NIH Must End Discriminatory Funding Practices Against HBCUs!!! (379 hits)
A study released last week by researchers from the University of Kansas revealed that African-American researchers are more than 30 percent less likely to receive funding for projects from the National Institutes of Health than their white, Hispanic and Asian counterparts. NIH Director Francis Collins called the revelation “deeply troubling,” and vowed “..the problem has been there all along. Now we know about it and have to do something.”
But despite Collins’ “now we know” claims, he and NIH administration have long been made aware of this issue by members of the HBCU leadership community, most notably, by Hampton University President Dr. William Harvey. In a series of communications dating back to 2010, Harvey sounded the alarm for NIH’s failure to act upon the grave warnings and instances of outright discrimination against HBCUs, the long-proven institutions most equipped and qualified to address the disparity of funding going to black researchers to address minority health crises.
In a letter to Collins in December 2010, Dr. Harvey responds to a study revealing that less than one percent of all NIH grants allocated to institutions of higher education reached historically black colleges and universities from 2007-2009. Citing data collected from the White House Initiative on HBCUs, black colleges received a maximum of .83 percent funding during the period; a stark contrast to maintained and slight increases in allocations going to HBCUs for agricultural and science & technology research and inclusion initiatives from other federal agencies.
