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The University of Power & Wealth

“Our success educationally, industrially and politically is based upon the protection of a nation founded by ourselves.” – Marcus Garvey

Many in the African American community believe that colleges and universities are simply there to educate a student so that they can go on to get a job. However, colleges and universities more than any part of our society are institutions of power and wealth creation more so than any other institution.  I’d touched on some of the economics of universities previously in the article “Can African American Muscle save African America?” This is mainly because they, more than any other institutions,  can touch all three parts of the SEP (social, economic, political) development model. Through their teaching they can influence the social aspects of a community by providing strong cultural identity. Through research they can create economic opportunities, and their research can also influence policy in local, state, and national governments.

The social development of students to serve their community can be seen in a university like Brandeis, a Jewish institution, which has a MBA program in Jewish studies. This program identifies potential Jewish leadership and hones their skills to run Jewish institutions in the community handling the social, economic, and political aspects of these institutions. Per their website it states “This innovative program prepares future Jewish community executives with the full complement of MBA/non-profit skills and specialized knowledge of Judaic studies and contemporary Jewish life.” They also offer a program called the MPP-MA in Jewish Professional Leadership which states “By preparing professional leaders with a full array of policy analysis and development skills, as well as specialized knowledge of Judaic studies and contemporary Jewish life, it trains students to design and implement innovative solutions to the Jewish community’s most critical problems, and to analyze and reform existing practices.” As you can see the university is catering to the core demographic that it was founded to serve. It is ensuring that their institutions that serve their community are well equipped with leadership that understand the historical & cultural (social), economic, and political aspects that the Jewish community face and will allow it to prosper and protect itself.

Next, let’s look at the economics that colleges and universities can produce for a community. What do Google, Time Warner, FedEx, Microsoft, Facebook, and Dell have in common? They were all founded on college campuses. Google founded at Stanford, Time Warner & FedEx at Yale, Microsoft and Facebook at Harvard, and Dell at the University of Texas. The six companies whose wealth value as measured by their market capitalization (except Facebook who has a private valuation are measured by a stock’s share price times number of company shares outstanding) is worth an estimated $530 billion. To put it in perspective these six companies wealth alone is 63% of African America’s buying power which is valued at an estimated at $850 billion.

Economically-speaking, colleges & universities primary driver of funding is research. Research in many instances is turned into businesses. These businesses tend to hire and have its initial investors come from the very university and nearby communities they are launched from. The wealth these businesses generate comes back to the university and community in the form of larger endowments, more research dollars, and more scholarships. These scholarships allow its students to graduate with less debt, which allows for early accumulations of wealth instead of paying down student loan debt. These businesses by hiring primarily from the institutions they sprung from help the employment of the demographic they serve. In the case of University of Michigan their research that will be transformed into business ventures will attempt to transform Michigan’s economy to one less dependent on the auto industry and its appears more into bio-tech businesses which should drastically improve Michigan’s unemployment rate (presently at 12.9% vs. National of 9.2%) in the years to come. The state of Utah’s UStar program (using taxpayer dollars) through its two state universities Utah and Utah State is focusing on the spillover industry from Silicon Valley. UStar’s mission stated on their website is stated as “UStar created a number of research teams at the University of Utah and Utah State University. Spearheading these teams are world-class innovators hungry to collaborate with industry to develop and commercialize new technologies.” BP in 2007 gave $500 million to the University of California-Berkeley to “develop new sources of energy and reduce the impact of energy consumption on the environment.” This $500 million is more than ALL HBCUS research budgets combined ($440 million) according to the National Science Foundation tracking of college and university research budgets.

Individually speaking we can see how this wealth has culminated into the hands of people at the universities who were fortunate to be a part of these founding companies. Facebook’s 1st investor Eduardo Saverin was a fellow student of Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard. His $15,000 investment, had he actually held onto it, today would be worth $7 billion. Google’s initial investors were professors from Stanford where Page & Brin founded the search engine. Same goes for Microsoft where Bill Gates initial investor and partner was classmate Paul Allen whose current net worth is $13.5 billion primarily in part to his Microsoft holdings. Dell Computers founded by Michael Dell in his University of Texas dorm room also has his primary investors from UT.

