News Articles
Jun 8, 2026
By Jamal Watson, Ph.D.
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — On a Friday morning inside the gleaming new science center at Johnson C. Smith University, a room full of HBCU presidents, chancellors, scholars, and higher education advocates gathered for what organizers framed not as a moment of reflection, but as a reckoning.
“This is not a season of reflection,” said Dr. Herman J. Felton Jr., president of Wiley University and one of the founders of the Higher Education Leadership Foundation (H.E.L.F), as he opened the foundation’s inaugural "A Futurist Symposium: Mapping the Future for the HBCU." "It is a season of provocation."
The two-day gathering, held on the JCSU campus, brought together leaders from across the HBCU ecosystem — from small private institutions to flagship universities, from philanthropic intermediaries to corporate partners, all under the banner of charting the future for these storied institutions. For a decade, H.E.L.F has convened these gatherings to strengthen the pipeline of HBCU leadership and to wrestle with the structural challenges confronting Black higher education institutions. This year, with federal funding streams under threat, enrollment pressures intensifying, and the political climate growing more hostile, the stakes felt considerably higher.
The Charlotte convening came just weeks after H.E.L.F.'s spring gathering at Virginia State University, where the foundation brought together presidents, board members, scholars, and executive search practitioners to examine what it called the “unreadied president” — the gap between the skills and preparation most HBCU leaders carry into the presidency and the full weight of what the role demands. That gathering centered on presidential succession and board governance, drawing on a detailed case study of the leadership transition at Claflin University from President Emeritus Dr. Henry Tisdale to current President Dwaun Warmack and surfacing hard questions about the relationship between presidents and their boards and the imperative of proactive, trust-building communication between institutional leaders and their governing bodies. Taken together, the two convenings formed something of a two-part argument: that HBCU leadership must be both better prepared and better supported, and that the structural and financial challenges ahead leave no room for either drift or delay.
Johnson C. Smith University President Dr. Valerie Kinloch welcomed guests to a campus steeped in history and, she made clear, intent on shaping its own future. Founded in 1867, JCSU was established, like so many HBCUs, as a direct response to systems that denied Black Americans access to higher education.
“There has to always be light, particularly in dark times,” Kinloch said. “And as we know, there are times for us that are just opportunities for us to continue to exhale, to see, and to be what people might say is impossible — that we see as possible.”
The Weight of the Moment
The urgency behind the gathering was unmistakable. Felton, invoking the biblical call to “write the vision and make it plain,” reminded the assembled leaders that the foundation had made a wager ten years ago: that the future of HBCUs would be determined by the quality of those prepared to lead them. The wager, he said, had proved correct. What the founders had underestimated were the forces arrayed against the institutions those leaders would be called to steward.
“Endowment gaps becoming endowment chasms,” Felton said. “The grace we once received is spent. The benefit of the doubt has been withdrawn. And the champions who sang our praises, in many corners, have gone silent, or crossed to the other side of the road and passed us by.”
The opening panel, moderated by Dr. Yolanda Spivey-Watson, president of Complete College America, centered on what HBCU presidents most need to get right before they can reasonably expect major donors and philanthropic partners to make significant investments in their institutions. Dr. Michael Lomax, the president and CEO of the United Negro College Fund (UNCF), offered characteristically direct counsel: focus first on students, then on faculty, and then — unavoidably — on fundraising. A president who cannot sell the vision of an institution, he said, cannot effectively lead it.
“You have to become an adept salesperson,” Lomax said. "You can't rely on somebody else. You gotta do that.”
Lomax reflected on his nearly 23 years at UNCF, noting that when he arrived, the organization was raising $60 to $70 million annually. When it closes its books at the end of the current fiscal year, UNCF will have raised $297 million. The lesson he drew was not about scale for its own sake, but about what becomes possible when institutional leadership is paired with focused, relentless advocacy. He announced that UNCF has built a $5 million endowment for each of its 36 member institutions, structured to deliver a 4 percent annual payout in perpetuity — roughly $150,000 per institution this year, with a goal of reaching $2 million annually per school within five years.
“Readiness is the individual institution's responsibility,” Lomax said. “We can't do for an institution what the institution doesn't do for themselves.”
Dr. Harry L. Williams, president of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF), echoed the point, describing how his development team transformed a culture of modest fundraising expectations into one of audacious goal-setting. When he arrived at his institution, the most TMCF had raised in any single campaign was just over $20 million. He told his team they would raise $50 million.
“No one in the room believed me,” Williams said. “They thought I was crazy.” By year three, TMCF had reached $80 million. Today, the development campaign stands at $130 million.
The Sixty-Year Degree and the Future of the Learning Relationship
The convening's second major voice belonged to Dr. David Rosowsky, a special advisor to the president of Arizona State University and the author of a widely circulated piece titled "The 60-Year Degree: Why Universities Must Pivot from Recruitment to Perpetual Partnership." Rosowsky, who describes himself not as a futurist but as “a presentist who lives maybe a year in the future,” offered a sweeping and sometimes sobering diagnosis of the forces confronting higher education, followed by a challenge to reimagine the fundamental relationship between institutions and the people they serve.
