Under Trump, a Hard Test for Howard University

One morning last February, not long after Donald Trump had been inaugurated as President, but long before many people had reconciled themselves to that fact, students at Howard University awoke to find a bold message written on a walkway of the campus’s central plaza, known as the Yard. Spray-painted in blue block letters, it read “Welcome to the Trump Plantation, Overseer: Wayne A. I. Frederick.” The message was aimed at the heart, the character, and the conscience of Howard’s president, a reserved, deliberative oncologist and surgeon whom the board of trustees had unanimously elected to the position in 2014. Frederick is pure Howard: he earned his undergraduate and medical degrees and a master’s in business administration there. At forty-six, he has held a number of titles, but “overseer”—a derisive term for black proxies of white authority—was hardly one he was seeking.

There was an additional layer of shade visible to those familiar with the school’s history. When Howard—one of the largest of the hundred and two historically black colleges and universities, or H.B.C.U.s, in the United States—was founded, in 1867, it was supported by the Freedman’s Bureau, the federal agency charged with helping emancipated black people navigate the world that awaited them after the Civil War. The author of the spray-painted message was clearly suggesting that the school—and, specifically, Frederick—no longer represented a disruption of the nation’s racial hierarchy but was a bulwark of it.

The message was a response to a series of events that began on February 9th, when Betsy DeVos, the Trump Administration’s newly appointed Secretary of Education, made Howard, which is in Washington, D.C., the site of her first official campus visit. Trump was already unpopular with African-Americans, on account of his company’s discriminatory real-estate practices and his racist pronouncements, but the bigoted rhetoric of his campaign had made him more so. (When Talladega College, a historically black school founded by two former slaves in Alabama, announced that its band would march in Trump’s inaugural parade, alumni started a petition in protest and inundated the college’s Web page with complaints.)

Trump’s nomination of DeVos, a billionaire businesswoman whom Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, called the “least qualified nominee in a historically unqualified Cabinet,” was seen as another affront. Frederick told me, “She was confirmed at noon, and at two o’clock I had a call saying she wants to have a conversation.” A provision of Howard’s governance automatically makes the Secretary of Education an ex-officio member of the board of trustees, but many on campus felt that DeVos was using Howard as a convenient backdrop for a show of broadmindedness. Why else would she make the visit such an immediate priority? As a former Howard administrator told me, “It’s not like she was there to announce a multimillion-dollar grant.”

Then, on February 27th, Frederick and sixty-eight other presidents of black institutions went to the White House to meet with various officials, in the hope of laying the groundwork to secure additional funding from the federal government. Howard, in a unique arrangement, receives forty per cent of its operating budget—two hundred and twenty-one million dollars in 2016—from a congressional appropriation. This makes its administrators accountable not only to its donors, its alumni, and its students—as all college administrations are—but to the national political leadership. At a meeting that day, DeVos further angered many educators by referring to H.B.C.U.s as pioneers of “school choice”—a perspective akin to viewing Jim Crow as an empowering opportunity for black people to drink from race-specific water fountains. As John Silvanus Wilson, then the president of Morehouse College, in Atlanta, wrote after the meeting, “H.B.C.U.s were not created because the four million newly freed blacks were unhappy with the choices they had. They were created because they had no choices at all.”

Omarosa Manigault, a graduate of two black universities—Central State, in Ohio, and Howard—was then the director of communications for the White House Office of Public Liaison. She had reportedly pushed Trump to schedule a meeting with the presidents in the Oval Office, and pushed them to attend it. Frederick told me, “I was probably the last person to enter the room. I knew there would be a photo op.” In one of the photographs from the meeting, Kellyanne Conway, the counsellor to the President, knelt on a sofa in what seemed inappropriate informality. But many African-Americans were more offended by another photograph, which featured Trump smiling broadly, with the African-American leaders standing around him. It seemed like a tableau from plantation days, and served as a succinct summary of the fraught transition from Barack Obama, the first black President—and Howard’s 2016 commencement speaker—to Trump, who had smeared Obama by trafficking in birtherism and who now embraced the support of white nationalists. Frederick stayed near the door, out of the camera’s view. Nonetheless, his presence became an incendiary element in the post-election mood at Howard. The message appeared the next morning.

