100th time, or perhaps we've already had the 100th time where Congress has voted to raise the debt ceiling since 1950, I believe. We do this a lot, obviously.

We've been doing it more and more in recent years because government has been spending more and more in recent years. You know, it used to be pretty pro forma. It's clearly not anymore.

We've never defaulted, so we don't know exactly what would happen. But I will say most of the analysts who seem to have credibility and authority in this area don't have positive things to say about what might happen. I think the mid-ground opinion appears to be an economic collapse equivalent to 2008, which is not a great scenario.

And one, you would think that Congress would be eager to figure out a way to avoid, but that's not what's happening, right, Sarah? I mean, this is a very partisan issue, and Senate Republicans, in particular led by Mitch McConnell, have dug in. They do not want to have a vote that can be used against them. In an election that's just about a year away, in which a 50-50 split in the Senate means that the majority is really up for grabs, and he doesn't want his members to take a vote saying they increased the debt.

They are focusing back on being fiscally conservative and restraining spending and corralling government spending after a lot of spending under the Trump administration. Who knows? But so far, both sides are very much dug in, and as we stand 13 days out, we could be on the brink of a very devastating economic impact.

SPEAKER_00
Which actually brings us back, John, to reconciliation, right? Because Republicans had originally said that they wanted the Dems to attach the debt ceiling to the reconciliation. And I remember when the outline came out on reconciliation, both you and I were like, why isn't the debt ceiling in here? And then the idea was, we'll tie the debt ceiling to the CR. That didn't work.

So now we're back to how do you pass the debt ceiling when it is so divided on partisan lines without trying to do it with the 50 votes that you would have in reconciliation? So do you think we're back to that discussion? Is that how they're likely going to move it?

SPEAKER_03
You know, it's a really good point. And I think the problem we have is that Democrats remained convinced for a long time that Republicans would essentially break, that 10 Republicans would move to avoid hitting the debt ceiling limit. And they would be able to get a vote.

In fact, they've scheduled another vote in the Senate for tomorrow to do just that. On the debt ceiling, hopefully trying to make Republicans vote either in favor of raising debt ceiling or a vote for what they would say is economic collapse. It does not seem like Republicans will budge at this point.

Why didn't the Democrats just do it in reconciliation? Then they have this reconciliation package going forward. Well, for one, like we talked about, reconciliation isn't going anywhere either. So it's not likely had they attached it to their bigger bill, it would have been done in time.

They made the calculation correctly there. But they probably didn't make the correct calculation as they could do it through reconciliation independently of the bigger Build Back Better Act bill. The problem with that is it takes time to do that.

If they were going to do that, they should have started that about a week and a half ago. By the most conservative estimates, it'll take two to three weeks to create a reconciliation procedure just for the debt ceiling limit. Like I said, we're 13 days out from what we think will be the debt ceiling limit.

It's frankly, in a lot of ways, too late. And the Republicans in this way have a lot of leverage to draw that out, to actually make that process not work or at least not work within the timeframe. Up in the air, like you said, Sarah, we'll get our go bags ready and start collecting bottled water and whatnot, canned goods and prepare for the economic collapse.

It'll be great.

SPEAKER_00
But I think for our higher ed colleagues that are listening to this, the big takeaway is that there's a lot of uncertainty. It's impacting reconciliation and the infrastructure debate. We don't have to worry about a government shutdown, but probably as a nation, we have bigger things to worry about, at least for the next two weeks.

And it's taking all of the oxygen out of the air when we try and talk about other issues with Congress. Like, I don't know about you, but I've been sending emails to staff saying, well, you might have time now to talk about these issues and not a lot of responses. Because I think all the time is being taken up to try and solve these bigger issues.

SPEAKER_03
Yeah, no, I think that's the same experience I've had. There's a lot of, understandably, a lot of focus on these big issues. And reasonably enough, too, it's very hard to say, we need to do this when we don't know what's going to happen with reconciliation.

