are members of UNCF need more help on being a president, being an effective president because so many of them are academics who never had training in management and the operation of businesses, which HBCUs are. And so, I felt, well, let me go in and tell this board of directors at UNCF what I think UNCF also ought to be doing. And my vision was to create an Institute for Capacity Building, which would help really ensure that UNCF was doing everything it could to make our presidents the most effective and innovative they could be and also our institutions stronger. I could see then that small private colleges were vulnerable and needed not just more resources but the benefit of a network of other institutions working together to improve the business operations, to transform the business model and to grow the number of students we were touching. The board liked that idea, and they offered me the job. I went to UNCF in 2004, with the notion that this is my stop. HBCU TIMES: THAT WAS A LOT OF PROPOSED CHANGE IN A SHORT PERIOD OF TIME TO A GROUP THAT PROBABLY WASN’T USED TO IT. WHAT OBSTACLES OR CHALLENGES DID YOU FACE IN IMPLEMENTING THESE IDEAS? DR. LOMAX: I didn’t anticipate that there would be so many obstacles and so many challenges. One of them was that when I got to Washington, DC in 2004; and I started meeting with journalists, their first question was, “Do we still need HBCUs?” and “Why do we need a UNCF?”
education we have to do to make them understand the power and importance of HBCUs and UNCF, and to make sure that they understood how relevant we are to the current environment that we found ourselves in 20 years ago. So, 20 years later, I just started this interview, and you haven’t said anything about do we still need HBCUs? And you know, that was a question that many Black journalists would ask me as well. So, I think we’ve done a lot of work to effectively reposition HBCUs as a critically important asset in the Black community and an important segment of the higher education sector in this country. There are 102 of these institutions. We serve only about 250,000 students. HBCUs are only 3% of higher education institutions, but we still produce three times as many college graduates as other similar institutions do. We produce a significant percentage of the STEM graduates. We produce leaders. HBCU TIMES: WHAT WERE SOME OF THE METHODS YOU USED TO CHANGE THE PERCEPTION OF THE NEED FOR HBCUS? DR. LOMAX: One of the things that we have done over the last 20 years is we’ve used data research and analysis to make the case for HBCUs. And so, we don’t get those negative questions, but we still get many challenges because we haven’t fully built out the asset base that HBCUs need not just to survive but to thrive. And a lot of our focus now is on significantly increasing the financial resources that these
institutions have and the financial resources that they will continue to have because we’re building endowments, not just projects and programs. HBCU TIMES: HAVE YOU EXPERIENCED ANY RESISTANCE FROM THE LEADERSHIP OF THESE SCHOOLS AS YOU’RE TRYING TO HELP THEM? DR. LOMAX: So, the way we operate at UNCF, there are 37 private historically Black colleges. They are member institutions. They have their own part of the organization where they meet twice a year. They have a chair, vice chair and secretary, and they review the performance of UNCF and give us feedback. Now, UNCF has a board of directors, which is who appoints me and who I report to; but we also have these stakeholders, the member presidents on our board. When I came in, I told them that we’ve got to do the work differently. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to raise money every year, provide scholarship support, write checks that hopefully grow every year or send you working capital for you to deploy in whatever way you think is important. But I think there are some other things we need to do, and here are the things I think we need to do. First and foremost, we need to ensure that there’s a strong pipeline of college-ready high school graduates who go to HBCUs, so we’re going to have to spend some time working on improving our K-12 public schools because that’s how we get all of
our kids. And they said, “Oh no no no no no Lomax, that’s not something that we want to do. You just work with us on the students we got.”
HBCU TIMES: AND HOW DID YOU RESPOND TO THAT?
DR. LOMAX: I’m a hardhead. I’ve been a president, and I said, “No, that’s something I’m going to do!” Here we are, 20 years later, after working with traditional public schools and charter schools, we are seeing a stronger group of students coming to our institutions. Our presidents understand the value in our K-12 investments, and we now have a group of presidents here [at the summit] looking at building high schools on their campuses. [The Presidents’] job includes working with first-generation, low-income students and beginning that work in high school; and then bringing those students onto the campuses means that they will be college ready—they’ll know more about what it’s like to go to college. Those high schools can also be, and possibly middle schools, possible training grounds for future teachers. HBCU TIMES: THAT’S SOMETHING THAT HBCUS USED TO DO BACK IN THE DAY, AS EVIDENCED WITH THE FLORIDA A&M DRS HIGH SCHOOL. DR. LOMAX: Now, it’s something we’re going to redo, and we’re rebuilding that initiative. HBCU TIMES: WHAT OTHER STRATEGIC INITIATIVES HAVE YOU IMPLEMENTED TO SUPPORT HBCUS?
DR. LOMAX: These institutions
So, I said, okay, there’s a lot of
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