We have also seen the philanthropic power of this wealth to impact communities at work as well. Mark Zuckerberg recently donated $100 million donation to Newark, NJ school system. T. Boone Pickens four years in 2006 ago set a record with a $165 million donation to Oklahoma State University which, as has been reported, “surpasses the $100 million Las Vegas casino owner Ralph Engelstad gave the University of North Dakota in 1998.” The two donations by Pickens and Engelstad together are equal to over 25% of all HBCU endowments combined and over 50% of HBCU research budgets. T. Boone Pickens donation alone could put 412 African American students a year through undergraduate DEBT FREE or 110 African American doctors through medical school DEBT FREE at HBCU medical schools Charles Drew Medical School in California or Meharry Medical School in Tennessee. Graduating debt free could allow these doctors to be more likely to choose working in hospitals in African American communities as opposed to chasing a high paying job they need to pay down the massive student loan debt they occur. How would that be for improved medical care to our community?

The power to influence political policy is evident at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. Their current areas of focus are Arab media & politics, conflict resolution, drug policy, energy, health economics, homeland security, international economics, religion & culture, science & technology policy, space policy, tax & expenditure policy, the Americas Project (Latin America policy), the Transnational China Project (Chinese culture & policy), urban studies (African American policy), and the U.S.-Mexico Project (border policy). They have also recently sponsored an organization for the Iraq Study Group. Even our beloved Barack Obama’s cabinet is infected with Ivy Leaguers as noted in the article “Barack Obama taps into the Ivy League revolution with his cabinet” which notes that 22 of the 36 cabinet members are from Ivy League universities. Universities that still hold less than a 10% African American population. While Obama has a diverse cabinet the probability of this happening if he himself were not African American is highly unlikely (see previous 43 cabinets). It goes on to say “Even in Obama’s Washington, money and surnames matter.” The reality is people in power tap into those whom they know and who are qualified (or not) more than they tap those who they don’t know and are qualified. The old adage “Its who you know not what you know” speaks to a large part of the social networking importance of colleges and universities.

The question is then how do we improve our HBCUs to become the vehicles that can serve our SEP interest? First realize that these institutions are more than just a place to get a degree. As you can see their depth is possibly the greatest vehicle of development our community has at its disposal and that their existence is for the very thing we seek and that is to help uplift our community today and for generations. Secondly realize every mind and body has a value. This IS capitalism people. EVERYTHING has a value. For American college and universities each warm body generates an average of $33,000 in tuition revenue per year. HBCUs only get $6 billion of the $54 billion in African America’s annual tuition revenue pie meaning $48 billion is leaving our community to predominantly European American colleges & universities in tuition revenue alone. This forces our 95 HBCUs to operate on an average of $63 million per HBCU to have very little in the way of improving facilities, recruiting talented faculty, and expanding their research budgets, which could influence the SEP of our communities. To put that $63 million in perspective Ohio State University’s ATHLETIC department operates on $107 million per year (primarily funded by African American muscle). The fact that only a roughly 10-12% of African American students who can attend college choose to go to HBCUs limits these institutions from improving themselves as they are always strapped for operation revenue meanwhile being asked to compete from the perspective of: Howard v. Harvard, Charles Drew Medical v. UCLA Medical, or even Prairie View A&M vs. Texas A&M in the areas of SEP development and leaves us at the mercy of someone else’s institution solving our problems who has no real interest in doing so.

We must redirect our charity giving. A blog on African American giving I read recently said of our $11 billion we give annually to charities, $7 billion goes into churches. By making a concerted effort to redirect $2 billion of this would vastly improve the state of our HBCUs and should not dampen our religious institutions. Because while I’m all for saving our souls it is high time we invest in improving the fate of the bodies which house our souls and the institutions that were created to serve them and our communities. Too many of us faithfully pay our tithes and give little thought to our secular institutions like HBCUs. Their fate I dare say will be our own and without our own institutional power to combat institutional power of other communities we will be forever at the mercy of others awaiting them to bless us with their leftovers. It is time to once again do for self as all others do and as we use to do. Operate like a nation or become a destroyed people.