What are you going to do in higher education policy? Change is significantly if there's a free community college plan in place or not. Certainly, a large-scale economic event would change a lot of different factors. Plus, we haven't even really mentioned this, but we are still dealing with COVID.

And in fact, some of the things in terms of what campuses are experiencing, AC has been working on recently, right, Sarah?

SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah. So we have, well, you know, it's also when Congress is stalled, we seem to get really busy on the regulatory side. And so there's a lot that the Biden administration has been doing around trying to get more Americans vaccinated, including in executive order around vaccine mandates, which is impacting higher ed.

And John, neither you or I are an expert. Our other colleagues are working on this issue a lot. And so they've put together an issue brief that we will post along with this podcast that kind of talks about colleges and universities' obligations under the vaccine mandate, or at least what we know so far.

SPEAKER_03
And you can find those on AC's website. And we'll also link to it on the show notes for this episode. So basically, Sarah, what we have to share with people is that everything's chaos, nothing's certain, and we may be perched on the brink of a global collapse.

So generally, good news, right?

SPEAKER_00
Yeah. And I think, you know, in other good news categories, our institutions are still working to help afghan, displaced Afghan students and scholars, even with all the chaos going on. I mean, talking about chaotic Afghanistan.

So we've also put together a resource for institutions that are looking to help displaced students and scholars coming from Afghanistan. And I know that we'll be posting that also. We put that together with some of the other higher education associations, including our friends at IIE, AAU, and APLU.

And we really see it as a living document because we're learning new things every day about the issues facing these students and scholars. And I think the administration is trying to figure out what flexibilities are needed or what resources are needed. And so that document's going to be updated as we learn new things and as we continue to help those students.

SPEAKER_03
And with that, we will be back right after the break with Mishataka and I talking with Adam Harris.

SPEAKER_01
And we are back. And we are joined today by a very special guest, Adam Harris, who is the author of the recently published book, The State Must Provide, a narrative history of racial inequality in higher education. Adam Harris is a staff writer at the Atlantic, covering national politics and a national fellow at New America.

I first met Adam when he was previously a reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Education, and he recovered federal education policy. Among his many accolades, Adam was named to the Forbes 30 under 30 list. That's quite a feather in your cap, Adam.

Congratulations on the book. One of the blurbs on the back is from our president, Ted Mitchell, who called it a tour to force. And I really have to agree.

I mean, there's incredible research in here. I love learning about John Fee and some of the other pioneers, who I frankly and sadly didn't know much about. It's not easy to make history this interesting.

You did a fabulous job. I cannot recommend this book enough to anybody who cares about higher education and segregation and what we need to reckon with as a society going forward. So enormous congratulations, Adam.

Thank you. I really appreciate it. Can we start big picture and sort of basic? Adam, what made you want to write this book?

SPEAKER_02
Yeah. So I think at the beginning of the book, I talk about my own experience at Alabama and right. You know, I got to campus and, you know, it's a beautiful campus, right? I had been there before my mom went to Alabama and my uncle had been a drum major there.

My sister was there on campus. We dropped her off a year prior. And so I got to campus and it actually snowed.

It was rare that it snowed in Alabama. And so it just made the campus even that more much more beautiful. But the semester wore on.

I started getting, you know, you have your classes and you actually start getting real homework and you actually get busy. And so I needed to sort of get away. And so I wanted to kind of wanted to study.

I wanted to do a little bit more work and our library would be closing within the hours. So I figured, you know, there was a university across town, another public institution that I could go to that had a library that was open, you know, three hours longer than ours. So I get over there.

It's the University of Alabama Huntsville. And I noticed that, you know, they have newer buildings in Alabama A&M. They have, you know, if they're been potholes, I didn't see any of them.

Just all of this sort of manicuring and regular maintenance that some institutions have. And it was interesting to me why my own campus hadn't had that same routine maintenance. It appeared that you age did.

