By Kayode Crown
For student Nicholas Chapman, toilet conditions were the most apparent thing that needed attention at Alabama A&M University.
“The bathrooms are nasty,” Chapman told AL.com this spring.
Shawn Williams expressed concerns about one of the classrooms.
“There’s definitely improvements or places that could be renovated or improved to make student life better,” he said. “I know they are doing some repairs, but, for example, in one of the classrooms I’m in, there’s a part of the ceiling completely off.”
Last fall, the secretaries of the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Education sent letters to 16 state governors, including Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey. In the 33 years between 1987 and 2020, the 16 states did not equitably fund the pair of majority Black and majority white public land-grant universities in their states, the secretaries’ letter said.
The federal officials said that Alabama underfunded Alabama A&M, the state’s public majority-Black land- grant institution, to the tune of $527 million, when compared with Auburn University, the majority-white counterpart. The secretaries’ letter did not mention Tuskegee University, Alabama’s third land-grant college, which is a private institution.
Jim Purcell, executive director of the Alabama Commission on Higher Education, faults the federal officials’ analysis, saying they did not take into account the class offerings and differing costs of programs offered at each school.
“When I’ve talked to them, they basically said we just did this general comparison of fall time students to budget allocations,” said Purcell in an interview with AL.com. “That’s such an amateuristic calculation compared to what academic costs are, and that academic program mix is probably the most crucial aspect of expenses.”
A&M is what’s known as an 1890 land-grant school. Land-grant schools began forming from revenue from land donated to states by the federal government in the 1800s. In 1890, Congress passed a law requiring that states either admit Black students to those schools or establish separate universities for Black people. Seventeen states, primarily located in the southern part of the nation, chose the second option, including Alabama.
Alabama established Alabama A&M in 1875. Auburn had become the first Alabama land-grant institution three years earlier, in 1872.
Last year, around the same time that the secretaries sent their letter, Alabama A&M wrote to the Alabama Commission on Higher Education to ask for $197 million in funding for infrastructure needs on campus. The university requested $51.8 million to renovate student, administrative, and academic buildings, $140 million for new science and student amenities and $5 million to replace a pedestrian bridge because “current bridge has reached its end of life,” Alabama A&M wrote in the slide presentation be- fore ACHE last year. ACHE shared portions of the slide with AL.com.
Chapman, Williams and other A&M students spoke to AL.com about facility and infrastructure issues they’ve encountered on campus during the spring semester.
“I think in the school, something that needs to kind of be worked on is maybe the bathrooms in some buildings,” said student Taiwo Olawepo, adding that there had been improvements in the library and some of the dormitories.
Alexis Anthony said she was concerned about the safety of the electric socket in her dorm.
“I don’t feel like it’s safe. So my mom told me not to use it,” Anthony told AL.com.
