Defending black excellence against Trump’s academic assault
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
May 17, 2025
Last Thursday morning, I left Boston to attend the graduation of my second grandson from Morehouse College, “the storied Atlanta school” (The New York Times, May 13). This was a change in the institutions of higher education my immediate family attended.
I attended Fordham University, received my doctorate from Cornell University, and taught at Harvard University. My first daughter did her undergraduate work at Stanford University and got her law degree from Harvard; my second daughter attended Hampton College, received a Master’s from Yale University and a doctorate in theology from Duke University. Tomorrow she will deliver remarks on behalf of the Yale Divinity School Alumni Board, of which she is the president. My son-in-law received his undergraduate degree from Columbia and law degree from Harvard Law School.
My three grandsons attended historically black colleges and universities (HBCU). My eldest grandson received his undergraduate degree from Howard University, while my third grandson attends Morehouse. They wanted to be educated at black schools.
Dr Leah Creque Harris, a close friend, a former associate provost and chair of the English Department at Morehouse, invited me to attend the retirement function of David A Thomas, the twelfth president of Morehouse, on Thursday evening. He retires from the college on June 30 after seven years of service.
It was an elegant affair. I saw many former colleagues, among whom were Cornel West, an illustrious scholar and a presidential candidate in the recent US election. West visited my class at Harvard frequently and critiqued my work sometimes. We have enjoyed a fructifying relationship over the years.
On Thursday morning, Harris took me to see Dr Lawrence Carter, the founding dean of the Martin Luther King Jr International Chapel, in what she called the “inner sanctum of Morehouse’s storied history of social justice”.
King, a Morehouse man, personifies those social justice values. His photographs lit up the room. There were also photographs and framed newspaper clippings of Dr Benjamin Hayes, spiritual mentor of the Civil Rights Movement, President Barack Obama, Nelson Mandela, Daisaku Ikeda, Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi who influenced King’s beliefs.
Of special importance was a photograph of Howard Thurman, another Morehouse man, who became a prominent black theologian. He mentored King and persuaded the latter to visit India to study under Gandhi from whom he picked up his theory of non-violence.
I kept thinking of Howard while I was sequestered in this intellectual and cultural heart of Morehouse. My eldest grandson graduated from Howard last year although I turned down a junior professorship in Howard’s English Department in 1976. These two schools were intimately connected.
Today the scholarship and learning tradition of the HBCUs is threatened by President Trump’s short-sighted, anti-intellectual posture. His proposal to cut US$64 million from Howard, the lone federally chartered HBCU, has sent shivers down the backs of other HBCUs. F DuBois Bowman, the incoming president of Morehouse, says the role of a president “has always been difficult—certainly the case now, even to an increasing degree. He believes leadership matters most at the present time”. (The New York Times, May 13.)
Harvard, a leading university in the US, has borne the brunt of President Trump’s attack. The Trump administration has frozen US$2.2 billion in federal funds it receives, and threatens to strip the university of its tax-exempt status. The academic staff of Oxford University in the UK expressed its support for its Harvard colleagues and, by extension, its HBCU colleagues.
They wrote: “We reject in the strongest possible terms President Donald Trump’s weaponisation of charges of anti-Semitism to mount an outrageous assault on institutions of higher education in the US.
“And we assert the inviolability of academic freedom for the functioning of universities. This includes the abilities of universities to govern themselves and to decide whom they should hire and admit, in accordance with the law but free of undue political influence.” (Financial Times, May 12.) I hope T&T universities can support these claims.
I was immersed within this tradition from my first teaching appointment at Fordham in 1970 to my last teaching days at Wellesley College in 2024.
As I sat at the dinner table at the retirement function with the dean of Wharton School that Trump attended, a professor at Harvard Business School, and a prominent Atlanta dentist who attended Morehouse, I could only think of an ignoramus president who is determined to undermine a tradition to which I devoted 54 years of my life.
In Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar, Marc Antony says: “The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.” Trump’s dumbing-down of American higher education will be remembered long after he vacates the US presidency.
Morehouse and other HBCUs will continue to maintain the excellence for which they are justifiably proud.
—Prof Cudjoe's e-mail address is scudjoe@wellesley.edu. He can be reached @ProfessorCudjoe.
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The Slave Master of Trinidad by Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
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