Prior to our gift announcement, we started our faculty-staff institute with a presentation by Dr. John S. Wilson, executive director of the White House Initiative on HBCUs. He helped us discuss institutional infrastructure for maintaining best practices.

As always, Dr. Wilson was profound and gave me new ideas to consider. One of the key ideas was prestige versus reputation, and we should be working toward prestige where we drive the market.

Another idea is to prioritize permanence, where developing a strong enough endowment allows the president to be creative without worrying about resources. The goal should be for us to have an endowment to expense ratio that is at least 5. Only one HBCU is close to this (Spelman), so we all have lots of work to do.

The Prez