Tag Archives: Black institutional wealth

The Largest IPO in African History Is Happening. Where Are African America’s Institutions?

Posted on June 26, 2026 by | Leave a comment

Our work is the presentatoin of our capabilities. – Edward Gibbon

There is an old story about a village that lived along a great river. Every season, merchants from distant lands traveled that river, loading their boats with timber, ore, and grain pulled from the very land the villagers had worked for generations. Those merchants sailed downstream to markets where fortunes were made and power was consolidated, and season by season, neighboring tribes who had learned to build boats and send their own goods to market grew stronger their granaries fuller, their children better protected, their voices louder in the councils where decisions were made about who owned what and who owed whom. The village elders watched all of this from the bank. They were not ignorant men and women. They knew the river better than any merchant who passed through. They understood its currents, its seasons, its dangers. But they had never built boats. The lumber was expensive. The tools were hard to come by. The timing was never quite right. And so the resources of their land flowed downstream in other people’s vessels, enriching other people’s villages, while their own families and sibling villages just around the bend, bound to them by blood and history grew more exposed with each passing year. Then one season, a young man and a young woman stood before the elders and said: we know how to build the boats. We know where the timber is. We know the market downstream. The only question is whether this village will finally decide that the river belongs to us too.

The most consequential capital markets event in African history is unfolding in real time, and there is no reason for HBCU endowments and alumni associations to be spectators.

Aliko Dangote, the Nigerian industrialist whose Dangote Petroleum Refinery and Petrochemicals FZE has already reshaped the energy economics of West Africa, is preparing to take the refinery public. The offering structured as a coordinated multi-exchange IPO spanning the Nigerian Exchange, the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, the Nairobi Securities Exchange, the Ghana Stock Exchange, and several additional African bourses carries a valuation range of $40 billion to $50 billion. At a 10% stake offering, the actual transaction size approaches $5 billion, making it by a wide margin the largest equity offering ever conducted on an African stock exchange. The IPO subscription window is expected to open later in 2026.

For HBCU endowment officers, foundation boards, and alumni association investment committees who have spent the last decade searching for alternative assets that offer both competitive returns and meaningful institutional alignment, this transaction deserves serious analysis. It is not a charity play or a symbolic gesture toward Pan-African solidarity. It is a hard industrial asset, generating real revenue in hard currency, operating at the center of a continental energy transformation that will define the next quarter century of African economic development.

The strategic case begins with the asset itself.

The Dangote Refinery, located in the Ibeju-Lekki Free Trade Zone on the outskirts of Lagos, is the world’s largest single-train crude oil processing facility, with a current capacity of 650,000 barrels per day. It reached full operational capacity in early 2024, has already turned Nigeria into a net fuel exporter, and has disrupted global trade routes that previously ran refined petroleum products from European refineries back into the African market. The refinery currently supplies over 90% of Nigeria’s domestic petrol demand and has exported refined fuel to five African countries. The Dangote Group’s revenues have grown from $3.3 billion to $18 billion over the past five years, and the refinery’s expansion roadmap which envisions more than doubling capacity to 1.4 million barrels per day is the central purpose of the IPO capital raise.

One structural feature of the transaction is particularly noteworthy for institutional investors operating in the United States: dividends will be paid in US dollars, even though shares are purchased in naira. This is not a minor administrative detail. It addresses the core foreign-exchange risk concern that typically limits American institutional appetite for African equity markets. Dollar-denominated dividends from an asset generating dollar-denominated revenues — the refinery sells its output at global commodity prices — transforms the currency risk profile of the investment from speculative to manageable. For HBCU endowments that are overwhelmingly concentrated in US equities and fixed income, this creates a genuine entry point into the African investment universe without the full currency risk exposure that has historically made direct African market participation unattractive.

Now consider where HBCU endowments currently stand in the landscape of American higher education finance.

According to the most recent NACUBO-Commonfund Study of Endowments, HBCU institutions accounted for approximately $2.4 billion of the $944 billion in total endowment assets reported by participating institutions. The average HBCU endowment was $236.7 million, compared to $1.4 billion for all NCSE respondents. Only two HBCUs — Howard University, which crossed the $1 billion threshold, and Spelman College hold endowments above $500 million. The PWI-to-HBCU endowment gap among the top 10 institutions in each category stands at roughly 129 to 1. HBCU endowment gift flows fell to $67.7 million in FY25 from $91.9 million in FY24. On nearly every metric, the structural undercapitalization of HBCU institutional wealth is not merely significant; it is a threat to the long-term viability of institutions that serve as the backbone of African American professional formation.

The investment allocation patterns compounding this problem are equally stark. HBCU endowments allocate just 14% of their portfolios to alternative asset classes, compared to 41% for their non-HBCU peers — a 27-percentage-point gap that systematically excludes them from the asset classes driving the highest long-term returns. The reasons are structural and understandable: smaller endowments have fewer investment staff, face higher minimum investment thresholds at most alternative asset managers, and operate with more conservative board mandates. But the consequence is that HBCU endowments are systematically excluded from the alternative and international asset classes that generate the outsized returns sustaining the endowments of Harvard, Yale, and the University of Texas system. The compounding effect of this exclusion over decades is not a gap — it is a chasm.

The Dangote IPO, precisely because of its scale, its multi-exchange structure, and its dollar dividend commitment, represents an unusual opportunity to begin addressing one dimension of this allocation problem.

For institutions with sufficient endowment size to participate as institutional investors in the international tranche of the offering — Howard, Spelman, Hampton, and a small handful of others — the case for direct participation is straightforward. A position in the world’s largest single-train refinery, at an entry valuation of $40 to $50 billion, in an asset whose expansion is already funded and whose revenues are denominated in the currency in which your dividends will be paid, provides genuine portfolio diversification, inflation protection through commodity-linked revenues, and exposure to the fastest-urbanizing, fastest-growing consumer energy market on earth. Africa’s urban population is projected to double by 2050. Every major city added to the African urban grid requires energy infrastructure. The Dangote Refinery is positioned at the center of that demand trajectory.

For institutions whose endowment size makes direct participation in the IPO difficult which is the reality for most of the HBCU sector the answer is not to sit out. It is to aggregate. The 1890 Foundation, which serves as the coordinating hub for the nation’s 19 historically Black land-grant universities and has already demonstrated its capacity to administer large-scale federal partnerships, is the most credible existing infrastructure for a consortium investment vehicle among its member institutions. A formally structured investment fund operating through the 1890 network governed by participating endowment officers, managed by professional advisers with international markets experience, and capitalized through pooled contributions from member institutions would provide access to investment minimums and due diligence resources that no individual 1890 institution could assemble independently. The SWAC, MEAC, SIAC, CIAA, and HBCU Athletic Conference represent analogous organizing structures across the sector where the same consortium investment logic applies where each already functions as a governance body with member institutions, shared administrative infrastructure, and collective standing that could anchor a pooled investment vehicle.

HBCU alumni associations belong in this conversation, but not as secondary vehicles for the institution’s benefit. They belong as independent institutional investors making strategic decisions on their own financial merits. An alumni association that builds an investment fund with its own governance, its own professional management, and its own return targets is building institutional wealth for its membership, not running a philanthropic pipeline to its parent institution. The distinction matters. An alumni association investment fund capitalized by members seeking competitive financial returns will attract a different level of participation, a different quality of governance, and ultimately a different scale of capital than one framed as an alumni giving mechanism wearing investment clothes. Where coordination between a university endowment and its alumni association investment fund makes strategic sense such as co-investment in a shared opportunity, shared due diligence costs, complementary positions in the same offering that coordination should happen by design, not by default. But each institution must be making an independent decision of financial merit.

The argument for this model is not merely aspirational. It has historical precedent in other diaspora investment networks. The Indian American diaspora has consistently channeled capital into Indian infrastructure and technology sectors through organized networks of high-net-worth investors coordinated through professional associations and regional affinity groups. Cuban American capital networks have played a documented role in channeling investment back into businesses serving the diaspora in South Florida. Jewish American institutional networks have sustained diaspora bond programs through organized professional and philanthropic structures for decades. The mechanisms are known. The question is whether African American institutional leadership will build the organizational infrastructure to replicate them.