Juan Demetrixx, a political-science major and a leader of a student activist group called H.U. Resist, told me that he didn’t know who had written it, but added, “We agree with the sentiment.” Another student told the Hilltop, the campus newspaper, “Frederick doesn’t care about us, only money.” Other local media reported that additional messages had appeared, such as “Wayne Frederick doesn’t care about black people” (a spin on the accusation that Kanye West levelled at George W. Bush after Hurricane Katrina) and “Make Howard black again.” Mark Mason, an alum who is a chief financial officer at Citigroup and a vice-co-chair of the university’s board of trustees, was protective of Frederick, telling me that the graffiti “was inappropriately personalized and should not have happened.” He added, “Howard has always been a place where people have been able to offer a difference of views, and Wayne continues that aspect of our legacy, but there’s a respectful way to do that.”

I enrolled at Howard in 1987, a year before Frederick, though I didn’t know him there. I met him briefly a year ago, but our first substantial conversation took place last spring, at his office, in a corner suite on the fourth floor of the main administration building. The room looked very different from the last time I had been in it, in my sophomore year, when students occupied the building during a protest. Frederick’s office is composed and serene, much like his demeanor. That day, he wore a blue suit, a crisp white shirt, and a pin commemorating Howard’s recent hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary. He is trim and somewhat formal, and speaks softly, with a trace of the accent of his native Trinidad. (Frederick’s father, a policeman, died when he was two; he was raised by his mother, a nurse, and his stepfather, a prison officer.) He lives in suburban Montgomery County, Maryland, with his wife, Simone, a fellow-Trinidadian, whom he met at Carnival and who previously worked in health-care information technology. They have two children.

Frederick might best be described as a pragmatic optimist. James Comey, the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, is spending the year as a fellow at Howard, and he told me that he found Frederick to be both kind and tough. Effective leaders, Comey said, “are nice people who listen well, but they’re not going to get run over.” The day the message appeared, Frederick asked that it not be removed: “I said, ‘Let the rest of the campus see it.’ There’s a freedom of expression that we’re going to uphold.” (Graduate students cleaned it up the next day.) But he was clearly shaken by the incident, particularly when a white classmate of his twelve-year-old son mocked him, saying that Frederick was “running Trump’s plantation” and would soon be fired. He told me, “I’ll be honest with you. That probably was one of the lowest points not just in my being president but in my life.”

Part of Frederick’s frustration stems from the fact that, although he is more conservative in his actions and in his manner than most students and faculty members, both groups had previously regarded him favorably. A number of people told me how impressed they had been by the speech he gave at the 2016 convocation ceremony. The night before, the university marshal, who traditionally leads the parade of faculty, e-mailed Frederick to say that, in light of the anti-racist and anti-police-brutality demonstrations being staged across the country, she would not stand when the national anthem was played. She offered to step down as marshal, or to resign, but Frederick said no. At the ceremony, others followed her example, and, during his remarks, Frederick paused to ask those who had sat during the anthem to stand and be recognized. He told them, “While I intend to stand when the national anthem is played, I also will respect and celebrate your interests in protesting.” For many college presidents, this would be a straightforward embrace of free speech, but, for one whose campus is so susceptible to the fluctuations of national politics, it was an audacious position to take.

Then circumstances changed. In April, members of the faculty senate passed a vote of no confidence in Frederick’s leadership, for, according to the chair at the time, “ineffective fund-raising” and a failure to incorporate faculty perspectives in decision-making. No one who voted against him would speak to me on the record, and no further actions were taken. Some faculty members disputed the validity of the vote on procedural grounds. Also last year, six women filed suit against Howard, alleging that the university had been slow to respond to reports of sexual assault, and that, in at least one instance, this had allowed a perpetrator to commit additional offenses. The university filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, which has not yet been ruled on. In the meantime, Howard announced a new set of policies to clarify the handling of sexual-assault complaints, following an internal review.

