What’s Next for Tennessee’s Sole State-Funded Historically Black University?
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Posted By: S. Moore on August 23, 2023 On Aug. 14, as incoming Tennessee State University students were moving into their new dorms, TSU President Glenda Glover was announcing her retirement. By the time she finishes the current school year in the spring, Glover will have led Tennessee’s only state-funded historically Black university for 11 years. “It’s time for me to come down from the mountain, and move to a different calling,” Glover said during a press conference. She stood in front of a blue curtain that listed her accomplishments over the past 10 years, including increasing the university’s endowment and grant funding, adding and enhancing academic programs, and increasing enrollment and national recognition for TSU. Vice President Kamala Harris and TSU alumna Oprah Winfrey were commencement speakers under Glover’s leadership, and her voice can be heard on the opening track of the Grammy-winning 2022 album The Urban Hymnal by TSU’s Aristocrat of Bands. The university has also struggled under Glover’s leadership, having been scrutinized by lawmakers in recent years, including after the Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury issued a critical report identifying financial issues at the school. Significant housing issues that left many students staying in hotels instead of dorms also drew attention to the university (though it’s worth noting that TSU isn’t the only state university that has relied on hotels to house students). School leaders have sought in recent years to recoup hundreds of millions of dollars they say the state has underfunded over the course of decades, and supporters attribute some of the university’s issues to underfunding. In February, a joint legislative subcommittee reviewed the findings of the state comptroller’s audit and recommended that the school’s board of trustees address issues including campus housing shortages. The report suggested placing TSU under the direction of the Board of Regents, reconfiguring TSU’s current board of trustees, replacing TSU management, increasing reporting on aspects like scholarship and enrollment information and more. The subcommittee ultimately gave the board a year to address the findings, and a bill pushed by Senate Republicans during this year’s session sought to reduce the size of the TSU board. It did not pass, but its push illustrated the tension surrounding TSU on Capitol Hill. State Rep. Harold Love (D-Nashville) is a TSU alumnus and represents the district in which the university is located. He has helped lead efforts to recoup missing funds for TSU, and says there has been a “good-faith effort” to pay some of that back — including $250 million from the state, which is being put toward infrastructure updates — but there’s still more to be accounted for. He also says he was upset about the bill that sought to decrease the size of the board, in part because he didn’t know it was coming. “How does a bill even get discussed — that’s that drastic — without having a conversation with the legislator in whose district the school resides?” Love tells the Scene. “How are you going to have a proposal to reduce the size of the board of the only public HBCU in the state, while letting the other non-HBCU boards remain the same size?” Glover declined to say that her departure was politically motivated, reiterating that “it’s just time” for her retirement. Love, however, tells the Scene that after talking with Glover, he knew “she was contemplating doing something related to trying to bring the temperature down in the legislature with regard to Tennessee State and the board of trustees.” Even so, the Tennessee Black Caucus of the State Legislature called on Glover to stay for another year. According to state Rep. Sam McKenzie (D-Knoxville), the caucus chair, Glover “has been unfairly targeted by some state leaders.” “When people look at Tennessee State University and point out the lack of maintenance in the buildings … issues with infrastructure and issues with other things, there has to be, I think, consideration of what was done with less,” says Love. “And the fact that when you have leaders like Dr. Glover who come in at the helm of these universities, and take them in a direction that’s positive, there should at least be, I think, a consideration by state leaders to say, ‘Job well done with what you had.’” Glover has not said what her next move will be, but has said her “voice is now needed on a much more national platform,” referencing issues like equity within higher education and civil rights. “I believe you and I can see the efforts, legislation [and] the policies that are being made every day to push this country back, to drag us back, to force us back, into an era that we all fought so hard to overcome,” said Glover during last week’s press conference. “An era that we have not seen since the days of the landmark decision of Brown vs. Board of Education.” Who will lead TSU after Glover remains to be seen, but she says she doesn’t plan to help select her predecessor, noting that that’s the board of trustees’ obligation. 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