And, you know, of course, as I started covering higher education, I started poking in and notice that my experience between that HBCU and that predominantly white institution wasn't necessarily an anomaly, but was actually in fact more often the norm. But there was actually a second piece that I actually don't write about in the book that kind of was a bit of a spark for me. My dad actually went to, he had a track scholarship.

He went to the University of Louisville when he first started college. Ultimately ended up stopping out and didn't necessarily have the sort of a care and attention around him at the institution at the time. And when he went back to school, he went to Alabama State.

And he often talked about, you know, if he was, you know, if he was hungry, he was able to, you know, go to one of his professor's houses and like they would they would ride dinner and just all these all these different things that were like the wraparound services and extra care that the institutions and the folks who worked at them were providing. And so it didn't necessarily make sense to me why there was such difference in the experience that I was having, right? I had great professors. My dad had great professors, clearly.

And the funding mechanisms that the institutions were receiving. And I was trying to find the roots of that. So that was kind of the roots of the book.

And as I got into covering higher education, I really just kind of learned more about how much of it is based and rooted in state and federal policy.

SPEAKER_01
In your research, did you find, are there specific data points that that sort of surprised you about the inequalities and sort of the funding mechanisms and the the ways in which the states have set up their support for higher education?

SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I think one of the initial ones was, you know, I'd always known that, you know, several HBCUs, how they were founded, how the sort of separate but equal system was was, you know, fundamentally created a separate but unequal system was fundamentally created. But I think digging into some of the kind of granular details of how states studied the ways that they were underfunding their institutions for a long time. Right. You have Kentucky in the early 1900s, bringing in a professor to actually study Kentucky's state normal and industrial Institute for Negroes. And they say, hey, the guy comes in and he's like, well, your girl's dorm is fire-prone and it lacks fire escape.

She boy's dorms in a mud puddle. You know, your electrical plant doesn't have any power. Your teachers are underpaid.

Your buildings are old. And the state's like, well, we have $40,000. You guys can fix it with that.

He's like, well, it's actually going to be much more expensive in the state. Even as they're saying in the halls of the state house, like, oh, well, we will spare no expense to bring our institution up. They were actively expiring those expenses.

And so to acknowledge and to see the ways that states continually studied the problem and still continue to underfund the institutions and not address them, it was, I don't know, it was necessarily shocking, but it was revelatory in a lot of ways. It sort of explained a lot, right? That there's always been this acknowledgement that the institutions were being underfunded, but it's just what happens with that knowledge. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03
And, you know, when we were talking before we started actually reporting, we talked a little bit about how your book has really come out at this kind of incredible moment. In fact, on a lot of these themes and these issues. And one of the things actually, I just came here from talking to a group about the reconciliation legislation that's being proposed in the Congress.

And there's $111 billion for higher education in that bill. And normally what we've seen in the past is like we saw with the relief bills or in previous things, this money goes directly to the institutions on a formula, it goes to the students. This is different, right? There are some proposals in here that get at this equity of funding across institutions, money that goes directly to HBCUs and tribal colleges and universities and other MSIs, the free community college plan.

You know, I'm curious, you did such extensive research in these patterns of funding and where the inequalities arose. Is this, you know, looking at this, is this finally, you know, a step in the right direction? Is this the right approach? Is this too little too late? I'm curious what you think about all this.

SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I think that this is the step in the right direction, right? We actually have not seen, you know, legitimate like substantive injections of funding into the institutions in this sort of way, right? Where we're talking about billions of dollars at this point rather than, you know, oh, the federal government's doing $50 million to the institutions, to where, you know, a place like, you know, Ole Miss can make $100 million in private donations in a year. Or, you know, a Harvard or Yale is like, you know, our investment return was a billion dollars this past year, right? So to make those sort of sizable investments is new and it is a step in the right direction. I think that the point we need to get to is to sort of make those investments kind of recurring.