In addition, despite the federal funding, Howard has faced particular financial challenges. It is responsible for the administration of the undergraduate college and seven graduate and professional schools, with a combined enrollment of ten thousand students, more than half of whom come from low-income families. It also runs Howard Hospital, a six-story, four-hundred-bed facility built in the nineteen-seventies. In March, the Washington Post reported that the hospital was suffering a financial and organizational crisis that threatened the well-being of the broader institution. (It is currently ranked sixth out of seven major hospitals in the District of Columbia, and it operated at a nineteen-million-dollar loss in 2015.)

“There’s a reason the other two universities in D.C.”—Georgetown and George Washington—“don’t fully own their hospitals,” Frederick told me. “It’s a business with a very small margin, and an industry unto itself.” The issue is further complicated by the hospital’s history: not only does it provide critical care for low-income, predominantly African-American residents of the city, but it was founded, as the Freedmen’s Hospital, in 1862, to care for black soldiers wounded in the Civil War. Although Howard did not take over the hospital until 1967, the school has used it for teaching since 1868, and it represents a central part of the school’s mission. More than a hundred positions have been eliminated, and the university says that there has been a surplus in the annual budget for two consecutive years. Even so, it is exploring options to sell the hospital or to share its ownership.

Frederick hopes to one day return to surgical practice full time, and he still occasionally operates at the hospital. I visited him there in early July, when he had volunteered to be on call. He had also invited a recent graduate named Shakira Jarvis, who was considering applying to the medical school, to accompany him on his rounds. At the hospital, a different side of Frederick’s personality emerged: he was at ease and even, at times, jovial. He first checked in on a patient he’d operated on two days earlier, for a perforated ulcer. Then he looked in on a twenty-five-year-old man with familial adenomatous polyposis, a disorder that begins in adolescence and is characterized by the growth of tumors in the large intestine. Those with the condition are at a high risk of developing colon cancer. The recommended treatment, Frederick said later, is the removal of the intestine, at around age sixteen. This patient, who lived in one of the poorest areas of the city, had received only sporadic treatment, and a cancerous growth had gone unnoticed. Frederick was there to discuss end-of-life care with him.

When Frederick came out of the patient’s room, he talked to Jarvis about how medicine cannot be separated from the social context in which it is practiced. His long-term plan is to send not only medical students but also social-work students and nutrition majors to chronically underserved communities in the District, in an effort to step in where the health-care system has failed. It’s easy to see how the demands of Howard’s social mission might outstrip its resources.

The issue confronting Howard and the other H.B.C.U.s is not whether they still have a role in a society where the formal segregation of higher education no longer exists; that is something commonly asked about black colleges, not by them. In the years immediately following the Brown v. Board of Education decision, in 1954, many worried that the colleges would be unable to compete against prestigious, better resourced, mostly white schools in order to attract talented black students. Yet the schools’ core mission, their cultural traditions, and, increasingly, their capacity to provide a sense of community for a significant subset of black students who grew up in largely white environments gave them durability in the new landscape. If part of the terrible yield of racism has been the reduction of human complexity to flat caricature, then Howard’s objective—pedagogically, socially, demographically—has been the opposite. As Jacob Hardman, a senior finance major, who grew up in a predominantly white community, told me, “Howard was the first opportunity I had to not just be the one exceptional black person.”

The resilience of the H.B.C.U.s is even more striking given the fate of women’s colleges in the United States, which have declined in number by eighty per cent in the past fifty years. (There are currently just forty-four.) A study in the nineteen-nineties found that three-quarters of African-Americans with doctoral degrees and four-fifths of black federal judges hold at least one degree from a historically black institution. The question that looms over the H.B.C.U.s is not “why” but “how.”