But the case for HBCU institutional participation in the Dangote IPO extends beyond portfolio diversification or even diaspora solidarity. It is about the connective tissue between two halves of the same people that has never been fully built. African American institutions sit on intellectual capital in agriculture, medicine, engineering, law, public policy, and the sciences that is directly relevant to the development challenges facing African Core nations. African institutions sit on natural capital, emerging market infrastructure, and a demographic growth trajectory that represents the most significant economic expansion of the twenty-first century. The relationship between the two has been episodic and philanthropic where it should be structural and transactional. An HBCU endowment that holds equity in the Dangote Refinery is not making a charitable gesture toward the continent — it is establishing a financial relationship that creates the institutional logic for research partnerships, faculty exchanges, student pipelines, and joint ventures that philanthropy alone never compels. Capital is the language institutions speak to each other when they intend to be taken seriously. Beyond the bilateral opportunity, there is a harder truth: Africa’s resources have been extracted, its assets undervalued, and its markets structured to serve outside interests since the colonial era. That dynamic does not end on its own. It ends when African institutions and their diaspora counterparts accumulate enough ownership stake in African Core assets that the continent’s wealth begins compounding inward rather than flowing out. Every dollar of HBCU and African American institutional capital deployed into African equity markets is a dollar that does not go to the outside investors who have historically treated the African Core as a source of raw return without reciprocal obligation. Ownership is the only permanent answer to extraction.

The Dangote IPO is not only an investment proposition. It is a test of whether Black institutional America can organize itself to participate in the capital formation of the African Core, the region whose industrialization will define the global economy’s next chapter or whether, once again, the value created in this geography will accrue primarily to investors who had the institutional organization to show up.

Nigeria’s regulatory environment carries the political and macroeconomic variance typical of any large, resource-rich emerging economy no more inherently unstable than the frontier and emerging markets of Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, or Latin America that well-capitalized endowments have allocated to for decades without treating the risk as exceptional. That Nigerian markets have historically been characterized as uniquely risky reflects less about Nigeria’s actual risk profile than about the systematic undervaluation of African Core economies by external rating frameworks designed to serve the capital interests of institutions that benefit from keeping African assets mispriced. The multi-exchange listing structure presents a genuine operational challenge: coordinating clearing, settlement, and trading standards across multiple African exchanges simultaneously has no established precedent at this scale, and execution risk is real. Currency risk, while substantially mitigated by the dollar dividend structure, is not eliminated. And the refinery carries $3.65 billion in outstanding debt, with plans to repay through operations and asset sales — a material factor in any serious valuation analysis.

These risks are real. They do not, however, distinguish this offering from the risk profile of the emerging market private equity and infrastructure funds that well-capitalized non-HBCU endowments have been allocating to for the past two decades. The difference is not that those endowments found risk-free investments in emerging markets. The difference is that they built the institutional capacity to analyze and manage those risks, and they positioned themselves to capture the returns that came with accepting them.

HBCU endowments that remain concentrated in domestic equities and fixed income because they lack the investment staff to evaluate an African infrastructure IPO are not being prudent. They are being institutionally underpowered in a way that will compound against their beneficiaries for generations.

The path forward requires several concrete steps. First, HBCU endowment boards and foundation leadership should commission formal analysis of the Dangote prospectus as it becomes available and engage the offering’s appointed advisers — Stanbic IBTC Capital, Vetiva Advisory Services, and FirstCap — to understand the terms available to international institutional participants. Second, the 1890 Foundation, UNCF, the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, the HBCU Faculty Development Network, and the leadership of the SWAC, MEAC, SIAC, CIAA, and HBCU Athletic Conference should open formal conversations now about the governance structure of consortium investment vehicles within their respective networks, before this offering closes and before the next one arrives. Each of these organizations already operates across multiple institutions with shared administrative infrastructure; the investment coordination function is an extension of capacity they already possess, not a capability they would need to build from scratch. Third, HBCU alumni association leadership (national organizations, alumni chapters, and the professional networks that shadow every major HBCU) should be building investment fund infrastructure as a parallel track, governed independently and capitalized on financial merit, with coordination with institutional endowments happening where it creates genuine value for both parties.

The architecture of African wealth is being redrawn. The Dangote IPO is not a metaphor for that process. It is the process, in concrete form, open for institutional participation by any investor with the organizational capacity to engage it.

The young man and the young woman are standing before the elders. The boats can be built. The only question is whether this village will finally decide that the river belongs to them too.

This article is for informational and analytical purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Prospective investors should conduct independent due diligence and consult qualified financial advisers before making investment decisions.

Disclaimer: This article was assisted by ClaudeAI.

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The Prospect Heights Empire, Part II: From Newsprint to Natural Resources — How Flavor Group Holdings Built a Vertical Integration Strategy for the Ages

Posted on May 15, 2026 by | Leave a comment

We ain’t gotta dream no more, man. We got real shit. Real estate we can touch. – Stringer Bell

There is a concept in corporate strategy called vertical integration which is the deliberate extension of a company’s ownership up or down its supply chain in order to capture margin that would otherwise accrue to a third party, reduce dependency on suppliers with competing interests, and build structural moats that competitors cannot easily replicate. Standard Oil practiced it. Carnegie Steel perfected it. The major timber and paper conglomerates of the twentieth century built generational fortunes on it. Khadijah James understood something about the magazine business that most publishers learn too late: the product you sell is content, but the input you cannot live without is paper. And paper, in the mid-1990s, was not simply a commodity. It was a strategic vulnerability. Flavor Group Holdings, had it been built with the institutional discipline the prior analysis outlined, would have recognized this vulnerability by no later than 1997. What follows is the story of how it would have addressed it and how that address would have positioned the company for a generational transformation that most legacy media firms failed to execute.

In 1997, the average ton of coated magazine paper cost between $850 and $1,100, depending on grade, supplier relationship, and contract structure. For an independent publisher without the purchasing leverage of Condé Nast or Hearst, paper costs could represent 25 to 35 percent of total production expense. Flavor magazine, growing its print run and expanding its distribution footprint, would have been acutely sensitive to this dynamic. Kyle Barker, reviewing the company’s cost structure with the same analytical discipline he applied to equity portfolios, would have identified paper as the single largest controllable variable in the production budget. He could not control advertiser sentiment. He could not control newsstand foot traffic. He could not control the postal rates that governed subscription economics. But he could, in theory, control the cost of the raw input upon which everything else depended.

The strategic logic of timber acquisition was straightforward. Timberland in the Northeast — the forests of Maine, Vermont, and upstate New York — and the Southeast — the pine flatwoods of Georgia, Alabama, and North Carolina — had been the backbone of American papermaking since the late nineteenth century. By the mid-1990s, consolidation in the timber industry had created an unusual market dynamic: large tracts of productive timberland were available at prices that undervalued their long-term yield, precisely because institutional investors had not yet developed the appetite for timberland as an asset class that they would later demonstrate through the proliferation of Timber Investment Management Organizations. Overton Wakefield Jones, whose expertise in physical infrastructure extended naturally to land assessment and property management, would have led the due diligence on initial timber acquisitions. Kyle would have structured the financing, likely through a combination of SBA rural development lending and community development financial institution capital. Maxine would have drafted the easement agreements, the timber rights contracts, and the supply agreements that would formalize the relationship between the timber subsidiary and the magazine operation.

The initial acquisition target was 15,000 to 20,000 acres of mixed hardwood and softwood timberland in Maine and Georgia, purchased between 1997 and 2001 at an average price of $400 to $700 per acre consistent with market rates for productive timberland in those regions during that period. Total acquisition cost at the midpoint: approximately $9 million, financed with 60 percent debt against the land’s appraised productive value. What Flavor Group Properties now held was not simply commercial real estate in Brooklyn. It held a natural resource asset with a biological growth cycle, a recurring harvest yield, and a supply relationship with its sister company that guaranteed a baseline demand for its output. The New York Times connection deserves its own examination. By the late 1990s, the Times consumed approximately 200,000 metric tons of newsprint annually, sourcing from multiple suppliers across North America and Scandinavia. An independent, Black-owned timber operation with certified sustainable forestry practices and competitive delivered costs to the Times’ printing facilities in New York and New Jersey would have represented precisely the kind of supplier diversity that large institutional customers were beginning to prioritize under pressure from shareholders and advocacy organizations. Flavor Group Timber, positioned as a minority-owned sustainable forestry operation with direct supply relationships to the Northeast’s largest paper consumers, would have been a compelling commercial proposition, one that combined genuine cost competitiveness with the reputational differentiation that procurement officers could document. The Times as a primary customer would not have been charity. It would have been commerce.