So that it's not like, oh, this is a one-time thing. Because if you think about the, so if they were given that money that they were owed at the time, so it's kind of like, you know, when you have a toothbrush and, you know, you've got $3.50, you get to brush your teeth and you get to do your routine maintenance and it's great.

You get your toothbrush. But if you don't have a toothbrush and it turns into a cavity, it's going to be more expensive to fix that cavity. And if you don't have, you know, the money to fix that cavity, then it turns into, okay, I need a root canal and now it's $1,000 to fix this issue because I had to put a crown in it, rather than, you know, $3.

50 for that routine maintenance. And so you have to think about the way that sort of lack of funding and the underfunding is compounded over the years. And that's where that sort of recurring bit of funding comes in.

Because the institutions, yes, they are receiving the money now and they're going to be able to do things with it, but they are able to plan out that sort of sustainable future with a one-time injection, right? So to say, okay, we have, we will have this money for five years and then after five years, what are we going to do? So, you know, there have been proposals. Denise Smith from the Century Foundation just released a report that was proposing a $40 billion endowment fund for HBCUs. That was, you know, this money was going to go directly to the endowments in order, in order so that they're able to plan for the future.

And that's something that a lot of the institutions have not had the privilege to do.

SPEAKER_03
Yeah. And first of all, I'm impressed you pulled that toothbrush metaphor off. That was really well done.

I wasn't sure where you're going when you started and it's like a toothbrush, but it's a great metaphor. And I think it's, you know, it's an interesting thing too. The federal government is really stepping in to provide these funds.

When we've seen you talked about the states have, you know, pretty poor trackery with number of lawsuits recently where states have had to make large payments to their HBCUs for underfunding them for decades. You know, I do think it's a little curious, you know, some of the discussion has also been about, you mentioned, you know, Harvard or Yale with the huge endowment, the idea of providing an endowment for these institutions. Another thing that's been talked about is this idea, are there institutions that owe HBCUs and other institutions something? And how can they leverage those resources they have and have accumulated historically and frankly, inequitably to help those institutions get back to where they should be? Yeah, I think, you know, there are a couple

SPEAKER_02
of ways that that can be done, right? If it's a state level institution, right? One of the ones I often point back to is Mississippi because like the one-to-one there is so glaring, right? In the late 1860s, early 1870s, when, you know, white parents were afraid that the University of Mississippi was going to be open to black students, the faculty at the university wrote a letter to the local paper and said, hey, we want everyone to know that we would rather all resign and the university closed than enroll a black student. Meanwhile, in 1871, after Alcorn State is founded, you know, they're given a guaranteed appropriation by the state of $50,000 for a decade. Four years later, 1875, that appropriation is reduced to $15,000.

A year later, that appropriation is reduced again to $5,500. Meanwhile, Ole Miss is having their appropriation increased. So you start to see that wealth stratification of the institutions develop.

And, you know, for an institution like that, there is a sort of responsibility as you're all in that same university system, the IHO, to sort of help out the institutions that were shut out of funding when you were being showered with it. But on top of that, for the institutions that have been studying slavery, studying their relationships to slavery, right? The University of Virginia just recently released the report, I guess it was a year or two ago now, where, you know, they said Thomas Jefferson was saying he literally could not imagine a University of Virginia without slavery at its root, right? And if you think about what they are getting back from their endowment returns now, maybe a percentage of those endowment returns goes to an institution like, you know, St. Augustine's University.

Maybe it goes to an institution like Stoneman College. It doesn't have to be, you know, the, it's like, oh, you have to give all of your endowment returns this year. It's like, no, if you say for two decades, or for a decade, we are going to give a significant portion of our endowment returns to this institution to help build their endowment.

That's a significant step. And so I think that there are ways that the institutions can do this and can live up to, kind of like what Prairie View A&M's President Ruth Simmons told me a couple of years ago, right? Institutions, universities have to tell the truth. They have to be truth telling institution if they work towards those higher ideals, because if they don't, they just kind of become another corrupt institution like any others that, you know, deserve scrutiny.