The “big four” among H.B.C.U.s includes Morehouse and Spelman, both in Atlanta, and Hampton, in Virginia, but Howard, situated in the nation’s capital, holds a central status. A study from the Equality of Opportunity Project ranks it in the top eight per cent of élite schools in terms of impact on the social mobility of students. Its list of alumni includes luminaries in politics (Thurgood Marshall, Doug Wilder, Andrew Young, David Dinkins, Kamala Harris); arts and letters (Zora Neale Hurston, Lucille Clifton, Donnie Hathaway, Ossie Davis, Amiri Baraka, Roberta Flack, Jessye Norman, Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates); business and science (Walter Lincoln Hawkins, Bill Bell, Kelly Miller); and academia (E. Franklin Frazier, Thomas Sowell, Marjorie Lee Browne). In my time there, such people were held up not simply as case studies in achievement but as a kind of categorical validation of the ideal of black institutions. They were data points of possibility to counter the roster of pessimisms arrayed against black America and, tragically, even subscribed to at times by members of our own communities.

Faculty and alumni refer to Howard as “the mecca,” in part because it has historically attracted students from throughout the African diaspora. It is held in particularly high regard in Frederick’s native Trinidad. Eric Williams, who became the nation’s first Prime Minister after independence, in 1962, taught in the social-science department. Stokely Carmichael, who was a student activist at Howard before becoming a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and, later, the Black Power movement, was also Trinidadian. Shaka Hislop, a former English Premier League soccer player, was a star of Howard’s team in the late nineteen-eighties, and had been a schoolmate of Frederick’s in Trinidad. “I left to attend Howard on a soccer scholarship,” Hislop told me. “I fell in love with the place and encouraged him to come.” He went so far as to cover the twenty-five-dollar application fee, in a bid to insure that Frederick applied.

Frederick’s decision was complicated by the fact that he has sickle-cell anemia, a condition that causes fatigue and painful blockages of the blood flow. Cold weather can worsen the symptoms, and Frederick worried about winters in Washington, D.C. But the appeal of Howard’s history prevailed. He arrived on campus a sixteen-year-old freshman weighing less than a hundred pounds. Frederick and Hislop were a study in contrasts: the tall, popular athlete and the diminutive introvert so dedicated to his studies that he earned his undergraduate and medical degrees in just six years. In 2014, Hislop completed an executive master’s in business administration; his degree bears the signature of the friend he all but coerced into applying.

Most of the H.B.C.U.s are in the South, where they were the product of an ethic of social uplift adopted after the Civil War, when resistance to the education of blacks was almost as fierce as it had been during slavery. W. E. B. Du Bois, in his history of Reconstruction, published in 1935, quotes a Louisianan to the effect that white Southerners were “more hostile to the establishment of [black] schools than they are to [blacks] owning lands.” Theories about what social roles best befitted the four million black people in the United States in 1865—a sixth of the population—varied, and so did the mission of the schools. Many focussed on agricultural and technical education, such as Tuskegee Institute, in Alabama, and North Carolina A. & T. University. Others, such as Morehouse, Spelman, and Howard, aimed to build a broadly educated segment of black America that would open the doors of opportunity for the remainder of the race. And, for decades to come, admission to white-dominated universities remained so segregated, at least in the de-facto sense, that without the H.B.C.U.s higher education would have been an impossible aspiration for formerly enslaved people and their descendants.

Howard was first envisioned during a series of dinner conversations among political brokers in downtown D.C. The organizer was Oliver Otis Howard, who, as a general in the Union Army, had fought at Gettysburg. In May, 1865, Howard was appointed the commissioner of the Freedman’s Bureau. In his memoirs, published in 1907, he wrote that he had experimented with organizing primary schools for black children in the South, but that the white teachers he hired were too indoctrinated with racism to be effective educators. The dinner group came up with the idea of establishing a college to train black teachers, but General C. H. Howard, Oliver’s brother, suggested that educators alone could not safeguard the civil rights of such a vulnerable population. Lawyers were also needed, so a law school should be established, too. Over the course of a month, a plan to create a full university came together.

