Black Enterprise, Publishers Page, November 2015
Earlier this month, I could not help being moved to tears by the overwhelming experience of participating in the ribbon-cutting ceremony and tour of the $72 million Morgan Business Center, home of the brand-new Earl G. Graves School of Business and Management at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland.
The state-of-the-art facility, completed under the administration of MSU President David Wilson, features a Center for Innovation, computer labs, digitally-enabled classrooms, a real-time capital markets stock trading center, seminar rooms, and a 299-person-capacity auditorium that includes an 80-person lecture hall. This building also houses a demonstration kitchen and a block of 10 functional hotel rooms for the business school’s hospitality management program. (I and other Graves family members enjoyed the honor of being the very first guests in these rooms.) The Graves School of Business, originally named in 2005, houses nine undergraduate majors, including entrepreneurship, finance, information systems, and management, as well as four master’s level programs and courses for doctorates in business administration.
The Graves School is fully accredited by The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business International, an accreditation that less than 5% of business programs in the world have received. In short, it is equipped not only to be a great HBCU business school, but a great business school, period. The Morgan Business Center would be a treasured jewel on virtually any college campus in America.
It is impossible for me to translate the massive emotional impact of everything I saw during my tour of this sparkling facility into mere words. In order to appreciate it, you have to consider my journey. In 1953–62 years ago–I arrived from Brooklyn as an 18-year-old freshman to then-Morgan State College–with nothing more than a duffel bag and $15 in my pocket. To witness the opening of this amazing new facility, accompanied by children and grandchildren (including my namesakes and Black Enterprise CEO Earl Graves Jr., and his son Earl Graves III), is a miraculous manifestation of my faith in and loyalty to not only Morgan, but all HBCUs. I am as proud of the progress and evolution of my beloved alma mater as I am of the evolution from the single-magazine publishing company I founded in 1970 to the digitally-focused, multi-platform national events and media company it is today.
There are those, including too many black people, who are quick to advance the idea that HBCUs are no longer necessary. Simply put, they are dead wrong. As they have for decades, HBCUs continue to outperform majority institutions in producing black graduates in a range of key professions, despite less financial resources and other support. For example, Xavier University in New Orleans, an HBCU with just a few thousand students, leads the nation in black graduates who complete medical school.
Today, HBCUs are rising to the challenge of providing desperately needed talent for the pipeline into the technologies; in Silicon Valley and beyond, that are driving global industry and upon which America’s economic competitiveness depends. That talent was showcased at the inaugural Black Enterprise TechConneXt Summit in Santa Clara, California, in October, where students from five HBCUs–Spelman, Johnson C. Smith, Howard, Southern, and Morgan–competed in our BE Smart hackathon (don’t ask me to explain it!) to design a money management app for college students. The demand for diverse talent needed to fill critical technology jobs and drive innovation cannot be satisfied without HBCUs.
HBCUs–and the students they educate–are deserving of our nation’s support. HBCUs are still the solution to the challenge of preparing the black professionals and business leaders America needs to remain globally competitive. Schools like my alma mater, Morgan State University, continue to rise to the challenge. My family and I could not be more grateful to be part of that rich legacy.