‘A Dirty Open Secret’: Systemic Underfunding Of Florida A&M University And Public HBCUs

Blatant systemic racism exists in the nation’s higher education state university systems. On September 22, six students at historically Black Florida A&M University (FAMU) filed a class-action lawsuit against the state of Florida, claiming decades of discriminatory funding of the state’s public, land-grant university. Specifically, the students claim, “Throughout its history and up to the present day, Florida has purposefully engaged in a pattern and practice of racial discrimination, principally through disparate funding, that has prevented HBCUs, including FAMU, from achieving parity with their traditionally White institution (“TWI”) counterparts.”

Much like past lawsuits related to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) — most recently in Maryland, but also in Alabama and Mississippi — the lawsuit alleges that the state of Florida has amply funded its public historically white institutions, while knowingly depriving FAMU of funds. Also, like the previous lawsuits, the students accuse the state of academic program duplication, which has a long history of starving HBCUs of tuition dollars and maintaining a segregated higher education system. The plaintiffs seek parity in Florida’s higher education system within five years.

FAMU’s state appropriations amount to roughly $13,000 per student and fall behind the University of Florida (UF), which receives over $15,500 per student in state funding. According to the lawsuit, if FAMU had received the same level of state funding per student between 1987 and 2022, the HBCU would have received $1.3 billion more in funds from the state. Critics might think that UF, the state’s flagship campus, should receive more funds per student because it has more research production and better facilities. However, the reason that UF has more advanced facilities and a larger capacity for research is the result of decades of systemic racism and an unfounded belief that African Americans were not intellectuals and professionals.

In fall 2021, FAMU enrolled over 7,300 students, whereas UF enrolled 34,800 students. Despite the vast difference in size, FAMU educates more than three and a half times the number of African Americans than UF does. These statistics are similar across the South as HBCUs do the lion’s share of the work educating African American students.

In February of 2022, Forbes published an investigative story titled “How America Cheated Its Colleges,” which has served as evidence for recent public HBCU lawsuits. According to the authors, “Compared to their predominantly white counterparts, the nation’s Black land-grant universities have been underfunded by at least $12.8 billion over the last three decades.” The article also found that FAMU’s underfunding was the second-largest of any HBCU land-grant institution; North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro, NC is the most underfunded institution. According to Joshua Dubin, a civil rights attorney who is representing the FAMU students, “Any state that is discriminating against historically Black colleges and universities by underfunding them should be on notice. This is fair warning that if you're going to have a college in your state, you're going to treat them all the same. There should be no disparity, period, and we’re going to help bridge that gap.”

The land-grant university system that both FAMU and UF are a part of was established by the federal government through the 1862 Morrill Act. These agricultural institutions were allotted land that — for the most part had been taken from Native Americans — and allowed to sell or use the land for higher education. A caveat of the subsequent 1890 Morrill Act was that the new institutions could not discriminate based on race. However, the federal government did allow for the creation of a separate system of colleges for Black and white students, thus reinforcing segregation in public higher education throughout the South. Beginning in 1890, all Southern states established separate (but nowhere near equal) land-grant institutions for Black students. Although these institutions received an initial land grant, they did not receive additional funding until the late 1970s when Congress appropriated annual funds.

Adam Harris, the author of The State Must Provide: The Definitive History of Racial Inequality in Higher Education, states “Higher education has a dirty open secret in that they have never given Black students an equal chance to succeed.” In his book, he has proven, with substantial evidence spanning more than a century, that the onus is on the states to rectify the inequities in funding experienced by public land-grant HBCUs as the states reinforced the laws and policies that created them. As he shares, “They created, fostered, maintained, and defended an inequitable system.”

Harris demonstrates how the presidents of historically white, state flagship universities worked together with state legislators to foster pervasive segregation while at the same time working to crush HBCUs. These presidents lobbied to either close HBCUs, or to reduce the meager funding that the states allotted to them, often redirecting the funding to their own institutions. The students in the lawsuit against the state of Florida, draw upon this oppressive legacy, noting, “Throughout its history, Florida has systematically engaged in policies and practices that established and perpetuated, and continue to perpetuate, a racially segregated system of higher education.”

Public land-grant HBCUs are in a situation where the leaders must fight the very source of their funding for justice. They are walking a tightrope. For many, it seems unfathomable that these injustices have happened and continue to happen, but for those living through them, injustices have been an everyday reality. The students in this lawsuit — as the most interested and affected parties — are bringing the “dirty open secret” out for all to see and demanding the justice that is owed to HBCUs.