Inside Higher Ed: How the Farm Bill Can Address Historic Underfunding of HBCU Land-Grants
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Inside Higher Ed: How the Farm Bill Can Address Historic Underfunding of HBCU Land-Grants
From Katherine Knott | Inside Higher Ed
The country’s 19 historically Black land-grant universities see the upcoming update to the farm bill as an opportunity to make up for historical underfunding and invest in moving these institutions forward, advocates, administrators and experts say.
The farm bill, last updated in 2018, is a wide-ranging package of legislation that authorizes programs and spending related to agriculture and nutrition, including millions for agriculture research and extension services for land-grant universities. The 2018 bill included a number of wins for the Black land-grants such as creating six new centers of excellence and $80 million in scholarship funds for HBCU students. Advocates are hoping to build on those gains in this next update.
“People look at the farm bill as just another piece of agriculture policy, but really, it is one of the driving forces that provides key research, teaching and extension funding to the land-grant universities,” said Denise Smith, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank.
Mortimer Neufville, president of the 1890 Universities Foundation, a nonprofit focused on supporting its namesake institutions, said the farm bill is critical to the HBCUs because they’re serving underserved populations.
“We are caught in the crosshairs of doing highly scientific work and doing applied work to meet the needs of the audiences that we’re trying to serve—rural communities and underserved communities,” he said.
He’d like to see Congress expand the number of centers of excellence at HBCU land-grants. The centers started slow because they weren’t fully funded until 2021.
“We are already seeing the impact of some of the centers in terms of student success and workforce development,” he said. “We are able to assist [the U.S. Department of Agriculture] in addressing some of the workforce needs. We’re looking at nutrition and health and how some of our vulnerable populations are. We are trying to meet their needs. So we got a late start, but they are making a definite impact.”