Mr. Foster is the Interim Executive Director of HBCU Endowment Foundation, sits on the board of directors at the Center for HBCU Media Advocacy, & CEO of Sechen Imara Solutions, LLC. A former banker & financial analyst who earned his bachelor’s degree in Economics & Finance from Virginia State University as well his master’s degree in Community Development & Urban Planning from Prairie View A&M University. Publishing research on the agriculture economics of food waste as well as writing articles for other African American media outlets.

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Land Ownership: African America’s 40 Acres Crisis

“He felt his poverty; without a cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings, he had entered into a competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.” – W.E.B. DuBois (Souls of Black Folks)

The United States as a whole is comprised of 2.3 billion acres of land.  As the Civil War came to a close in 1865 it was General Sherman who issued Special Field Order No. 15 that would establish the 40 acres & a mule so that former slaves could establish family farms. With 4 million African Americans who were now free that would equate to approximately 160 million acres (or 7% of America’s land) in African American control. Unfortunately with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln this order would find no support by new president Andrew Johnson. The 10,000 African American former slaves who had received 400,000 acres would see this land stripped and returned to its former European American owners courtesy of the Johnson administration. This would have profound social, economic, and political (SEP) implications for African America going forward for generations to come, and be as close to reparations as African America would ever see from the U.S. Government.

In the early part of the 20th century as African America looked to establish itself,  the reality was and is that African America like all groups in America and in the world are in a competition for resources for the survival of its very existence and it is of no incentive for another group to make this competition easier for its opponent. In other words why would McDonald’s ever give Burger King a prime property rather than use it for its own development? Or America give Canada control over valuable resources it controls? This applies to ethnic Diasporas (African, Arabic, Asian, European, & Latino) as well. Control of land is the foundation of SEP development. In capitalism that equates to land ownership. As African American continues to lose wealth, the primary cause could be argued that this is in large part because of the depletion of our land ownership.

Land is at the base for everything. It develops neighborhoods and communities. Neighborhoods are designed with great detail, such as who will live in it, and not just haphazardly put together as many assume.  A land developer already has done multiple SEP studies before they dig the first piece of dirt from the Earth. Who they want to attract to the development can be something as simple as making sure there is a specific religious building in the development or pricing the housing at a high-end average like $5 million per home or $1 million per lot, or placing certain commercial developments in proximity such as a Whole Foods or Wal-Mart. You certainly know that will narrow you down to a certain demographic of people who most likely share similar values and the vice versa is true as well. On the lower income end when one builds government funded housing, which is typically owned by someone wealthy, they receive subsidized payments from the government for use of said property to house low-income tenants which brings a completely different demographic but again all well studied and placed depending on land values. Low-income developments tend to get the brunt of locations near undesirable locations in a town or city while more affluent will have access to city services more abundant per capita.

In any economic development you need land. Even a web-based business like Amazon has a facility or economic interest in land somewhere for production of its Kindle and other products. When a store chooses where to build a new business it searches for enough land that a lot of times they lease (which provides its owner long term cash flow) for its business’s building capacity to be met. It also seeks land around a demographic that it caters too. This is why luxury brands are located on Rodeo Drive and not in South Central. The location is catering to a certain demographic and hoping to discourage other demographics. My former professor happened to be in possession of a piece of property that a certain do-it-yourself orange box company wanted to build a store on. They leased land on a multi-decade lease and once the lease is up if they leave – he keeps the land, the building, and all the cash generated by the lease along the way. Its more likely they will continue to lease the property from him and he will pass the land and its cash flow onto his heirs.

Land also allows a group to control the political makeup of a community in terms of how political lines are drawn for voting districts and how schools are zoned in terms of funding. This is why there is often an uproar when lines are being redrawn and suc,h because by moving certain lines -be it schools or voting-it can ensure certain economic development will come your way in the future, be it through the development of neighborhoods or commercial. As a land developer you know you can get people to pay a premium if you build a neighborhood in a higher rated school district.

