Our View: NC A&T State is among underfunded land-grant HBCUs; state lawmakers should step up

North Carolina A&T State University finds itself at the top of a list that appears to be a serious indictment on unequal education — in our state and elsewhere.

The historically Black university was cheated out of $2.8 billion in money it should have received as one of two schools in North Carolina founded as federal land-grant institutions, according to a Feb. 1 report published by Forbes magazine. The publication found that in total, historically Black land-grant schools have been underfunded by at least $12.8 billion compared to their predominantly white counterparts.

Notably, the time period of the Forbes report does not stretch back into the Jim Crow era, from the 1870s to the 1960s, where segregation and open discrimination against Black Americans was the norm. The period covered by the report is from 1987 until 2020. In other words, this apparent discrimination in funding occurred after the Civil Rights movement when all relevant authorities were fully aware of racism’s harmful legacy in U.S. history.

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Federal land-grant schools were founded to foster agriculture research and education, with the Merrill Act of 1862. The Forbes reporters chose 1987 for their analyses because that is when records started being maintained that allowed for side-by-side comparisons of the money given to the universities by state legislatures. We find it distressing to think about the gaps in funding that doubtlessly existed before good records were kept.

(The report did cite two states where the land-grant HBCU and its white counterpart received equal funding — Delaware and Ohio.)

North Carolina A&T, which has an enrollment of just over 11,600, was founded in 1891 about four years after N.C. State University, the state’s other land-grant school, which has an enrollment of 32,000. The $2.8 billion that A&T lags behind N.C. State is figured in inflation-adjusted dollars. The next HBCU on the Forbes list is Florida A&M University, which was shorted by $1.9 billion.

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Forbes found that research money accounted for at least some of the funding gaps between the HBCUs and their predominantly white counterparts. The article reports that North Carolina is one of the states where additional money is earmarked for university research.

It noted that in 2020, the N.C. General Assembly allotted N.C. State $79 million for research compared to $9.5 million to A&T.

But the Forbes writers added: “Explaining away funding disparities because of research money is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy: The white institutions’ ability to host research in their gleaming, state-of-the-art laboratories is the result of decades of generous funding by the states, while researchers at counterpart HBCUs have been starved for cash.”

We believe the issue raised by the Forbes report merit a look by state officials. If an investigation confirms a pattern of unfairly underfunding A&T vs N.C. State, a corrective is in order and money is due to A&T. It is after all, a public institution, i.e. funded by the state’s taxpayers — including African-American taxpayers.

The Forbes list highlights the unique challenges faced by HBCUs in a time of thinning university budgets and limited resources. Recent news has illustrated another challenge: A dozen HBCUs, including some on the Forbes list, have been subject to a series of bomb threats — just as Black History Month kicks off.

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Despite it all, both public and private HBCUs have raised multiple generations of accomplished graduates in all fields, including Vice President Kamala Harris. That makes them critically important to the country and to the larger economy.

Such recognition should be on North Carolina lawmakers’ minds as they determine if its two historical, land-grant schools are being treated equally.

This article originally appeared on The Fayetteville Observer: North Carolina A&T State is among underfunded land-grant HBCUs