Oliver Howard’s experience in the war had given him a higher regard for African-Americans than that held by many of his contemporaries, including President Andrew Johnson, who generally resisted the Freedman’s Bureau initiatives. By the standards of the era, Howard’s proposal was wildly idealistic, even if, today, it appears notably tentative. “A brief experience showed us that the Negro people were capable of education, with no limit that men could set to their capacity,” he wrote. “What white men could learn, or had learned, they, or some of them, could learn.”

In the spring of 1867, Howard authorized a transfer of funds from the bureau to cover the cost of building the main campus, on a hundred and fifty acres of farmland that he and others—the new trustees—had purchased. Charles Boynton, a clergyman who also served as the chaplain for the U.S. House of Representatives, was selected as the first president. Although John Mercer Langston, the great-uncle of Langston Hughes, had served as interim president from 1873 to 1875, it was not until 1926 that the university appointed its first black president, Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, a thirty-six-year-old theologian. Johnson, whose parents had both been enslaved, was so light-skinned that he could be mistaken for white. He presided over Howard’s first great expansion and modernized the law school, with a focus on civil-rights law, hiring Charles Hamilton Houston, the first African-American to make the Harvard Law Review, to run it. Houston became a mentor to Thurgood Marshall, and together they initiated much of the key litigation to integrate American schools in the nineteen-fifties.

Howard also attracted an overtly political student body. A famous photograph from 1934 shows a line of students, wearing nooses around their necks, standing across the street from the Daughters of the American Revolution Memorial Hall, where a national conference on crime was being held. The students demanded that the Attorney General, Homer S. Cummings, take action to halt the dozens of lynchings that were still occurring across the nation. The following year, members of the House Appropriations Committee called on Johnson to answer questions about radicalism on campus. He said that he would sooner send the students and faculty “back to the cornfield” than prescribe what they could read or how they could think. Johnson’s audacity made him a legendary figure in Howard’s history—the main administration building is named for him—but many at Howard saw his statements and his actions as irresponsible, and even reckless.

In “Invisible Man,” published in 1952, Ralph Ellison, who was a student at Tuskegee Institute in the nineteen-thirties, described the tense dynamic between black colleges and their leadership. The first section of the novel is set at an unnamed Southern school, where the protagonist, a student, runs afoul of the president, Dr. Bledsoe, who is as dictatorial toward blacks as he is deferential to whites. When white benefactors, whose noblesse oblige blinds them to their own racism, gather for dinner, Bledsoe discreetly excuses himself rather than offend their sensibilities by dining with them.

Bledsoe was based, in part, on Booker T. Washington, the founder of Tuskegee, but he represents a broader character type in H.B.C.U. history. In 1963, Albert Manley, the president of Spelman, fired Howard Zinn, then the chair of the history department, for encouraging his students—Alice Walker and Marian Wright Edelman among them—to participate in the burgeoning civil-rights movement. Manley worried that student activism would upset the white good will upon which the school depended.

In Ellison’s time, Tuskegee was dedicated to the proposition that personal dignity and character were the antidotes to racism. Du Bois, one of Washington’s most ardent ideological opponents, criticized him for practicing the “old attitude of adjustment and submission.” Howard was always intended to be a more forward-thinking institution, though the delicate political positioning of the school made that a complicated undertaking, particularly for its administration.

Over and over again at Howard, the conflict between conciliation with the white world and a more assertive form of politics animated campus activism. In 1968, when students shut down the school and demanded a greater prominence in the curriculum for African-American studies, they posted a sign reading “Black University” on the front of the administration building.