And so I think the more that the institution can put, you know, that money behind the words, behind that research, the better off

SPEAKER_01
they will be. Before President Simmons was president at Prairie View, she was president at Brown. And I know that she, you know, undertook sort of a commission there to study Brown's connections to slavery.

And I know other institutions have been the same. Have you been following sort of what's been happening on the ground there and anything interesting that you've observed, anything that's potentially useful for HBCUs and other MSS?

SPEAKER_02
Yeah. So, you know, some institutions, Brown, Georgetown, they kind of recently established basically scholarship funds, kind of reparation scholarship fund for students of, in Georgetown's case in particular, it's of the descendants of the 272 people who were sold in order to fund the institution. And I think that that is a good step.

But you also have to think about scale in this, right? So if you look at a place like Oklahoma, there are more Black students that attend Langston University, which has a student population of something like 1900, and then there are the University of Oklahoma, which has a population of upwards of 20,000 students. And so I think that it's good that they are creating these funds to bring more students into the institution, but that has a cap on it. And, you know, if you're thinking broadly, it's like maybe they should be helping, you know, in a state like North Carolina, where 52% of Black students who attend a public college in North Carolina do so at one of the community colleges.

25% of them do so at one of the HBCUs and 22% do so at one of the 12 PWIs. And so, you know, thinking about that scale, thinking about the, I think that it can't just be, we're creating a scholarship fund for more students to attend our institution if there is like a cap on that. And there's like, you know, the reach of that is in some ways limited.

I think it has to

SPEAKER_01
be more expansive. Well, one of the things that's so troubling about sort of the trends in higher education is that at many of these institutions in many states, the number of Black students that are attending the flagship universities of predominantly White institutions is declining over time. How does that, what do we do with that, Adam? I mean, how should we be thinking about sort of remedies of institutional segregation, discrimination, slavery, you know, as we think about what we should do with our Black students, where they should go? How do you think about this?

SPEAKER_02
Yeah, so, you know, in a place like, so in Alabama, for instance, right, Auburn University has fewer Black students in total now than it did in 2002. And it's still, you know, roughly around 5% Black students in 1980s when a federal judge, you know, on the same day that Bo Jackson won the Heisman, a federal judge said that it was the most segregated institution in the state, they had about 2% or 3% Black students. And so that percentage has not grown much over that, you know, 30 plus years.

And so I think that there is, one of the things that needs to be done is an honest assessment of where the institutions are. And I think that, you know, a lot of colleges are looking at their numbers, they're saying, you know, how do we increase enrollment? How do we, you know, increase our, you know, minoritized and marginalized populations on campus? And I think one of them is creating an environment that students feel safe in, an environment where students feel that they can be nourished, right? My parents, you know, I looked broadly, I, you know, thought about going to Cornell, thought about going to Stanford, thought about, you know, going to several different places and applied to several different places. And I ultimately ended up going to Alabama A&M because my parents had always, you know, put in my mind and told me that, you know, you are going to have, you are going to be, you know, you don't have to perform being anything other than yourself.

You can just be your full self at this institution. And I, you know, for a long time I thought that, you know, it's just something that your parents say, you know, but then once you actually experience it, it became really clear. And so I think that the more that institutions can create that environment where students feel nurtured, the better off they will be.

But I don't know, it's difficult because, you know, with things for, particularly for highly selective institutions that use race conscious admissions and things like that, it's, they're limited in what they can do in order to, you know, kind of explicitly increase those enrollments thanks to the Bakke case in 1978. So that's a, it's a very, it's a very difficult question, but it's also, I think there's a piece of it that involves rethinking where and how, like at a state level, like how we're funding institutions, like community colleges, public regional institutions, including HBCUs and MSIs, like, so the institutions that have large shares of minority and, you know, minoritized and marginalized populations, you know, there should be a funding mechanism so that those institutions are given the funding that they need in order to support those student populations.