The structural shift in paper demand did not arrive without warning. The signals were present and legible well before their full consequences materialized. U.S. newsprint consumption peaked in 1998 and began a decline that would prove both sustained and accelerating. Printing and writing paper demand followed a similar trajectory after 2000, ultimately falling more than 30 percent from its peak by 2010. The causes were not mysterious: digital news consumption, desktop publishing, email, and eventually the smartphone demolished the economic foundation of the industries that had historically consumed the most paper. Kyle Barker, reading the data with the same discipline he applied to equity valuations, would have begun signaling concern about the long-term demand trajectory of printing and writing paper no later than 2002. The question before the Flavor Group Holdings board was not whether the shift was real — the data made that question moot. The question was what to do with timberland optimized for a demand profile that was structurally contracting.

The answer came in two phases, both of which required the kind of strategic patience that only a company with a diversified revenue base and a disciplined governance structure could sustain. The first phase was a deliberate pivot within the timber portfolio toward the segments of the paper market that were growing rather than contracting. Packaging paper — corrugated boxes, containerboard, kraft paper — was experiencing demand growth driven by a structural shift that would later be named e-commerce but was already visible in the late 1990s as catalog retail and early internet commerce began to reshape consumer purchasing behavior. The same digital transformation that was destroying demand for newsprint was simultaneously creating demand for the boxes that delivered the products ordered online. By 2005, packaging paper represented over 40 percent of total U.S. paper production. By 2020, it accounted for more than 50 percent. Flavor Group Timber’s response was to work with its mill partners and supply chain relationships to shift harvest and processing toward fiber grades appropriate for packaging applications, a conversion that required capital investment but was achievable within the existing land base and timber management infrastructure. The Southeast pine holdings were particularly well-suited for this transition, given the fiber characteristics of Southern yellow pine and the geographic concentration of containerboard manufacturing capacity in Georgia, Alabama, and the Carolinas. The second category that continued to perform was sanitary paper products such as tissue, paper towels, and related consumer hygiene products that demand for which proved remarkably durable across economic cycles. This segment is dominated by large integrated manufacturers with proprietary consumer brands, making direct market entry difficult for a company of Flavor Group’s scale. The strategic play here was not manufacturing but supply: positioning the timber holdings as a certified sustainable fiber source for contract manufacturers and consumer products companies seeking to strengthen their environmental sourcing credentials.

The second phase of the timber strategy represented a more ambitious conceptual leap, and it required the company to think about its land holdings not as a paper input operation but as a biological platform capable of supporting multiple overlapping output streams. By 2008, it was apparent to anyone watching the materials science and energy sectors that biomass — organic material derived from forest and agricultural waste, including wood chips, sawdust, bark, and non-merchantable timber — was becoming a meaningful feedstock for both energy generation and next-generation materials production. The forest residuals that had historically been burned as waste or left to decompose were being revalued as inputs for cellulosic ethanol production, biogas generation, and, most significantly for Flavor Group’s strategic trajectory, the emerging field of bioplastics. Bioplastics, materials derived from biological sources rather than petrochemical inputs, were receiving significant research investment and early commercial development from companies seeking alternatives to conventional plastics in packaging applications. The confluence of e-commerce-driven packaging demand, regulatory pressure on single-use plastics in European markets, and consumer preference shifts created a market pull for bio-based packaging materials that was structurally aligned with precisely what Flavor Group Timber’s land base could provide.

The strategic investment here was not vertical integration into bioplastics manufacturing which is a capital-intensive, technically complex undertaking beyond the company’s core competency at that stage of development. It was equity participation in early-stage bioplastics and biomass ventures through Flavor Group Ventures, the holding company’s investment vehicle that Kyle had been building since the early 2000s as a repository for the company’s excess cash flow. The investment thesis was straightforward: companies developing bio-based packaging materials needed not only capital but also feedstock security that had reliable, sustainable, cost-competitive access to the biological raw materials their processes required. Flavor Group Timber, with its certified sustainable land base and established supply chain infrastructure, could provide both financial capital and strategic value to early-stage bioplastics ventures in a way that purely financial investors could not. It was, in the language of modern venture capital, a strategic investor with genuine operational relevance to the companies it was backing. By 2015, Flavor Group Ventures held equity positions in four bioplastics and biomass processing companies — two of which had reached commercial scale in packaging applications for e-commerce clients, creating a financial return that compounded the underlying land value of the timber holdings.

Step back and consider what Flavor Group Holdings had assembled by 2015, beginning from a magazine operation and a Brooklyn brownstone in 1995. The media and content division, anchored by Flavor magazine’s digital transition and Synclaire’s talent network, had evolved into a multi-platform content business with subscription revenue, branded partnerships, and a podcast and video operation serving the same audience the original magazine had cultivated for two decades. The legal and advisory division, under Maxine Shaw’s continued leadership, had become one of the most respected Black-owned commercial law practices in the Northeast, with a client roster that included entertainment companies, real estate developers, and the timber industry supply chain relationships that Flavor Group’s own business development had generated. The real estate and land management division held commercial and residential properties in Prospect Heights, Crown Heights, and Bedford-Stuyvesant alongside approximately 22,000 acres of productive timberland in Maine and Georgia. The timber and natural resources division supplied packaging paper clients across the Northeast, held supply agreements with consumer products manufacturers seeking certified sustainable fiber, and managed a portfolio of forest residuals contracts with biomass energy facilities in the Southeast. The ventures division held minority equity positions in bioplastics, biomass processing, and sustainable materials companies, an early-stage portfolio assembled at valuations that by 2020 had generated returns consistent with the upper quartile of venture capital performance in the materials science sector. A conservative enterprise value estimate for this portfolio in 2020: between $400 million and $600 million, depending on the bioplastics portfolio’s mark-to-market performance and the real estate cap rate applied to the Brooklyn holdings.

There is a temptation to read this analysis as speculation, an exercise in imagining what fictional characters might have accomplished had their writers been economists rather than television producers. That temptation should be resisted, because the companies described here are not fictional. Every business model, every asset class, every strategic pivot outlined in this analysis has real-world precedents built by real people with the same inputs available to Khadijah, Kyle, Maxine, Régine, Synclaire, and Overton. Boise Cascade began as a lumber company and became a diversified paper and packaging enterprise. Potlatch Corporation managed timberland as a REIT and generated durable returns across multiple paper market cycles. Sappi, the South African pulp and paper company, executed a packaging pivot in its North American operations that preserved institutional value through the printing paper decline. The difference between those companies and the one that was never built on that Brooklyn brownstone is not talent, geography, or access to capital in any absolute sense. It is the deliberate decision to build an institution rather than simply pursue a career.

Khadijah James understood that Flavor was more than a magazine. The question she never got to answer on television and that every ambitious professional working from a brownstone office or a shared apartment in a gentrifying neighborhood ought to be asking right now is how deep the roots of that institution could have grown. Timber is patient capital. So is institution building. Both require the wisdom to plant trees whose shade you may not sit under for decades. Both reward the discipline to tend what you have planted rather than sell it before the harvest. The forest, it turns out, was always the point.

Disclaimer: This article was assisted by ClaudeAI.

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The Five Evergreen Acres: A Land Investment Framework for Every Stage of African American Life

Posted on May 8, 2026 by | Leave a comment

Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything, for it’s the only thing in this world that lasts. It’s the only thing worth working for, worth fighting for… – Ted Turner

Raw land is among the oldest and most durable asset classes available to private investors. For the HBCU community — individuals, families, alumni associations, and institutional partners — it is also among the most underutilized.

There is a social media post circulating in land investment circles that reads simply: “Forget the luck of the Irish. We prefer the certainty of a deed.” Beneath that caption sits a framework titled “5 Evergreen Land Staples” — timberland, pastureland, recreational property, waterfront land, and prime agricultural ground — each chosen for the same fundamental quality: enduring income or appreciation that does not require the daily volatility management of equities or the tenant fragility of residential real estate. The post is from Land.com, a mainstream marketplace catering primarily to rural landowners. The audience it implicitly addresses is white, rural, and generationally landed. Yet the analytical framework it articulates is precisely what the African American institutional ecosystem needs to operationalize and the HBCU community, with its networks of graduates, alumni chapters, and anchor institutions spread across the American South and beyond, is uniquely positioned to execute it at scale.