In 1987, when I arrived at Howard, from Jamaica, Queens, to become the first college student in my family, James Cheek had been the president for eighteen years, following a successful stint in that role at Shaw University, in North Carolina. (Mark Mason, the Howard trustee, was also from Jamaica, and was my freshman roommate.) During my sophomore year, in a display of the kind of racial pragmatism that so incensed Ellison, Cheek recruited the Republican political operative Lee Atwater to the board. Atwater, a specialist in employing racially coded rhetoric to discredit and defeat Democratic opponents, had run George H. W. Bush’s 1988 Presidential campaign, and used the notorious Willie Horton ad to portray Michael Dukakis as “soft on crime.” For Cheek, the virtue of Atwater’s political access outweighed his actions. For the students, the move heightened a fear, bequeathed to us by the protesters in 1968, that Howard was not a black university but merely a university with black people.

At the annual Charter Day ceremony in 1989, at which Bill Cosby was given an honorary degree, a group of protesters led by April Silver, who now runs an arts agency, and Ras Baraka, the son of Amiri Baraka and now the mayor of Newark, confronted Cheek about the Atwater appointment. Cheek dismissed their concerns, and, a few days later, more than two thousand students occupied the administration building, shutting down the university. Atwater resigned from the board four days later. Cheek was widely criticized for his decision to deploy the D.C. police in an attempt to remove the students from the building, and stepped down soon afterward.

But Frederick, who did not participate in the protests, regards Cheek in far less stark terms than I do, in part because Cheek presided over the largest modern expansion of Howard’s campus—including the construction of the new hospital building—and of its student population. Where some saw in Cheek a figure willing to sacrifice self-respect in pursuit of revenue, others saw a brilliant tactician navigating a minefield of white antipathy. Frederick is not unaware that the same debate colors the way his own presidency is seen.

The intertwined sense of the weight of Howard’s history and its current implications has typically inspired a kind of racial omertà—a reticence to openly speak ill of one’s own in a society that is always ready to use your shortcomings against you. This made the circumstances surrounding Frederick’s selection as president all the more noteworthy. In June of 2013, Renee Higginbotham-Brooks, the vice-chair of the board of trustees, published an open letter warning that, under the leadership of Sidney Ribeau, a communications scholar who became president in 2008, Howard was on the verge of financial collapse. It had also undergone a worrisome decline in prestige: its credit rating had fallen, and its standing in the annual U.S. News & World Report rankings had dropped for several years running. Some of Ribeau’s supporters disputed the claims, but he announced his retirement later that year, which led to the appointment of Frederick, a physician with a master’s degree in business.

I visited Frederick again on campus late last summer. He’d arrived at the office at seven, and I sat in on several meetings he had scheduled with his “cabinet” of executive officers and new faculty members. One of them was Justin Hansford, an attorney and a Howard alum, whose parents and maternal grandparents also graduated from the university. I had first met him in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, when he helped bring a human-rights complaint to the United Nations against the United States, in response to the events surrounding the death of Michael Brown. He was coming to Howard to lead a civil-rights institute at the law school. “Social justice is in the DNA of this institution,” Frederick said, and he hoped that Hansford would help revitalize the tradition. Given all the recent criticism that Frederick has been too conciliatory, the remark seemed somewhat pointed. Hansford, though, felt that Frederick was sincere. “There’s a huge gap between the way the students view him and the way the faculty views him,” he later told me. Students, in his estimation, are far more critical. Yet Frederick’s relationship with the faculty is not without problems, as the vote of no confidence, valid or not, made plain.

Frederick thinks that his difficulties are partly due to a bias that some African-Americans have against West Indian blacks. “I’m the first non-American-born president of the university,” he said. “There’s an undercurrent of ‘Does he really relate to black people?’ ” I was struck by his forthrightness, even though I wasn’t sure I believed it, given Howard’s history as a crossroads of the African diaspora. But later, when I asked a retired senior administrator about Frederick’s decision to attend the White House meeting, she said, “It may be that, as someone from outside this country, he doesn’t know the various cultural markers, doesn’t have an absolute understanding of racism the way we do.” That “we” she conscripted me into was as loathsome a designation as the “they” that has so often been the lens through which black people are viewed. (Her argument also failed to explain why so many black American college presidents attended the meeting.) Clarence Lusane, who chairs the political-science department, echoed Frederick’s impression: “There’s an idea that there is a West Indian faction and a black American one, and that Frederick favors the former.” The idea had no real basis, Lusane said, and no one I spoke to could identify any specific instance of favoritism, but the perception nonetheless complicates Frederick’s reputation on campus.