SPEAKER_01
Adam, you mentioned a second ago, race conscious admissions, and I'm curious, what do you think the future of race conscious admissions is in this country? You know, we've seen states move away from it in referendum California, for instance, and, you know, I think all of us who are watching think that the court will probably take it out, the Supreme Court will probably take up this issue in the next couple of terms. What have you, what have you thought about

SPEAKER_02
the future of race conscious admissions? I can't, so my general thought is particularly at this moment, right? If you look across the court, you have a, you know, the court that has been, you know, rather skeptical of race conscious admissions practices, and, you know, you have a case that is, you know, built to challenge it, right? Yes, yes, race conscious admissions has stood up against the test of time, in part because it is, it is so, you know, affirmative action is so weak, because it's so watered down. It's not a tool for general, like, making up for the legacy of racial discrimination, it's a tool for broad diversity, whatever, however you define that. And so, you know, if you're, if you're reading the tea leaves, it does not look, it does not look good for, for race conscious admissions coming down the pipe.

And I think that with that in mind, institutions and leadership start thinking about what comes next, what do you do if race conscious admissions does go away? Because we've already seen that there are precipitous declines in black and brown enrollments, you've seen it in California, you saw it in mission, saw it in Texas, like we know what happens when, when affirmative action policies and race conscious admissions goes away. And so you have to start thinking about, you know, in the same way that we were discussing earlier about institutions trying to make up for their legacies of slavery and segregation, you know, maybe part of that is the institutions that have historically served these student populations, maybe those institutions have some responsibility to help those institutions or, you know, rethink the ways that they are, you know, using things like SAT scores, ACT scores and their admissions practices. Just, I think that institutions will have to have to get creative in order to continue serving, you know, historically minoritized

SPEAKER_03
marginalized populations. Yeah, and, and Adam, transitioning a little bit, you know, I, the first question I asked you, I talked about how timely your book was. And this is sort of related to that there has been over the last few months, this incredible public attention on critical race theory.

And as the author of a book who very compellingly and very clearly details racial inequality in our systems of funding and our systems of education, you know, I'm curious to get your perspective on this, you know, or a frame from editorializing, but this interesting uproar suddenly about what was, you know, for decades in obscure academic theory and, and, and what you think that says about the moment we're in right now.

SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I think that there has historically been a tendency to romanticize things about American history to sort of do the, the Cliff Notes version of American history to say that, yeah, it was the, the constitutional side, and then you have the Declaration of Independence and the founding fathers were great. And then we had the, there was that Civil War thing. And then, you know, then you have the 13th, 14th, 15th amendments.

And then some other stuff happens. And then Martin Luther King gives his, I have a dream speech and you have the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and 1965. And then we have a Martin Luther King day for, you know, reasons that we don't want to discuss.

And then, you know, we had, we had President Barack Obama, right? We've, that we have been on an upward swing of racial progress for our entire history. And it glosses over some of the sticky details. And I think those, those sticky details are where you can begin to make progress because those sticky details are, are they, they stick to the systems that they were, they were created in.

And there is, it kind of within that push, I think there is a discomfort among a significant share of the population to, to really think critically about the ways that systems have been set up and produce unequal outcomes. And that in their, in their construction, they were constructed inequitably. They were constructed on unequal terms, right? You, at a place like Iowa State, there's a reason why it didn't enroll its first black student for 30 years.

You know, from, from when it first received its Merrill Act funding. And that was because by that 30 years later, the federal government said, well, you actually can't discriminate against black students and your, your higher education system, you at least need to create a separate institution or you can, you can begin enrolling, enrolling black students. And so they, they enroll George Washington Carver.

And so, you know, I think that there is one of the things that I've thought a lot about in this broader conversation with this book that examines the roots of systemic racism and higher education is, you know, there's a push against telling the truth because the truth is uncomfortable. And the more people don't want you to tell that truth, the more important that truth becomes. And so I think that, you know, as, as, you know, writers, journalists, historians, etc.