The stakes are not trivial. As the Federation of Southern Cooperatives Land Assistance Fund has documented, African Americans own less than 1% of all privately owned rural land in the United States. That figure represents one of the most consequential economic collapses in modern American history, a loss that accelerated across the 20th century through discriminatory lending, heirs’ property dispossession, and the systematic exclusion of Black farmers from federal agricultural credit systems. Between 1910 and 2020, African American land ownership fell by roughly 90%, from an estimated 15–16 million acres to less than 2 million today. Reversing even a fraction of that trajectory requires not only individual decision-making but coordinated institutional action. This article maps a practical framework anchored in the five evergreen land categories for how African Americans at every life stage, and HBCU-affiliated institutions at every organizational level, can begin to build durable land portfolios through structures that keep capital inside the ecosystem.

Before addressing who should invest and how, it is worth establishing why the five categories on that social media post represent genuinely strategic holdings rather than speculative fashions. Timberland is distinctive because its primary asset — standing timber — continues growing in value as long as it stands. As one institutional investor noted at the 2009 Timberland Investment World Summit, timber was the only major asset class not to decline during the Great Recession: “As long as the sun is shining trees will grow and your timber’s value will increase.” For long-horizon investors, which includes endowments, alumni foundations, and family trusts, timberland offers inflation protection, biological growth as a return mechanism, and periodic harvest income that can be timed to liquidity needs. Pastureland generates recurring lease income from ranchers and livestock operators with relatively low management overhead, while the underlying land appreciates over time and the lessee carries operational risk. For a first-generation land investor or a young family with limited bandwidth for active management, a leased pasture parcel generates cash flow from day one. Recreational property, including hunting and fishing grounds, has benefited from the structural shift toward experiential consumption, outdoor recreation spending in the United States now exceeds $780 billion annually and the demand for private access through leased hunting rights or short-term rentals has made rural recreational parcels a viable income source even at modest scale. Waterfront land commands a persistent scarcity premium, as lakefront, riverfront, and coastal parcels face an absolute supply constraint that no amount of construction can remedy, with appreciation rates for quality holdings historically outpacing inland equivalents by substantial margins. Prime agricultural land, the fifth category, combines appreciation and income in proportions that no other asset class consistently replicates, with farmland producing positive real returns in nearly every decade since World War II while the growing global demand for food production adds a structural tailwind that shows no sign of abating.

For the African American individual investor, particularly recent HBCU graduates entering the workforce, raw land is rarely the first investment that financial advisors recommend. Equities, retirement accounts, and residential real estate occupy the conventional hierarchy. This is understandable but strategically incomplete. Raw land, particularly rural parcels in the 10–100 acre range, is far more accessible in price terms than most urban professionals realize. In many parts of the rural South and Midwest, quality pastureland or timberland can be acquired for $1,500–$4,000 per acre, meaning a 20-acre parcel may require a down payment comparable to what urban renters spend in twelve months on housing. The critical discipline for individual investors is to treat the first land acquisition not as a lifestyle purchase but as a strategic asset. A 20-acre timberland parcel generates modest income while the timber matures but builds balance sheet equity that can later be pledged as collateral for subsequent acquisitions, a mechanism that generationally landed families have used for centuries. The key to making this work is choosing land that produces some income immediately, whether through a hunting lease, a hay-cutting arrangement, or a grazing license, so that carrying costs do not exceed cash flow while long-term appreciation accrues. Structurally, individuals should acquire rural land through a single-member LLC rather than in personal name, for both liability protection and eventual transfer efficiency. The LLC structure also allows for the clean addition of family members as equity holders over time, laying the legal groundwork for the next stage of ownership.

A young family with children faces a different calculus than a single investor. The time horizon extends to 30 or 40 years, the need for tax-efficient transfer becomes relevant, and the question of heirs’ property known as the informal, undivided ownership arrangement that has caused the dispossession of millions of acres of Black-owned land must be proactively addressed from the first deed. Heirs’ property arrangements leave undivided interests in land vulnerable to partition sales, through which any one heir can force a sale often to outside buyers at below-market prices. A young family acquiring land today should structure the purchase inside a family LLC or land trust from inception, with a clear operating agreement specifying decision-making rights, buyout provisions, and management authority. This structural discipline costs several hundred dollars in legal fees at formation but eliminates the single greatest mechanism by which Black-owned land has historically been lost. For young families, pastureland and prime agricultural ground are the most suitable of the five categories. Leased to a working farmer on an annual or multi-year cash rent arrangement, these parcels generate predictable income typically $100–$300 per acre annually in productive regions while the family’s equity compounds. Agricultural land near HBCUs, particularly the 1890 land-grant institutions with active extension programs, offers an additional advantage: the university’s agronomic and soil science resources can improve the land’s productivity and rental value over time, particularly where a formal university-farmer partnership exists.

For African American households in the wealth-accumulation or pre-retirement phase, typically those between 45 and 65 with existing equity in residential real estate or retirement accounts, raw land fills a specific portfolio gap. It provides non-correlated returns, inflation protection, and estate planning flexibility that equity-heavy portfolios lack. At this stage, the five-category framework can be pursued more deliberately. Waterfront land and timberland, which require longer holding periods to realize full appreciation, are most appropriate for mature investors who do not need near-term liquidity. A modest timber holding, held for 20 years through a managed investment timberland organization, can produce both periodic harvest income and terminal land value appreciation that substantially outpaces a bond portfolio over the same horizon. Conservation easements on qualifying land parcels offer an additional mechanism: by granting a qualified land trust a permanent easement that restricts development, the landowner receives a federal income tax deduction equal to the value of the development rights surrendered, a tool that high-income African American professionals have underutilized relative to white rural landowners who have deployed it extensively. This is also the stage at which entry into private Real Estate Investment Trust structures becomes viable. A private REIT organized around agricultural or timberland holdings allows a group of accredited investors like friends, family members, or professional associates to pool capital into a formal investment vehicle with a shared land portfolio, professional management, and pass-through tax treatment. Unlike publicly traded REITs, a private land REIT can be sized for a community of 10–50 investors, managed by a professional trustee, and built specifically around the five evergreen categories. The formation cost is meaningful but amortizes quickly across the investor pool, and the structure creates a formal institutional container for what would otherwise remain fragmented individual decisions.

Not every land investment begins with a formal institutional structure. Some of the most durable private wealth in America was built by small groups of trusted individuals such as former college roommates, fraternity and sorority members, professional cohort peers who pooled capital informally before any institution took notice. For the HBCU community, this peer-to-peer investment model is both historically familiar and structurally underdeployed. A group of five former classmates, each contributing $10,000, creates a $50,000 acquisition fund. In rural land markets across the South, that capital is sufficient to purchase 15–30 acres of quality pastureland or recreational property with room for closing costs and an operating reserve. The land is titled inside a jointly owned LLC, the operating agreement governs decision-making and buyout rights, and the group begins building a shared balance sheet that none of them could have assembled individually on the same timeline. The social infrastructure already exists. HBCU alumni networks are among the most tight-knit in American higher education, and the bonds forged between classmates across Greek organizations, residence halls, student government, and athletic programs carry the relational trust that small investment partnerships require above all else. What is missing is not the social capital but the financial framework to convert it into land equity. The practical steps are straightforward: the group agrees on an investment policy covering land category, geographic focus, minimum hold period, and income distribution schedule; forms an LLC with an operating agreement drafted by a real estate attorney; designates a managing member responsible for vendor relationships, lease management, and annual reporting; and commits to a first acquisition within a defined timeframe, preventing the initiative from dissolving into indefinite planning. Over time, these peer land partnerships can grow through reinvested income, additional capital calls, and the addition of new members at formally appraised entry valuations. A group that begins with five classmates and 25 acres can, within a decade of disciplined reinvestment, hold a diversified portfolio spanning multiple land categories across several states anchored not by institutional mandate but by the simple decision of like-minded people to build something together.