Frederick knows that alumni will judge him largely on the university’s financial footing at the end of his tenure. Harvard, with an endowment of thirty-six billion dollars, has a policy that students whose families earn less than sixty-five thousand dollars a year are awarded free tuition, fees, and housing. Stanford, which has an endowment of more than twenty-two billion, has a similar policy, for families earning less than a hundred and twenty-five thousand. Howard, which competes against these institutions for students, cannot come anywhere close to such largesse. In 2015, the financier John Paulson gave Harvard a gift of four hundred million dollars. Howard is the only H.B.C.U. with an endowment larger than Paulson’s gift—around six hundred million dollars. The largest gift to the university during Frederick’s tenure so far is a four-million-dollar donation from the media executive Cathy Hughes and her son, Alfred Liggins III. Frederick also secured ten million dollars in pledges for need-based scholarships last year.

I also sat in on a meeting in the admissions office, where the staff was celebrating the record number of commitments the school had received from accepted applicants for the 2017-18 year. That presented new challenges, though, in terms of housing and classrooms; most of all, the administrators were concerned with the number of academically high-achieving applicants from low-income families. “We’ve got an incoming class with an average G.P.A. of 3.54 and 1210 SAT scores,” Frederick told me later. “But, when they run the analyses, probably sixty per cent of those kids can’t afford to be here.” This meant that those students would struggle with finding financial aid and paying it off. It was the main difficulty confronting all the H.B.C.U.s: a crisis not of purpose but of means.

Last year, the Howard administration sent out a fund-raising e-mail requesting donations for a “Senior Year Fund” for students who had managed to pay tuition for three years but could not cover their senior year. I understood the problem intimately—that circumstance had forced me to drop out of Howard, in the fall of 1990. I owed three thousand dollars in back fees, and therefore couldn’t register for the upcoming year. I stayed in Washington, working in bookstores, attending lectures, and writing bad short fiction. Three years later, when Carmen James, the bursar, and Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, a history professor, discovered that I had not graduated, the registrar’s office allowed me to reënroll and to pay off the outstanding fees in monthly hundred-dollar increments. Everything that followed—graduate school, a doctorate, a career in academia—was thanks to that intervention, a step that the school took in keeping with its sense of mission. But this is precisely the kind of thing that makes it possible for a university to receive a substantial budgetary appropriation and still find itself chronically strapped for funding. Howard’s outstanding tuition fees currently amount to eighteen million dollars.

The H.B.C.U. system has become a sort of longitudinal study of how the racial wealth gap plays out in higher education. Still, Frederick notes, “Howard produces more black people who go on to complete Ph.D.s in STEM fields than any other college or university in the country. Nine of the top ten producers of black people with undergraduate degrees in physics are all historically black colleges.” He added, “One of the things I feel is a real challenge is communicating what we accomplish not in comparison with each other but with all colleges and universities in the country.”

He has some ideas to that end. In an effort to become a crucial player in the diversification of industries where African-Americans are underrepresented, the university launched Howard West, which grew out of a program that brought in Google engineers to serve as computer-science faculty. Through Howard West, twenty-five students were selected by faculty to take a twelve-week course on coding at Google’s San Francisco campus this past summer. The company funded the program, which was initiated by Bonita Stewart, a Google vice-president and a Howard alum. There are plans to expand it to a full academic year.

Another idea has reconnected Frederick with Ben Carson, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Frederick originally applied to medical school because he wanted to work on a cure for sickle-cell anemia, which afflicts a hundred thousand people in the United States. Once he began his studies, he decided that he wanted to be a surgeon, though he wasn’t sure that he had the physical stamina the job requires. In 1993, Frederick cold-called Carson, then a celebrated neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins University and the author of several best-selling books, to ask his advice. Carson invited him to Baltimore, took him to lunch, and persuaded him to pursue surgery.

