A few years ago, at the Honda Battle of the Bands here in Atlanta, at the very end of the show after some of the biggest bands stepped, played and wowed thousands, a surprise band stepped to the field.
It was the Morris Brown College Marching Band.
Most of the audience knew of Morris Brown College's recent history - loss of accreditation, an ugly financial aid scandal that brought criminal charges against the school's president Delores Cross, a big drop in students and serious and short term financial problems.
But the band, made famous in the fictional movie "Drumline", was a sign that the school was back.
Well, not really.
Unbeknownst to most in the Georgia Dome crowd, that was mainly an alumni band with few - if any - current students. The band hardly represented what was happening at the Atlanta school that isn't even officially part of the Atlanta University Center consortium anymore.
In fact, most days Morris Brown College is a ghost town. Walk across the campus today most any part of the day and you will be hard-pressed to find anyone walking its manicured lawn. Many of the stately buildings aren't even in use. Mainly because there is reportedly less than 100 students there. A student there can only major in one of two things: business management or organizational management and leadership. A combined 13 concentrations are offered. That's it.
The story is the same at Knoxville College in East Tennessee.
A short distance from the University of Tennessee's sprawling campus is the small school on a hill that produced the likes of football legend Jake Gaither, journalists George Curry, Vernon Jarrett and Ralph Wiley.
The college gallantly overlooks what used to be a outmoded and crime-ridden housing project. It has been transformed into a clean community of houses and town homes.
Unfortunately, Knoxville College hasn't undergone any transformation - one that is sorely needed.
The college has been unaccredited since 1997, after a slew of,and history of, financial problems and poor management finally forced the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools to take away KC's accreditation. Enrollment plunged. One president was sued by students and faculty and eventually locked herself in her office after College brass fired her. Then the College went five years without a permanent president before Horace Judson became interim and then permanent president in 2010.
At the school of around 100 students, Judson is planning a $10 million fund-raising campaign, which will be a tough sell in East Tennessee. Many corporations and individuals have been asked to help KC many times over the years, yet many feel burned by big ideas that have turned out to be pipe dreams. Plus they may be leery of Judson, who was basically run off from his last job at Plattsburg State and the one before that at Grambling State (which subsequently had accreditation issues too).
This as buildings across campus go unused, facilities are badly in need of upgrading and a work program that was touted to help students pay for their education has hardly been a success. And they offer one degree in something called Liberal Studies.
I'm not here to put down any institution of higher learning. But without accreditation - and access to federal financial aid programs for students who need that money to pay for a pricey education - there is no way any college or university can survive, and nowhere near thrive. It's fruitless. Without accreditation, neither school can even access United Negro College Fund help.
The bottom line is this: why would anyone send a child to an institution that isn't accredited and has NO real plan to get re-accredited (re-accreditation rightfully takes several years to complete) when that child can study likely the same subjects at hundreds of other schools, including HBCUS?
HBCUs have not outlived their usefulness. They are very much needed in this nation. But we surely don't need 105 of them, especially when many of them still live on tradition instead of the reality of today's global economy. What was important in the 1960s is not high on a student's priority list in 2011. The money and student pot in this more diverse thinking world just wont allow for an institution to stand on the idea that it serves black students in a white world. That's archaic thinking.
“Some of our colleges are too focused on what they used to do and not focused enough on doing what they must do to remain competitive and produce the powerful results they need today,” said UNCF president and CEO Michael Lomax during a speech at his alma mater, Morehouse, in Feb. 2010.
For me, that means yesterday is nice, but it means nothing if you want to be credible today. And unless you can do that, then you are wasting time. You don't have the capacity to survive, much less thrive.
So there are 105 historically black colleges and universities in the United States, according to a list compiled by the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
I say there should probably be at the most 103. There likely should be fewer than that. But I'll stick to 103 right now because I know of two institutions - full of tradition and, at their peak, great places of higher learning - that should shut their doors and call it a day.
They are Morris Brown College and Knoxville College.
There IS a need for quality institutions. Unfortunately, these two aren't it anymore.