HBCU alumni associations sit at the intersection of institutional loyalty and latent investment capital. Most chapters hold reserve funds that have been accumulated through dues, fundraising, and event revenue that are parked in bank accounts earning negligible interest. Very few chapters have formalized investment policies, and this represents one of the most tractable missed opportunities in the HBCU ecosystem. An alumni chapter with $200,000 in reserves can, with proper legal structuring, become a founding limited partner in a private land REIT or a land investment LLC alongside other chapters. Five chapters pooling $200,000 each creates a $1 million acquisition fund capable of purchasing 250–500 acres of quality pastureland, timberland, or agricultural ground in rural markets adjacent to HBCUs. That land, leased and managed professionally, generates annual income that returns to the chapters while the underlying asset appreciates. Over a 15-year horizon, the portfolio can be refinanced to fund new acquisitions replicating the leverage cycle that institutional endowments have used with alternative assets for decades. The governance structure matters enormously. An alumni land partnership should be organized as a limited partnership or private REIT with an independent general partner or trustee, clear investment policy statements, annual audited financial statements, and a defined liquidity event horizon. The informality that characterizes most alumni chapter finances is incompatible with institutional land ownership at scale. But with proper structuring, the alumni network becomes what it has always had the potential to be: a distributed institutional investor class with shared objectives and collective bargaining power. Nationally coordinated alumni associations, the general alumni bodies of the major HBCU systems, are positioned to act at an even larger scale. A national alumni association with 50,000 dues-paying members and a modest per-member investment program could capitalize a seven-figure land acquisition fund within a single fiscal year. Structured as a private REIT with a land-grant mission overlay, specifically acquiring land adjacent to 1890 HBCU campuses or in counties with high concentrations of African American agricultural heritage, such a fund would generate financial returns while simultaneously reinforcing the geographic and economic footprint of the institutions themselves.

The structure of land acquisition matters as much as the acquisition itself, and for the African American investor at every level — individual, family, peer partnership, or alumni association — the financing institution is a strategic choice, not merely a transactional convenience. African American-owned banks hold just $6.4 billion in assets, while African American credit unions hold $8.2 billion, meaning these institutions together control less than $15 billion in combined lending capacity despite serving a market of more than 40 million people — insufficient to exert meaningful influence in national credit markets without deliberate capital infusion from within the community itself. When an African American investor finances a land purchase through a Black-owned bank or credit union rather than a mainstream white-owned lender, the mortgage deposit strengthens that institution’s liquidity ratio, expands its lending capacity through fractional reserve multiplication, and keeps the interest income circulating within the ecosystem rather than exiting to a Wall Street balance sheet. Every dollar deposited into an African American financial institution can translate into multiples of additional lending capacity once multiplied through the banking system — meaning that the collective financing decisions of HBCU alumni and community investors are not merely personal financial choices but acts of institutional capitalization. A community that builds land equity through Black-owned financial institutions simultaneously strengthens two pillars of its economic architecture: the land base that generates long-term wealth and the banking infrastructure that finances the next generation of acquisition.

At the institutional tier, the strategic imperative is even more pronounced. As of 2014, Tuskegee University controlled approximately 5,000 acres, ranking 12th among all American colleges in total land holdings, while Alabama A&M (2,300 acres), Alcorn State (1,756 acres), Prairie View A&M (1,502 acres), Kentucky State (915 acres), and Southern University (884 acres) collectively controlled more than 12,000 acres, placing all six among the top 100 college landowners in the United States. Those figures have not been comprehensively updated in the intervening decade, and the actual current land position of these institutions accounting for acquisitions, dispositions, and reclassifications likely differs. What has not changed is the strategic imperative to treat that land base as a productive investment asset rather than passive institutional real estate. A coordinated commitment of $1 million from each of the nineteen 1890 land-grant HBCUs would create a $19 million revolving fund capable, through its placement in African American banks and credit unions, of generating $7–$10 in agricultural lending capacity for every dollar committed financing not just land acquisition but the full productive cycle of African American farming. That mechanism addresses credit access. The complementary challenge is equity accumulation: deploying HBCU endowment capital, alongside alumni and friends’ capital, into the five evergreen land categories through a structured private REIT. An HBCU-anchored land REIT, capitalized with institutional endowment commitments as the senior tranche and alumni association and individual investor capital as subordinate tranches, would create a properly tiered investment structure with aligned incentives. The endowment’s priority return on its senior capital is protected; alumni investors participate in the upside above that hurdle; and the land itself remains in community-aligned ownership regardless of which investor class holds primacy at any given moment. Over time, the REIT’s land holdings can be diversified across all five evergreen categories — timberland for long-horizon appreciation, pastureland and agricultural ground for current income, waterfront parcels for high-appreciation positioning, and recreational property for near-term income generation — creating a portfolio whose income streams are non-correlated and whose asset values compound independently of equity market cycles.

The five evergreen land categories are individually sound investment ideas. Their strategic power for the HBCU community, however, lies not in isolated individual transactions but in the construction of a layered, coordinated ecosystem from the 22-year-old HBCU graduate purchasing her first 20-acre pasture parcel in Alabama, to the alumni chapter launching a multi-state agricultural REIT, to the 1890 HBCUs deploying endowment capital as the institutional anchor of a Black-managed timberland fund. At the most fundamental level, virtually every economic system man has ever created relies on one undeniable truth: whoever controls the land controls the system. The African American institutional ecosystem has the networks, the talent, and increasingly the structured financial vehicles to re-enter land ownership at meaningful scale. What it requires now is the strategic coordination to treat land not as a nostalgic aspiration but as a compounding institutional asset — one deed, one acre, one fund at a time.

Disclaimer: This article was assisted by ClaudeAI.

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The Ecosystem We Have Not Built: What the HERD Survey Tells Us About HBCU Research Infrastructure

Posted on May 1, 2026 by | Leave a comment

When you can do the common things of life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world. – George Washington Carver

In Washington, the phrase “support for HBCUs” has become one of the most reliable applause lines in American political life. Presidents invoke it. Appropriations committees cite it. Press releases are issued, summits are convened, and photographs are taken with smiling institutional presidents. And then, year after year, the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics releases the Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) Survey, the most comprehensive longitudinal dataset tracking university research investment in the United States, and the applause gives way to the same uncomfortable arithmetic.

In FY 2024, 59 HBCUs and affiliated institutions spent a combined $929.2 million on research and development. That is a large number in isolation. It is a devastating number in context. The total national higher education R&D enterprise that same year amounted to $117.7 billion. HBCUs accounted for 0.79% of it which is less than eight-tenths of one percent of the nation’s research investment, for institutions that produce a disproportionate share of Black STEM graduates, pre-medical students, and humanities scholars. The gap between what this figure is and what it should be is not a rounding error. It is a policy failure of the first order. But before laying the entirety of that failure at Washington’s feet, it is worth asking a harder question: how much of it is also self-inflicted?

What is worse than the current number is the trajectory. In 2015, the HBCU share of national R&D stood at 0.82%. In 2024, it stands at 0.79%. Ten years, three presidencies, dozens of executive orders, and multiple congressional funding packages later, the needle has moved — backward. The absolute dollar figures have grown, from $565.8 million in 2015 to $929.2 million in 2024, an increase of roughly 64% over the decade. But that growth is illusory when measured against the expansion of the national enterprise itself. The entire higher education R&D sector grew from $68.7 billion to $117.7 billion over the same period, an increase of 71%. HBCUs did not keep pace. They ran, and the field ran faster.

This is not a partisan observation. The data is indifferent to party affiliation. Under the Obama administration in FY 2015, HBCUs held a 0.82% share. By FY 2016, Obama’s final full year, it had slipped to 0.80%. Under the first Trump administration, the share fell steadily from 0.75% in 2017 to a decade-low of 0.63% in 2020. The Biden era produced the strongest absolute growth — $929 million in 2024 against $542 million in 2020 — but even at its peak, the Biden era only recovered the share to 0.79%, still below the Obama-era baseline. No administration has treated parity as a governing imperative. No Congress has appropriated at the scale the problem requires.

The HERD data makes the scale of the problem legible in a way that press releases cannot obscure. To reach just 1% of national R&D investment, a number that is not ambitious but merely honest, given that HBCUs serve a population roughly 15% of the total undergraduate student body, annual HBCU research expenditures would need to reach $1.18 billion, a gap of $248 million from current levels. To reach 2%, still proportionally below HBCU enrollment weight, the number is $2.35 billion, a gap of more than $1.4 billion annually. At 5%, which is arguably the minimum threshold for serious institutional research competitiveness, the annual requirement rises to $5.89 billion. These are not fantastical projections. They are the arithmetic of what it costs to matter in the modern knowledge economy.