Frederick does not share Carson’s political views, but he is still grateful for the advice that Carson gave him twenty-four years ago. He recently called him again, to talk about how HUD’s loan programs might help with a potential new plan to finance the hospital. But, Frederick joked, “that doesn’t mean I’m going to say he needs to be on my board of trustees.”

James Comey declined offers from many universities in favor of Howard’s. He was looking to engage in the conversation about law enforcement and race, he said, and “I thought maybe the hardest, most stimulating, and for me most beneficial place to have that would be at the mecca.” Some on campus interpret his presence as a sly gesture on Frederick’s part. Having been criticized for attending the White House gathering, he hired the man whose firing triggered an ongoing, potentially existential threat to Trump’s Presidency. But Frederick denies any political motivation: he met Comey last year, before the White House meeting, when he gave a black-history talk at F.B.I. headquarters, and the fellowship offer came out of discussions they had afterward.

In any event, Comey’s hiring sparked a campus backlash. Students from H.U. Resist released a statement saying that Comey “represents an institution diametrically opposed to the interests of Black people domestically and abroad.” Frederick met with the students, who later told me that they objected to Comey’s use of the term “Ferguson effect,” to describe an alleged uptick in violent crime that followed the national protests against police brutality, because police officers felt powerless to do their jobs effectively. They also criticized the reported monitoring of members of Black Lives Matter during Comey’s tenure, and lodged wide-ranging, historical complaints against the F.B.I. for its treatment of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, and its role in the deportation, in 1927, of the black-nationalist leader Marcus Garvey.

Convocation typically draws a respectable but far from capacity crowd, yet on the morning of last September’s ceremony, where Comey was due to deliver the convocation address, students and faculty packed the auditorium. Shortly after he began to speak, students started chanting protest slogans and singing “We Shall Not Be Moved.” The clamor suggested that at least some students believed that Howard had once more chosen political accommodation over principle. But an apparently larger group began shouting that Comey should be allowed to finish. He continued, saying that “Howard has always been different, which is why I wanted to be part of it. It was designed that way and it has remained that way. A safe space, especially for those who face the oppression and the challenge of being black in America.” He ended his comments to sustained applause. When I asked him later about the event, he laughed and said, “I’ve never given a speech where people were shouting ‘Comey is not my homie.’ ” Then he added, “Howard is dealing with this, like a lot of universities: How do you both embrace energy and protest and dissent and maintain an open environment where people can have hard conversations?”

Frederick was no less sanguine. “Institutions like the F.B.I. and the White House have a tortured history among minorities,” he said. “But we didn’t blame Barack Obama for every ill of the White House’s history. It’s the same with Comey.” Frederick had brought him to campus not despite the strained relationship between minority communities and law enforcement but because of it. “The dialogue is important because minorities are being killed by law enforcement, and I thought it important for my students to be asking him about that directly.”

The protest and counterprotest reminded me yet again of the apparent paradox at the heart of H.B.C.U.s, where pragmatists are in the business of producing new generations of fierce idealists. Ralph Ellison’s Bledsoe delighted in the idea that he might alchemize power from deference. Booker T. Washington denounced racial equality to powerful segregationists, but he also secretly funded efforts to defend black civil rights. Howard’s militancy has been underwritten by its compromises.

One afternoon, when I spoke to Frederick by phone, he told me about a student who had harshly criticized his decision to attend the White House meeting, but later came to his office seeking financial assistance to pay for his final year. To Frederick’s mind, the connection between his trip to the White House and his ability to aid the student was obvious. To his critics, such connections either are opaque or come at a cost that betrays the school’s founding mission. “People think we’re doing God’s work, on God’s time, with God’s money,” Frederick said. “The problem is, we don’t have access to the latter two.” ♦