Dr. Tony Allen is the president of Delaware State University and a Whitney M. Young Jr. Awardee for advancing racial equality, the National Urban League’s highest honor.
At the close of the 16th annual HBCU Philanthropy Symposium — a national convening that Delaware State University founded and has hosted for 16 years — Dr. Melva K. Wallace, the president of Huston-Tillotson University, talked about faith and vision.
On faith, she noted simply that it is impossible to please God without it. Impossible.
On vision, she reminded us that God asks us to write the vision and make it plain — so whoever reads it will run.
Those words came from a leader who, last fall, received the largest single private gift ever made to a historically Black college or university — $150 million from the Moody Foundation — and who stood before 325 of her peers hoping, out loud, that her record would be broken quickly, to the benefit of sister institutions everywhere. That is the character of this community. We do not hoard blessings. We multiply them.
But this is not a column about a conference. It is a column about what comes next for the country — and why Delaware is already ahead of it.
America is at the beginning of its second industrial revolution. The first one posed a question — who gets educated for a new economy? — and the nation’s answer was the land-grant university. When that promise was withheld from Black Americans, the Second Morrill Act of 1890 forced the issue, and Delaware chartered Delaware State the very next year. It was born as the country’s corrective answer to the last industrial revolution.
Now, the question is being asked again, at a speed no generation has faced. Artificial intelligence is remaking the economy faster than electrification ever did — what electricity took 40 years to spread, this technology did in months — and, by the World Economic Forum’s count, it will remake nearly two-fifths of workers’ skills within five years. It is already sorting the nation into those who command these tools and those commanded by them. That sorting will not spare Delaware, “above or below the canal.”
Here is the arithmetic that should guide us.
Historically Black colleges and universities are roughly 3% of America’s four-year institutions, yet we educate roughly 300,000 students and confer nearly 17% of all bachelor’s degrees earned by African Americans. We do so with smaller endowments, lower tuition, moving many families from low-resource communities to sought-after professional careers in a single generation. Dollar for dollar, no sector of American higher education converts investment into opportunity more efficiently.
DSU is proof in real time. We have grown enrollment nearly 32%, to a record 6,623 students. We have expanded research 88%, to nearly $50 million, and earned the Carnegie R2 classification — placing Dover among the nation’s serious research communities. We convened eHBCU, the first national online consortium among HBCUs, so a student anywhere can reach excellence everywhere. Our graduates staff Delaware’s hospitals, classrooms, farms and businesses. When this state invests in this university, it is not writing a check to a cause. It is capitalizing its own workforce.
And this year, Delaware said so — emphatically. The state invested $100 million in Delaware State University, the largest commitment in our 135-year history. Leaders like Sen. Trey Paradee, D-Dover, the chair of the Joint Finance Committee, ran the arithmetic and reached the right conclusion: This is infrastructure — infrastructure that will move our state forward, strengthen our economy and give Delaware students a real chance to succeed. It’s a point the governor and more than a few members of the Delaware General Assembly know now and loudly proclaim, and a healthy portion of them are Delaware State University and HBCU alumni, along with many allies.
At the symposium, the same conviction arrived from Washington. Rep. Alma Adams, D-N.C., the founder of the Bipartisan HBCU Caucus, charged the room to lift its voice for the IGNITE HBCU Excellence Act — bipartisan legislation to rebuild campuses, install high-speed broadband, preserve historical buildings and expand research infrastructure. She did not ask for applause. She asked for action. By morning, leaders from half the HBCUs in America were writing their congressional delegations. Delawareans who believe in this university should do the same.
But let me put every one of these dollars in context because celebration without honesty is how a country loses the thread. In 2023, the federal government notified 16 governors that their states had underfunded their land-grant HBCUs by more than $12 billion — over just 30 years, by Washington’s own accounting. The Moody gift, the largest in history, would not close one state’s gap. Delaware’s $100 million is unprecedented but still just a down payment on investment long overdue on its return.
A few years of substantial gifts will not repay a century of deliberate underinvestment.
That is precisely why the record matters. Everything I have described was produced while owed. Underfunded by billions, these institutions still delivered the strongest returns in American higher education. The question is not whether HBCUs can perform. It is what America forfeited by shorting them — and what it stands to gain by finally paying par.
The last industrial revolution’s answer was the land-grant college. The question of this decade is, which institutions become the land grant of intelligence? An institution chartered in 1891 to answer the first has standing to answer the second.
The answer was running the symposium. The students. A nationally renowned musical artist from Caesar Rodney High School — entering Delaware State University this fall as an Inspire Scholar — opened the convening and commanded the room. Several aspiring data science students worked and networked the room throughout the three-and-a-half days. And two recent graduates stood before national funders and showed them precisely what preparation looks like when someone invests in it — a robotic dog and a humanoid robot of their own build at their side, among the first robotics of their kind held at any institution.
Our institutions exist to prepare young people to take their rightful place of usefulness and honor in the world — a conviction as old as our founding charter. Pioneering educator and civil rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune built a university on that conviction with a dollar-and-a-half, faith in God and five little girls.
We see the results of that conviction in every HBCU around the country, every day.
Dr. Wallace calls it having a plan. Young people say, “Shooting in the gym” when no one is watching. Your state university has done it now for 135 years. Now comes a revolution that rewards exactly that discipline. Delaware built this institution. This institution is building Delaware’s future.
It is impossible to please God without faith. So, write the vision. Make it plain. And run.
We intend to.
Reader reactions, pro or con, are welcomed at civiltalk@iniusa.org.
