HBCU DIGEST: Can Dietra Trent revive the fading Biden HBCU agenda?

Dietra Trent is a doctoral-level expert on education, with a Hampton University pedigree. She is the new executive director of the White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Opportunity, and Excellence through HBCUs, which by any other name has always been a primary advocacy point for the HBCU sector.

But under the Biden Administration, Trent has the unenviable task of standing up tall for an administration that has made consistent work of giving Black colleges the bad side of a short attention span and even shorter memory arc. As the first woman to lead the office, her appointment was overshadowed by a White House who packaged her coming out party with that of Supreme Court Justice Nominee Kentanji Brown Jackson, whose selections were seemingly both designed as a socio-political bookend for Black History Month.