The Elevation of MORRIS COLLEGE BY DR. JAMAL WATSON
No appointment necessary. By mid- morning, 15 or 20 students have wandered into his office at Morris College, some to watch television, some just to sit. There's no agenda. His chief of staff—Danita Pearl—known to students simply as Ms. Pearl, hosts alongside him. The students call it “hanging out with Prez.” It is a small ritual, easy to miss in any accounting of a college presidency measured in enrollment figures and fundraising totals. But talk to Sewell for more than a few minutes, and it becomes clear that this is where he locates the real work of leading a historically Black college—not in the boardroom, but in the doorway. “We have to be able to impact and touch these students so that they know that there’s somebody who cares for them,” Sewell said in a recent conversation with The HBCU Times, “and will encourage them and help move them to where they want to be in their future careers.” Sewell became the 11th president of Morris College on July 1, 2024, arriving at the small Baptist-founded institution in Sumter, South Carolina that was, by his own account, in a fragile state. He is now entering his third year, and the story he tells about that stretch of time is nothing short of extraordinary, most Dr. Said Sewell has an open-door policy on Fridays, and he means it literally.
notably, an enrollment that had fallen to roughly 344 students, down from a high of about 1,050 under an earlier president. People were openly asking, Sewell recalled, whether Morris would survive. That question shaped what he calls his first agenda item: elevation. He set out to raise enrollment, retention and morale among students and faculty alike. He also aspired to raise the college’s name recognition beyond the boundaries of the Baptist Educational and Missionary Convention of South Carolina, which has supported the school for more than a century, but which Sewell is candid about seeing as an insufficient foundation for the future. “The churches are great. They support us,” he said. "However, we cannot depend just on the churches to continue to keep Morris alive." Two years into that push, Sewell points to enrollment climbing back to about 469 students and a retention rate that rose from roughly 41% to close to 72%. The college brought in just under $5 million in outside support over the past year, he said, from alumni, corporate donors and the federal government— support he credits in part to U.S. Rep. James Clyburn, whose parents both attended Morris and whom Sewell calls, admiringly, the closest thing Congress has to “Mr. HBCU.” Sewell now describes the college as moving past elevation into what he calls a “movement,” organized around four pillars he refers to as the four M's: mission, mastery, modernization and mobilization. The last of those, he
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