, everyone just kind of really has a responsibility to continue telling that truth in this moment. Because if we don't, you know, I think that you, you end up in that same cycle of inequality where the systems kind of that have momentum just, just kind of continue to perpetuate themselves.

SPEAKER_01
Can I ask you to put your crystal ball on or your, that's not right. Can I ask you to look into your crystal ball, put your fortune teller hat on? Let me grab it. Where do we go from here? I mean, what, what conversation are we having 10 years from now, 20 years from now? I know you're a new parent.

I mean, what conversation you can be having with your, your kids, you know, when they're, when they're looking at schools in 15, 18 years?

SPEAKER_02
Yeah, you know, I would hope that we're not having the same conversation. I would hope that things are, are changing. That, that, you know, institutions are, you know, enrolling student bodies that are reflective of the states that they serve.

That, you know, institutions are being funded in ways especially if they're, they're, you know, kind of doing outsized work and educating first-generation students, educating low-income students, educating black and brown students. I think that it is important that we close the funding gaps, the sort of inequitable funding gaps. I would hope that, that 10, 20 years from now, we would be moving to a place where we're doing that.

And, you know, there, there are bills now, I think that the, the, you know, President Biden's infrastructure bill and, and his, his, you know, big legislation is, is a step towards that. I think that, you know, Representative Alma Adams bill likewise is a step towards that. But I, I just recently, actually yesterday, I gave the convocation address at St.

Augustine's University down in North Carolina. And, you know, I think that we should, we need to recognize that even as we, you know, characterize the institutions as, you know, these are HBCUs. We should also recognize kind of diversity among those institutions, right? There, and there are some HBCUs that now, like Howard has a sizable endowment now, whereas an institution like St.

Augustine's may not have that same sizable endowment. So also looking across the board and saying that, you know, we, we need to do the work to lift all of these institutions up rather than in simply a select few. And I think the more that we can do that and, and have a more holistic picture of not only HBCUs, but the entire education sector, as opposed to kind of focusing on a specific set of institutions, the better off we will be.

And I hope that's the place we get to, and, and 10 to 20 years. And as you mentioned, I have kids and I'm still, I'm working on convincing my wife to, to have them go down to Alabama and because it was, you know, it's like, oh yeah, you know, now it's a legacy. How's that going? It's going well.

It's going well. She likes it. She likes Huntsville.

My folks still live down there. So it's a, it's a great city. And it's also a little plug for Huntsville, one of the fastest growing cities in the US.

So, you know, our producer, Laurie,

SPEAKER_03
is in Huntsville and she's always singing its praises. So now it's, now I'm getting it from two sides. So maybe we'll have to rethink what I think about Huntsville.

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02
We have great breweries down there. You know, we got the Maddits and the Trash Pandas are down there. So yeah, baseball team.

You'll have to give me a moustache to our, then show us all

SPEAKER_03
the good breweries. Absolutely. Adam, it has been great having you on.

You know, I think would be very, very easy to keep this conversation going for a long time because you're just so engaging to talk with. And I'll add my kudos to Moustachs at the beginning. The book is not just informative and exhaustively detailed.

It's fun to read. You know, in a way, I was a history major. I don't like Moustachs comment about it's, you know, history and how boring it is.

I love history, but this is good history. And certainly I would recommend anyone who hasn't yet picked it up. What are you doing? Get out there, get this book and read it.

It's fantastic. But thank you for taking the time to speak with us today. Absolutely.

And thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Adam.

As always, you can check out earlier episodes and subscribe to .edu on Apple, Google podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. For show notes and links to resources mentioned in the episode, you can go to our website at a c e n e t .

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They do an incredible job making this happen and making Moustachs, Sarinai sound as good as possible. And finally, before we leave, thank you so much for listening. you