HBCUs and Disruptive Technologies

The White House Initiative on HBCUs (WHI-HBCUs) hosted the "HBCU Week Conference 2012" that began on Tuesday morning, September 25, 2012, and ended at midday on Wednesday, September 26, 2012. During the Tuesday evening dinner, the WHI-HBCUs posed the following question to attendees:

"What innovation (action or solution) on your HBCU campus will make the biggest difference in stronger advancement or fundraising results"

The best responses would be shared with all attendees during the "town meeting" that was held on Wednesday morning.

Notes on the HBCU Week Conference 2012

This note is the follow-up to my previous "End of an Era." In that note I voiced my concerns that the HBCU community was leaving an old era and entering a new one that threaten the continued existence of each and all unless they made profoundly transformative changes. I mentioned my decision to  attend my first HBCU Week Conference in many years with the intention of listening to the comments of other attendees in order to get some sense of how much my concerns were or were not shared by other members of our community. The conference started yesterday and ended today. The resuts? Good news and bad news.

End of an Era

The 2012 National HBCU Week Conference, hosted by the White House Initiative on HBCUs (WHI-HBCUs), will be held this coming Tuesday and Wednesday, September 25th and 26th. It's been a long time since I attended one of these annual events, but I couldn't miss this one. I'm not going because I want to hear the carefully prepared remarks of the dozens of speakers at the podiums, but because I want to listen to the concerns spontaneously expressed by the hundreds of attendees, unfiltered by the media.

The Most Important HBCUs ... to Google

How important is your HBCU? Of course your HBCU is very important to you ... but how important is it to anyone else? To prospective students? To government agencies looking for potential contractors? To foundations seeking worthy recipients for donations?

Response to an Unpublished Comment

Yesterday a reader submitted a provocative comment on the "Best of Blogs" page. The following note is an edited version of an email that I sent to the reader in response. I've omitted any references to the names and statistics mentioned in the reader's comment that could identify specific persons associated with a specific HBCU for reasons noted in my opening paragraphs. As it happens, Gmail returned my response as "undeliverable" ... Given that I copied and pasted the reader's email address into my response, the reader must have mistyped his or her email address when submitting the comment ... or deliberately entered a false address in order to preserve his or her anonymity from me. No matter. The comment merited a serious response.

Telling HBCU Success Stories ... Condensed Version

On June 4th, I posted a long note on this blog, HBCU Websites -- Some Best Practices, that made the following assertion:

"As the manager of the Digital Learning Lab (DLL), I have visited each of the 105 HBCU Websites every week since 2003 in search of announcements about their academic achievements or upcoming academic events, i.e., announcements and events related to their teaching & learning, their research, and their community service. I then post links to these announcements on the DLL's "Gateway to HBCUs" Web portal and also add them to the DLL's searchable database."

In other words, the Gateway to HBCUs is a gateway to a growing collection of HBCU success stories.