There is one additional data point that every HBCU president, board member, alumni association chair, and development officer should be required to sit with before any other conversation about strategy begins. In FY 2024, 39 individual PWIs each spent more on research and development than all 59 HBCUs combined. Not more per institution. More in total more than $929 million apiece, individually, at 39 separate universities, while the entire organized HBCU sector could not collectively match what any one of them spent alone. Johns Hopkins, the perennial top-ranked research university, spent $4.1 billion on R&D in FY 2024, an amount more than four times the combined output of every HBCU in the country. But Johns Hopkins is not the only comparison that should give pause. The University of Pennsylvania spent $2.2 billion, an amount more than twice the entire HBCU sector. The University of California San Francisco spent $2.1 billion. The University of Michigan spent $2.1 billion. The University of Wisconsin-Madison spent $1.9 billion. These are not the top five institutions in the country by research output simply because they are wealthier or more selective than HBCUs in some abstract sense. They are the top five because they decided, at an institutional level, that research was the primary mechanism through which a university generates long-term power — economic, political, and reputational — and they built accordingly. Each of those five institutions, on its own, individually outspends every HBCU in America combined by a factor of two or more. Ohio State. Texas A&M. These are not exotic outliers. Several of them are state universities with public missions not fundamentally dissimilar from many HBCUs. The difference is not that their researchers are more talented or their communities more deserving. The difference is that somewhere in their institutional histories, research became the mission not a supplement to it. That reorientation produced decades of compounding returns. HBCUs are still debating whether to begin.

The external funding gap is real. But it exists alongside and is partly enabled by a pattern of institutional self-neglect that the HBCU sector has been reluctant to examine with full candor. Too many HBCU administrations, particularly those overseeing graduate programs, have treated research not as a strategic priority but as a grant-chasing appendage: a necessary line item for federal reporting, a credential for accreditation purposes, something the provost manages while the president attends to enrollment and donor relations. The result is an institutional culture in which research infrastructure is perpetually undercapitalized, grant offices are understaffed, and the graduate school — the engine of every serious research university — is treated as a placeholder for undergraduates (the bulk of most HBCU graduate schools are their own undergraduates) rather than the economic generator it is designed to be. This is not an abstraction. It shows up directly in the HERD rankings.

Howard University, the flagship of HBCU research activity, spent $101.8 million in FY 2024, ranking 178th nationally. North Carolina A&T, which has made the most deliberate institutional bet on STEM research, spent $81.8 million and ranked 192nd. Morehouse School of Medicine spent $68.7 million and ranked 212th. Florida A&M spent $68.7 million and ranked 213th. These are the top tier four institutions spending a combined $321 million out of the sector’s $929 million total. The other 55 institutions divided the remaining $608 million, an average of just $11 million each. And that average flatters the distribution considerably. Grambling State University, one of the most storied names in HBCU history, spent $486,000 in FY 2024, ranked 811th nationally, in the 13th percentile. Shaw University spent $452,000. Coppin State spent $304,000. Mississippi Valley State spent $161,000. Jarvis Christian College spent $150,000. These are institutions with graduate programs, loyal alumni networks, and deep community roots. The research numbers they are producing are not the result of limited potential. They are the result of limited prioritization. There is a meaningful distinction between the two, and the sector has been too comfortable blurring it.

The comparison with peer land-grant and regional public universities is instructive and uncomfortable. A regional public university with comparable enrollment to Morgan State or Tennessee State will typically have a dedicated technology transfer office, a research commercialization incubator, multiple endowed research chairs, and a graduate school that is explicitly linked to the institution’s strategic revenue plan. These are not luxuries at those institutions. They are understood as core infrastructure. At too many HBCUs, they remain aspirational bullet points in strategic plans that are never fully funded.

The institutional neglect of research infrastructure does not exist in a vacuum. It is reinforced and in many ways perpetuated by a philanthropic culture among HBCU alumni that directs dollars toward the visible and the sentimental rather than the strategic. Ask an HBCU alumni association what its fundraising priorities are, and the answers are predictable: scholarships, athletics, the marching band, campus beautification, the homecoming experience. These are not illegitimate priorities. Scholarships keep students enrolled. A great homecoming is an institutional identity statement. But they are not the investments that build research universities, and the gap between where HBCU alumni philanthropy flows and where HBCU research infrastructure requires investment is one of the most consequential misalignments in Black institutional life.

The problem is structural and informational. HBCU alumni, by and large, do not know what their institutions’ research portfolios look like. They do not know that their alma mater ranks in the 13th percentile of national research expenditures. They do not know that the graduate school is operating without a dedicated technology licensing office. They have never been presented with a case for why endowing a research chair in computational biology or environmental science would generate more long-term institutional value than another scholarship fund. No one has made that case to them, because the institutions themselves have not fully internalized it. PWI alumni are regularly presented with precisely this framing. Major research universities run sophisticated campaigns explaining to their donor bases that an endowed professorship creates a permanent research income stream, that a gift to a technology commercialization fund can generate licensing revenue that multiplies the original gift, that an investment in graduate fellowships attracts research talent that then generates grant overhead that funds the next generation of infrastructure. The cause-and-effect chain from donation to institutional research capacity to economic output is laid out explicitly. HBCU development offices have, with notable exceptions, not made this case. The result is that HBCU alumni who are themselves scientists, engineers, physicians, and entrepreneurs give generously to scholarships while their institutions’ research infrastructure atrophies. They are loyal donors funding an incomplete vision of what their institutions could be.

The competitive gap is widening not only in research expenditure but in the commercialization infrastructure that converts research into institutional wealth and nowhere is that gap more nakedly visible than in patent production. The National Academy of Inventors publishes an annual ranking of U.S. universities by utility patents granted. In 2024, the University of California system led the country with 540 patents. MIT produced 295. The University of Texas system produced 234. Purdue produced 213. Stanford produced 199. Not one HBCU appears anywhere in the top 100. Not Howard. Not NC A&T. Not Florida A&M. The list runs to 100 institutions and ends with universities holding 14 patents each. HBCUs could not place a single institution on it. This is not incidental. It is the downstream consequence of four and a half decades of abdication from the commercialization economy that the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 made available to every research university in America. That legislation gave universities ownership of discoveries made with federal research funding — a structural gift that created the legal architecture for technology licensing offices, spinoff companies, and the university-based venture ecosystem that now anchors the innovation economies of entire regions. MIT’s technology licensing office has generated billions in cumulative revenue and been instrumental in creating hundreds of companies. Stanford’s equivalent has returned substantial royalty income to its operating budget and endowment for decades. The institutions that built aggressive commercialization infrastructure around Bayh-Dole are now compounding institutional wealth at a rate that has nothing to do with tuition receipts or annual federal appropriations. HBCUs have largely been bystanders to this transformation for forty-five years. Every year that an HBCU produces federally funded research without a pipeline for commercializing it is a year in which intellectual property that legally belongs to the institution is effectively abandoned. The patents are not filed. The licensing agreements are not negotiated. The spinoff companies are not formed. The wealth that research can generate, wealth that is independent of enrollment cycles, tuition sensitivity, and federal political winds is left on the table. When a major technology company funds a research center at MIT or Carnegie Mellon, it is making an investment in an ecosystem that has already demonstrated the capacity to convert that investment into commercially viable output. That ecosystem produced Google. It produced Genentech. It produced the foundational patents behind industries that did not exist a generation ago. The question for HBCUs is not how to be invited into that ecosystem. Invitation is not the goal, and dependence on the goodwill of institutions that have never prioritized Black wealth creation is not a strategy. The goal is to build a parallel ecosystem; one anchored in HBCU research infrastructure, capitalized through the African diaspora, and oriented toward producing the companies, the patents, and the intellectual property that generate Black institutional wealth on a generational time horizon. The African American community has spending power measured in the trillions. The African continent represents one of the fastest-growing concentrations of capital and technological ambition in the world. The Caribbean and broader diaspora hold resources, networks, and markets that no MIT spinoff has been designed to serve. An HBCU-anchored research commercialization ecosystem, built in genuine partnership with diaspora capital rather than in perpetual petition to federal appropriators, is the architecture through which an African American-owned Google becomes imaginable not as aspiration, but as institutional output. Stanford did not produce Google because it got lucky. It produced Google because it had spent decades building the research infrastructure, the technology transfer capacity, the graduate talent pipelines, and the investor relationships that made commercializable discovery an institutional inevitability rather than an accident. HBCUs have the community. They have the talent. They have, in the diaspora, a potential capital base that dwarfs what most research universities could claim at the moment they began building. What they have not yet built is the infrastructure that converts all of that latent capacity into compounding institutional power. That is the work. And it cannot begin until the sector decides that research is not an afterthought it is the foundation.

