“Yet We Rise”: Joseph L. Graves Jr. argues justice for HBCUs could transform science

Donald Trump hasn’t taken office for his second term as President, yet the incoming administration has already promised major changes to government systems and programs. The campaign and its advisers have placed a specific target on programs focused on environmental and racial justice.

Among the institutions likely to face deep cuts will be historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), said evolutionary biologist Joseph L. Graves Jr., a professor at North Carolina A&T State University and author of the 2022 book A Voice in the Wilderness: A Pioneering Biologist Explains How Evolution Can Help Us Solve Our Biggest Problem.

Graves made the prediction during the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing’s 12th annual Patrusky Lecture Nov. 9 at the ScienceWriters2024 conference in Raleigh, N.C. In his talk, he discussed the history of HBCUs and the inequities they have faced throughout their history—and still face today.

HBCUs have faced systemic disadvantages since their inception in the 19th century, Graves explained. The 1862 Morrill Act established the first wave of land-grant universities, providing 37 land grants to institutions across the United States. Following the Civil War, a second act aimed to provide educational opportunities for newly freed Black people, especially in the former Confederate states. As a result of that 1890 act, 19 more universities were established to serve Black students.

Legally, these institutions were meant to be offered the same privileges and funding as the first, historically white land-grant institutions. But that has never been the case, Graves said: The perpetual funding of the endowments granted to the 1862 institutions was systematically denied to the 1890 institutions.

The impact of this funding disparity has been magnified with time.

When comparing the relative endowment sizes for similar-sized institutions, HBCUs’ endowments are barely visible. Graves added up the endowments of the top five historically white institutions and the top five HBCUs and threw in figures for the largest  public HBCU and a similar historically white public institution, Texas A&M. The white universities have 90.4 times as much in their coffers. Routine federal support promised to both 1890 and 1862 institutions has also failed to arrive at HBCUs, with HBCUs receiving $436 million less in federal support between 2008 and 2022.

Graves outlined how the impact of such funding differences ripples far beyond the universities themselves. “Racism requires prejudice plus power,” he said. And institutional racism, he argued, arises when individual racism and individual ideas become a socially agreed norm—such as the underfunding of HBCUs.

Simple federal decisions could easily remedy these systemic injustices, Graves said. Providing funding to overcome the historic inequities and changing the systems that still favor predominantly white institutions with federal and state resources means they could “rewrite the demography of science in this country within a decade,” Graves said.

Nevertheless, institutions like his, North Carolina A&T, have achieved much against unimaginable odds, Graves said: The state legislature has refused to award a medical school to the university, and the state has failed to provide the dollar-for-dollar matching of federal funding that 1862 institutions receive. Still, his university ranks third in the state for active research grants. “We’re competing, but we’re competing with one hand tied behind our back, and shackles to our ankles,” he said.

The incoming administration doesn’t offer much optimism that change will come to these inequities, Graves said. A proposal in Project 2025, a policy plan published by conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, to give funding to states as block grants as opposed to constrained pots of funding means public HBCUs are likely to receive even less. Trump’s proposal to dismantle the Department of Education, meanwhile, will further cripple an already struggling education system. And his anti-science administration will further sideline good and publicly vital research, Graves added.

Graves is clear that Trump’s victory does not shift the fundamentals of what needs to happen next—and the progress that HBCUs are still making. At his institution and others like it across the country, “we’re doing stuff no one else is,” he says. “There have always been scientists who have stood against the standard white supremacist, patriarchal science. … We have always been there.”