Higher education, he argued, has spent decades serving an increasingly narrow slice of the population — 18- to 22-year-olds recruited from familiar pipelines — while a vast and growing population of adults who need education, retraining, and reskilling has been left largely unserved. The traditional four- or five-year degree, he said, is “out of touch” as the currency of educational achievement when most workers will change jobs and industries multiple times across a 60-year career.
“We are no longer in the luxury of being caught napping,” Rosowsky said. “Colleges and universities that fail to extend their reach across the 60-year arc will be left competing for a shrinking audience.”
The 60-year degree, as Rosowsky frames it, is not simply an argument for continuing education. It is a call for structural redesign — the creation of what he described as an entirely new institutional unit charged with managing a lifelong learning relationship between universities and their alumni. Alumni engagement offices focus on philanthropy, not ongoing intellectual partnership. Career services focus on first placement, not fifth career reinvention. Continuing education, he said, “too often sits at the margins rather than the core of the academic enterprise.”
“The problem is not intent,” Rosowsky said. “It's infrastructure.”
He cautioned that the greatest risk is not that institutions will ignore the 60-year model, but that they will attempt to layer new expectations onto existing units without rethinking their underlying mandates, producing what he called “incremental adaptation where structural redesign is what's required.”
Talent, Technology, and the Corporate Disconnect
Dr. Jason Wingard, former president of Temple University and a visiting scholar at Harvard University whose work sits at the intersection of higher education and workforce development, arrived at the convening with a case study designed to provoke. For the last several years, he noted, the number one boardroom priority among Fortune 100 companies has not been stock price, technology, or market strategy. It has been talent, specifically, the inability to find workers with the skills needed to remain competitive.
Yet, Wingard argued, higher education has largely not been invited to that conversation. He drew a contrast between two companies—one, which responded to its talent crisis by laying off large portions of its workforce and turning to the gig economy for on-demand skilled labor, and another, which invested $1.5 billion in retraining and upskilling its existing employees. Both represent dramatic responses to a problem that, he said, universities are uniquely positioned to help solve, if they choose to make themselves relevant to the discussion.
For HBCUs, Wingard and others argued, that relevance is not hypothetical. Ninety percent of HBCU seniors in one recent impact analysis reported having had an internship experience; 63 percent of those were paid internships, a rate roughly double the national average. The challenge is not the quality of the outcomes but the failure to communicate them effectively to corporate and philanthropic partners who continue to underinvest.
The Call to Collaboration
Among the most persistent themes across the two-day gathering was the imperative of institutional collaboration, not as an aspiration but as a financial and strategic necessity. Dr. Dan Greenstein, the former chancellor of Pennsylvania's State System of Higher Education and now Chief of Industry Transformation at Ellucian, offered some of the convening’s most data-intensive analysis, arguing that the HBCU sector is disproportionately concentrated among smaller institutions that carry elevated financial risk. Growth, he said, is not optional — it is the primary pathway to resilience, revenue diversification, and the ability to absorb the market shocks that are coming regardless.
Three paths to scale exist, Greenstein said, include organic enrollment growth, which is difficult and slow; mergers and acquisitions, which are complicated and politically fraught; and multi-institutional collaboration, which the data suggests is the most reliable near-term route to the institutional resilience smaller HBCUs need. Systems that share services — back-office functions, procurement, student support infrastructure, even certain academic offerings — show measurably lower financial risk profiles than those that operate in institutional isolation.
“What makes you, you, is what you deliver, to whom, and how,” Greenstein said, addressing the fear that collaboration means surrendering institutional identity. "
The convening closed with a Saturday morning reflection session in which attendees were invited to name what they were taking home, and what they planned to do with it. Several raised unresolved tensions: the persistent shortage of Black faculty in the sciences and humanities; the challenge of conveying the HBCU value proposition to a corporate world that still conflates elite predominantly white institutions with educational quality; and the gap between the ambitious visioning that happens at convenings like this one and the institutional inertia that so often waits on the other side of the flight home.
Dr. Elfred Anthony Pinkard, the former president of Wilberforce University and a co-founder of H.E.L.F, named that central tension directly in the convening's closing moments.
“We bring together a cadre of talented individuals twice a year,” Pinkard said, reflecting on the decade of H.E.L.F’s work. “We engage in passionate ideation. We have wonderful ideas. And yet we go back to 101 institutions that, even as they move, still exist at the fringes of American education, although they do incredible work."
The answer, he said, is not just more ideation. It is execution.
“This blueprint is doing the work,” said Pinkard, who is the co-author along with Felton and other HBCU leaders of a new book published by Virginia Union University titled, The HBCU Blueprint: A Strategic Guide to HBCUs Transforming and Thriving. “First, you ideate with excitement and with creativity, which is what we've done. Then you leave and you do the work.”
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Dr. Jamal Watson is a higher education consultant and professor at Trinity Washington University.