None of that ecosystem can be built, however, if the students arriving at HBCU research programs have spent their entire academic formation inside institutions that treated STEM as an afterthought. The research university does not begin at the graduate school. It begins at the pipeline that feeds it. The elite PWI research institutions that dominate the HERD rankings and the NAI patent list are not drawing their graduate talent from underfunded schools with overextended teachers and no competition culture. They are drawing from Phillips Exeter, Phillips Andover, and the constellation of elite preparatory institutions that have spent generations building exactly the kind of STEM competition infrastructure (doctoral-level coaches, state-of-the-art laboratories, national Olympiad pipelines) that produces the researchers who then generate the patents and the companies. The African American community once had more than 100 Black boarding schools. Four remain. The collapse of that infrastructure is not unrelated to the HERD data. It is part of the same story. Rebuilding a network of elite Black private day schools and boarding schools institutions explicitly designed as STEM pipelines into HBCUs and from HBCUs into the research economy is not a separate conversation from the one this article is having. It is the upstream chapter of it. An HBCU research ecosystem capable of producing commercially viable intellectual property requires a feeder system that has been preparing Black students for that level of scientific culture since before they arrive on campus. The Eight Schools Association does not produce Intel Science Fair winners by accident. Neither will HBCUs produce the next generation of research scientists, patent-holders, and technology entrepreneurs without building the institutional infrastructure that makes that outcome systematic rather than exceptional.

The deepest problem, however, is one that no federal grant program and no alumni campaign can solve on its own. It is a problem of institutional identity. Research at most HBCUs is understood as the work of a specific class of people: faculty with PhDs, graduate students, grant administrators. It is not understood as the work of the institution. This is a fundamentally impoverished conception of what a research university is, and it has real consequences for both the quantity and the quality of what gets produced. The most research-intensive universities in the world do not operate this way. At institutions where research is genuinely central to the mission, the orientation pervades the entire organization. The facilities management team understands that their work maintains the physical infrastructure on which research depends. Procurement staff understand that how they manage equipment acquisition and vendor relationships affects the cost-efficiency of the research enterprise. The administrative staff in grant offices understand themselves as investigators’ partners, not their compliance monitors. The groundskeepers and custodial staff who maintain the physical environment of laboratories and research spaces are part of an institution that takes seriously what happens inside those spaces. This is not sentimentality. It is operational culture. And it is the difference between institutions that treat research as a revenue center and those that treat it as a credential.

For HBCUs, the argument for this kind of whole-institution research identity is not merely operational. It is strategic and historical. The communities that HBCUs were built to serve have profound, unmet research needs: in environmental health, in medical outcomes, in economic development, in urban infrastructure, in food systems, in financial services. The proximity of HBCUs to those communities — geographic, cultural, institutional — is itself a competitive research advantage that no PWI can fully replicate. Community-engaged research, participatory research models, place-based longitudinal studies of Black American communities — these are areas in which HBCUs have natural authority. But capitalizing on that authority requires treating research as a whole-institution commitment, not a departmental function. It means building research literacy across every level of the institution. It means having honest conversations, from the boardroom to the grounds crew, about what research is, why it matters, and what the institution loses every year it is treated as secondary. Not because every employee will write a journal article, but because institutional culture is built through shared understanding of institutional purpose. When everyone connected to a campus understands that its long-term capacity to serve its community is tied to its research productivity, the institution begins to function differently. Budget priorities shift. Hiring decisions reflect research capacity. Alumni giving conversations expand beyond the sentimental to the strategic.

The institutions already gaining ground demonstrate the model. Morgan State’s growth from $13.6 million in 2015 to $55.5 million in 2024 — a 309% increase — did not come from waiting on Washington. It came from deciding that research was a strategic priority and building the administrative infrastructure to compete for it. Winston-Salem State’s 840% growth over the same period came from targeting federal health research dollars with institutional precision. Delaware State nearly tripled its portfolio. These trajectories prove the capacity exists.

There are also signs that the sector is beginning to grasp the coordination imperative. On April 29, 2026, fifteen HBCUs announced the formation of the Association of HBCU Research Institutions (AHRI), a national coalition explicitly designed to accelerate research capacity, increase the number of HBCUs achieving R1 Carnegie Classification, and expand collective policy influence. The founding membership includes Howard, the sector’s only R1 institution, alongside thirteen R2 institutions: Clark Atlanta, Delaware State, Florida A&M, Hampton, Jackson State, Morgan State, NC A&T, Prairie View A&M, South Carolina State, Southern University, Tennessee State, Texas Southern, and Virginia State. Collectively, AHRI’s members account for roughly half of all competitively awarded federal research funding among HBCUs. The coalition is co-located with the Association of American Universities and has secured a three-year, $1 million grant from Harvard’s Legacy of Slavery initiative, with Harvard’s Office of the Vice Provost for Research providing technical assistance. The formation of AHRI is the most substantive structural move the HBCU research sector has made in a generation, and it deserves to be recognized as such. But one million dollars over three years, measured against a sector-wide research gap of hundreds of millions annually and a patent economy in which HBCUs hold zero of the top 100 positions, is a foundation, not a solution. The significance of AHRI is not the capital it has raised. It is the architecture it represents — fifteen institutions deciding that isolation is no longer a viable strategy. If that architecture is built upon seriously, capitalized at the scale the HERD data demands, and extended to the 44 HBCU/PBI institutions not yet in the coalition, it becomes the organizational infrastructure through which the ecosystem this article has described can actually be constructed. If it becomes another announcement without a follow-through funding strategy, the HERD Survey will record the same story in 2034 that it has recorded every year since 2015.

But the formation of AHRI also demands a harder question that the coalition’s announcement did not address: how much genuine institutional autonomy do its member institutions actually have? Research strategy is a function of institutional governance. An institution that cannot independently set its research agenda, control its own board appointments, or protect its leadership from politically motivated interference cannot build the kind of sustained, multi-year research infrastructure the HERD data demands regardless of what coalition it joins. This is not a hypothetical concern. Prairie View A&M, one of AHRI’s founding members, operates within the Texas A&M University System, a governance structure in which the flagship institution’s interests, priorities, and resource allocation decisions do not always align with those of a historically Black land-grant whose research mission serves a fundamentally different community. The degree to which Prairie View can pursue an independent research commercialization strategy, build its own technology transfer infrastructure, or make unilateral decisions about patent filing and licensing within that system is a question the coalition’s formation does not resolve. Texas Southern, another AHRI founding member, has experienced more direct interference: its board has been subject to hostile gubernatorial appointments that resulted in the termination of institutional leadership in ways that the broader HBCU community recognized as reflecting political interests rather than institutional ones. Tennessee State has faced comparable dynamics, with the state’s Republican-controlled legislature effectively vacating its board and replacing it with gubernatorial appointees, a maneuver that places the strategic direction of a public HBCU in the hands of an administration with no particular stake in HBCU research excellence. An HBCU that cannot protect its own president, control its own board, or govern its own research agenda is not positioned to build a serious research enterprise regardless of its AHRI membership. The coalition is only as strategically coherent as the institutional autonomy of its members. That autonomy, for several of its founding institutions, is not guaranteed. It is contested.

The structural argument that the data ultimately forces is this: no external actor — no administration, no Congress, no philanthropic initiative operating at current scales — has demonstrated the will to close a gap this large. Replicating and scaling what the sector’s fastest-growing research institutions have done requires HBCU administrations to stop treating their research enterprises as afterthoughts, HBCU alumni to stop treating their philanthropy as sentiment, and HBCU communities to start treating institutional research capacity as what it actually is — a long-term economic and political asset that compounds in value every year it is invested in, and deteriorates every year it is not.

The HERD Survey is updated annually. And annually, the same story is told. The question is whether the institutions that story concerns have finally decided to write a different one.

Data sourced from the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, Higher Education R&D Survey (HERD), FY 2015–2024; and the National Academy of Inventors, 2024 Top 100 U.S. Universities Granted U.S. Utility Patents. All HERD expenditure figures are in thousands of current dollars.

Disclaimer: This article was assisted by ClaudeAI.

