Where do we go from here with FAMU?

In 1967, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King wrote “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community.” In this book, Dr. King expounded on his hope for the future of race relations and the Black community.  

I considered this prophetic book’s title as I considered the aftermath of Gregory Gerami's controversial donation of nearly a quarter of a billion dollars to Florida A&M University (FAMU). This controversy is a fascinating backdrop for black higher education philanthropy and higher education philanthropy in general.  

FAMU has done so much with comparatively little compared to its state land grant university peers in Florida, not counting the colossal endowments of America’s elite private and public universities.  FAMU, Florida’s 1890 Morrill Act state land grant university, has an endowment with nearly $183 million in assets.  The University of Florida, Florida’s 1862 Morrill Act state land grant university, has an endowment with assets of $2.7 billion. 

Why the massive disparity?   

According to federal law, Florida has never funded Florida A&M University.  The Morrill Act of 1890 mandated that states that chose to open a second land-grant university to serve Black students were required to provide a fair distribution of state funds between their 1862 and 1890 land-grant universities.  In a letter sent to Florida Governor Ron Desantis in September of 2023, U.S. Department of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona wrote that based on the “inequitable funding of the 1890 institution in your state has caused a severe financial gap, in the last 30 years alone, an additional $1,973,081,216 would have been available” to FAMU.  

One of the most poignant moments in this unfortunate controversy was the scene of a FAMU senior academic administrator remarking, with tears in her eyes, on how much a quarter of a billion-dollar donation would transform FAMU students’ lives.  I could tell she was sincere, particularly compared to what HBCUs have gotten compared to the norm in higher education philanthropic giving.  If FAMU had gotten its rightly owed $2 billion from the Florida state government over the past 30 years, university administrators might not have been in the position to have gotten conned by Gerami.

Gerami’s fake donation amount is relevant.  My ears perked up when I heard the amount of $237 million.  I was immediately taken aback because that would have been the largest donated amount to an HBCU ever.  However, when compared to donations to Predominantly White Institutions (PWI), it was pretty much unremarkable.  This shouldn’t be surprising in a country where the per-student endowment at Princeton University is more than the endowments of several HBCUs.

But the numbers are shocking in their scale.  Just this past February, Ruth Gottesman, the 93-year-old widow of a billionaire, donated $1 billion to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine to cover tuition for the medical school’s 1,300 students. Gottesman’s contribution is more than the combined endowments of Spelman College, Morehouse College, Hampton University, and every single HBCU in Florida combined.  

Billionaire businessman Michael Bloomberg has given Johns Hopkins University, a university of 23,000 students, $3.5 billion.  Bloomberg’s contributions to one institution total more than the combined endowments of all HBCUS that serve nearly 300,000 students.  Spelman College recently received the most significant gift in HBCU history when the Stryker family donated $100 million.  Compared to the Spelman donation, the Florida State University Foundation received a $100 million gift from Jan Moran and the Jim Moran Foundation nearly a decade ago to create the Jim Moran School of Entrepreneurship.

According to Fortune magazine, more than a dozen higher education institutions received donations of $100 million or more in 2023, with several receiving their largest gift ever.  The year’s most significant gifts went to Stony Brook University, which received $500 million from the Simons Foundation and McPherson College, a commitment of $500 million from an anonymous donor, the second such gift to that college in the past two years. The California Institute of Technology was pledged $400 million by Ross M. Brown.  Harvard University received $300 million from Citadel founder and CEO Kenneth C. Griffin for its faculty of Arts and Sciences.  

The endowments of HBCUs are minimal when compared to Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs), and for that reason, I can understand why FAMU bought into Gerami’s lies.  They were excited, not for any nefarious reasons, but for the kind of gift that, while rare for HBCUs and relatively common for PWIs, would have changed the history of FAMU.  In my opinion, Gerami targeted FAMU and disproportionately targeted other HBCUs because he knew that cash-strapped HBCUs might be more susceptible to wanting to believe him because of their relatively meager resources.  

I believe that Florida A&M University is America’s quintessential Historically Black Colleges and University (HBCU) land grant university. It is a jewel in the crown of Black America. The top-ranked public HBCU for the last five years and the only HBCU in the nation’s top 100 public university ranking, FAMU’s alumni roster reads like a Who’s Who in Black America. The FAMU School of Business and Industry is an incubator for Black corporate talent that rivals Big Ten and Ivy League universities alike. For decades, FAMU’s Graduate School Feeder program has funneled FAMU students to America’s most prestigious graduate school programs. FAMU perennially ranks as a top undergraduate institution for black doctors, pharmacists, lawyers, and doctoral recipients.

I even have a Spotify playlist for the FAMU Marching 100 Band!

However, FAMU students who graduated in the Class of 2024 should not have had Gerami as their commencement speaker.  I believe that FAMU’s leadership did not do FAMU students and reputation any favors with their lack of initial due diligence and their even more clumsy response to the aftermath of this fiasco.  I believe the governance and broad management failures on multiple levels that resulted in this fiasco are unacceptable.  In a video that showed his senior staff, the board chair, and Gerami discussing his ”donation,” FAMU President Larry Robinson told his senior staff in the 6 months that followed Gerami’s first interaction with FAMU to “not screw this up.” If just one person had done their due diligence, raised the same reasonable questions that I did, and, in fact, “screwed this up” by doing even a perfunctory Google search, this fiasco could have been completely avoided.

But my initial question remains: where do we go from here?  The institutional aftermath of this situation will play itself out.  However, it is incumbent that we turn the Gerami donation fiasco into something worthwhile.  

Donating real money to our nation's HBCUs is the best way to counteract a disaster driven by fake money.  We know that HBCUs are unique and irreplaceable.  If HBCUs didn’t exist, we would be rushing to create them.  Although HBCUs do so much with so little and HBCU alumni rave about their alma mater’s impact, HBCU alumni giving is in the single digits.  For example, in August 2020, the FAMU Board of Trustees established a 9 percent alumni participation rate goal. In 2021, only 6.4 percent of FAMU alumni donated to their alma mater.  

As much as FAMU alumni love their university, they can do better.  I want everyone to donate at least $100 to FAMU using the link here.  And for the Jackson State University alumni who couldn’t fathom donating to their arch-nemesis, you can donate to your alma mater here.  

Rather than curse the darkness, we must light a candle.