Historically control of land provided African America after reconstruction the opportunity to create and control the SEP of their communities as it was with European Americans when they first came to America, and all other cultural groups who followed in immigrating to the U.S. and built communities united by similar cultural values. Buying land they were able to build communities like Black Wall St. in Tulsa, OK and Rosewood in Florida. In these communities the strong social fabric of families, control of the curriculum in the schools, and faculty who could relate to the students helped provide a social setting that led to a strong economic development. This included a number of African American owned banks, grocery stores, doctors, and the only African American founded and owned automobile manufacturing company in Greenfield, OH named C.R. Patterson Automobile Company. These communities because they were controlled and owned by us (as with any group) hired predominantly people from its community and therefore it kept employment rates high and crime rates virtually non-existent. Unfortunately these communities had not been given enough time to develop proper politicalcapitalthat would allow them to defend themselves and many communities would find themselves burned to the ground with the complicit relationship that neighboring European American communities had with the mixing culture of the police and Klansmen (which is why the police distrust in large part continues today). With no way to protect themselves in many cases all out massacres would take place and these communities would be left with no way to rebuild as they appealed to governing bodies made of the very neighbors who burned them. Today we lose our land through gentrification of our neighborhoods (see Harlem), poor estate planning (social), unpaid taxes or rising taxes on the elderly on fixed incomes who can’t afford to keep up with them as developers use their political capital to muscle into an area, and simply just selling land to those outside of our community instead of circulating it.

So what is the state of our land ownership today? According to Federation of Southern Cooperatives Land Report the early 20thcentury was our zenith in terms of land ownership at almost 20 million acres –  a far cry from the 160 million acres we would have had if Special Field Order No 15 had been honored. However, today that number is even more tragic at roughly 7.7 million acres (or 0.0033% of America’s land) spread across the ownership of 68,000 African American landowners. To put this in perspective Land Report Magazine who tracks the top 100 landowners in the United States who are all European American – their top 5 landowners own 7.8 million acres combined. Ted Turner owning 2 million acres by himself or roughly 25% of African America’s total land holdings.

Another tidbit to note comes from my visit to Timberland Investment World Summit in 2009. I was the only African American present at this 3-day conference in which some of the heaviest hitters in terms of financial institutions were present along with timber companies looking to invest in land for the use of timber. It just so happened that during the recession timber was the only asset class that did not decline. Why? Because as one presenter said “As long as the sun is shining trees will grow and so will their value.” The minimum investment amount a family or business had to invest to have an institution manage their timber investment – $50 million (which was down from its $100 million minimum thanks to the recession and banks need for cash).

More importantly the question has to be what now? There is no recourse for our 40 acres and African American farmers continue to fight today for past discrimination with no resolve even under the Obama administration. But the fight is costly and many of the older farmers are dying out. I dare say the U.S. Government is simply waiting them out. My belief is with $800 billion (said to reach $1.1 Trillion by 2012) in buying power the largest amount by far of any minority group in America we must begin take this fight in our own hands with our own dollars as Native Americans have begun to do as featured in “Tired of Waiting, Native Americans Buy Back Their Old Land”. But it must become a priority and a conscious effort. Our HBCUs, primarily the Agriculture HBCUs and African American financial institutions must begin to hold more seminars that help us understand the process of the importance of buying land and the obstacles that go along with it which are much different than buying a home.

I didn’t even begin to mention land as the very base of agriculture (or this would end up being a doctoral thesis) which supplies the quality foods a community eats, the ethanol that is the new rage in alternative fuel, and the land which has valued minerals beneath it and water running through it which just happens to be the very base of life and existence. Land. Yea it’s kind of a big deal or as my grandmother always told me “They’re not making any more of it so you better hold what you have and try to get more of it.” A wise woman she indeed is.

Mr. Foster is the Interim Executive Director of HBCU Endowment Foundation, sits on the board of directors at the Center for HBCU Media Advocacy, & CEO of Sechen Imara Solutions, LLC. A former banker & financial analyst who earned his bachelor’s degree in Economics & Finance from Virginia State University as well his master’s degree in Community Development & Urban Planning from Prairie View A&M University. Publishing research on the agriculture economics of food waste as well as writing articles for other African American media outlets.