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The DEI Distraction: Why Black Business Leaders Are Defending the Wrong Battlefield

Posted on March 29, 2026 by | Leave a comment

It is simple. Our talent and capital is either empowering and enriching our institutional ecosystem – or it is doing that for someone else. We are begging Others’ to let our talent and capital make them richer and more powerful. – William A. Foster, IV

When Bloomberg Businessweek convened a roundtable of prominent Black business executives in late March 2026 to discuss the Trump administration’s sweeping rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, the gathering carried an unmistakable weight. The participants — Ursula Burns of Integrum, Lisa Wardell of the American Express board, Jacob Walthour Jr. of Blueprint Capital Advisors, Nicole Reboe of Rich Talent Group, and Chris Williams of Siebert Williams Shank represent some of the most accomplished figures in American corporate life. Their concerns are real. Their frustrations are earned. And they are, with the greatest respect, focused on exactly the wrong problem.

The DEI debate has consumed enormous intellectual and political energy among Black business leadership. Executives like Burns have emphasized that DEI efforts historically helped address systemic barriers rather than provide unfair advantages. This is correct as far as it goes. But defending the legitimacy of DEI however righteous the argument is fundamentally an argument about access to other people’s institutions. It is a debate about whether African American talent will be permitted to generate wealth for corporate structures that it does not own, govern, or ultimately benefit from in proportion to its contribution. Winning that argument secures a seat at a table built by someone else, financed by someone else, and passed on to someone else’s heirs.

The more consequential question, one that the DEI debate reliably obscures is this: what is the strategic value of Black business ownership as the foundation of an autonomous African American institutional ecosystem, and why has that ecosystem remained so structurally underdeveloped compared to the scale of Black talent and labor flowing through the broader American economy?

The case against centering the DEI debate as the primary lens for Black economic advancement is, at its core, an argument about capital flows. Every dollar of Black labor and talent that enters a corporation it does not own produces returns that are retained, reinvested, and compounded within that corporation’s ownership structure. The wages extracted represent a fraction of the value created. This is not a critique unique to the experience of African Americans, it is the fundamental logic of capitalism. The distinction, however, is that other ethnic and national communities have historically used their productive capacity to capitalize their own institutional ecosystems: banks, insurance companies, real estate holding entities, research universities, and media operations that recirculate wealth within the community rather than exporting it.

Between 2017 and 2022, Black-owned employer businesses grew by nearly 57 percent, adding more than 70,000 new firms, injecting $212 billion into the economy and paying over $61 billion in salaries. That is not a trivial contribution. But its structural limitations are equally stark. Black Americans make up 14 percent of the U.S. population but own only 3.3 percent of businesses. More revealing still: if Black business ownership continues to grow at its current rate of 4.72 percent annually, it will take 256 years to reach parity with the share of Black people in America, a timeline that leaves racial wealth gaps entrenched across generations. No DEI program, however well-designed or vigorously defended, addresses that structural gap. DEI operates within the existing distribution of institutional ownership. It does not alter it. A Black executive ascending to the C-suite of a Fortune 500 company is a personal achievement of consequence, but it does not transfer a dollar of equity to the African American institutional ecosystem. The corporation retains its ownership structure, its compounding endowment, and its ability to extend opportunity to subsequent generations on its own terms.

This is not an argument that employment in major corporations is without value. It is an argument about strategic priority and institutional logic. The Bloomberg roundtable reflects the perspective of individuals who have navigated the highest levels of American corporate life with exceptional skill. But the very fact that their primary public posture is a defense of DEI — a program designed to manage the terms of Black participation in institutions owned by others — illustrates how thoroughly that framework has captured the strategic imagination of Black business leadership. White workers overall still hold 71 percent of executive jobs, 61 percent of manager positions, and 54 percent of professional roles. DEI, at its most effective, redistributed a fraction of corporate leadership positions without altering the underlying structure of institutional ownership. The wealth generated by those institutions through equity appreciation, retained earnings, and compounding investment portfolios continued to flow overwhelmingly to the same ownership class it always has.

The parallel structure that could generate equivalent wealth retention within the African American community requires not better access to existing institutions but the construction and capitalization of independent ones. HBCUs represent the most significant existing node in that potential ecosystem. They are anchor institutions with land assets, research capacity, and the ability to concentrate and retain Black talent. But they remain chronically undercapitalized relative to their peer institutions, in large part because the most financially productive graduates of HBCUs and of Black communities broadly are systematically routed into corporations and financial institutions that extract rather than recirculate their productive capacity.

Black households have, on average, 77 percent less wealth than white households — roughly $958,000 less per household, representing approximately 24 cents for every dollar of white family wealth. That gap is not primarily explained by differences in income or educational attainment. It is explained by differences in asset ownership, intergenerational wealth transfer, and institutional investment. The DEI framework, even at its most ambitious, addresses income. It does not address assets. If the share of Black employer businesses reached parity with the share of the Black population, cities across the country could see as many as 757,000 new businesses, 6.3 million more jobs, and an additional $824 billion in revenue circulating in local economies. That figure represents the economic magnitude of the ownership gap and none of it is captured by diversity metrics in corporate hiring. The structural barriers to closing that gap are not primarily political. They are financial. On average, 35 percent of white business owners received all the financing they applied for, compared to 16 percent of Black business owners. Black entrepreneurs are nearly three times more likely than white entrepreneurs to have business growth and profitability negatively impacted by a lack of financial capital, and 70.6 percent rely on personal and family savings for financing which means that lower household wealth creates a compounding disadvantage that no corporate diversity initiative is designed to resolve. This is the architecture of the problem: insufficient institutional wealth produces insufficient capital formation, which constrains business ownership, which perpetuates insufficient institutional wealth. DEI does not break that cycle because it operates entirely outside of it.

The African American institutional ecosystem: HBCUs and their endowments, African American owned banks and credit unions, Black-owned insurance and real estate entities, and community development financial institutions represents the structural alternative to the DEI framework. It is not a consolation prize for those excluded from mainstream corporate life. It is the only mechanism capable of generating the compounding institutional wealth that produces genuine economic sovereignty. HBCUs enroll approximately 10 percent of Black college students while producing a disproportionate share of Black professionals in STEM, law, medicine, and business. They hold land assets in some of the most economically dynamic metros in the South. They maintain alumni networks that, if systematically directed toward institutional investment rather than individual career advancement, could generate endowment growth and enterprise development at a scale currently untapped. The strategic argument is straightforward: every Black student who graduates from an HBCU and subsequently directs their career, capital, and philanthropic energy toward institutions within the aforementioned African American ecosystem compounds the institutional wealth available to the next generation. Every Black student who takes that same talent into a corporation it does not own, however successfully, contributes to the wealth of an institution that will not reciprocate at the ecosystem level.

This is not an argument for economic separatism. It is an argument for institutional density, the same logic that has guided the development of Jewish philanthropic networks, Korean rotating credit associations, and the university endowment strategies of the Ivy League. Strong communities maintain reinforcing networks of institutions that recirculate capital and concentrate talent. The DEI framework asks Black Americans to enrich other communities’ institutional networks on the condition of fairer treatment. The ownership framework asks Black Americans to build their own.

None of this is to diminish the real harm caused by the current administration’s DEI rollbacks. Black-owned businesses that relied on federal contracting set-asides have seen immediate, concrete losses with some small business owners reporting the loss of $15,000 to $20,000 per month due to reduced contract flows. The SBA admitted only 65 companies to its 8(a) business development program in 2025, compared with more than 2,000 admissions over the previous four years. These are real economic injuries that warrant legal and political challenge. But the defensive posture of protecting DEI within institutions that Black America does not control is insufficient as a long-term economic strategy. The Bloomberg roundtable produced eloquent testimony about the frustrations of Black executives navigating a hostile political environment. It produced very little discussion of what autonomous Black institutional infrastructure should look like, or how the talent assembled in that room of capital allocators, board directors, investment bankers, and talent executives might direct its resources toward building it.

The transition from a DEI-centered to an ownership-centered strategic framework requires institutional coordination that does not yet exist at scale. It requires HBCU endowments to function as patient capital for Black enterprise ecosystems rather than passive investment portfolios. It requires Black-owned financial institutions to be capitalized and connected to the deal flow generated by Black corporate executives. It requires alumni networks to function as economic infrastructure rather than social affinity groups. And it requires Black business leadership to measure its success not by representation metrics within institutions it does not own, but by the growth of institutional assets within the ecosystem it does. The DEI debate is real and the rollback is damaging. But the strategic imagination of Black business leadership will remain constrained so long as its primary horizon is defined by the terms of inclusion offered by others. The more consequential work — slower, less visible, and politically unrewarded — is the construction of institutions powerful enough that the terms of inclusion become irrelevant. That is the work HBCUs and the broader African American institutional ecosystem exist to support. It is the work that this moment demands.

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