♪♪ >> Please welcome the 18th president of Howard University, Dr. Ben Vinson III.

[ Applause ] >> Well, good morning everyone.

It is an incredible honor and privilege to deliver greetings at the 157th Charter Day of this illustrious institution.

And this is my first Charter Day convocation as the 18th president of Howard University.

[ Applause ] I have so looked forward to this day, in large part for what it symbolizes for our community.

Now, in my career at six different universities, I have never seen this level of excitement about a charter.

[ Laughter ] This is absolutely unique.

And the truth is, while many charters read alike, it is the unusual circumstances leading up to our charter that distinguishes us.

And in recognition of that moment, our birthday, our charter represents a special moment of togetherness, a special moment of unity, of pride, and importantly of renewal to our commitment to the mission of our university.

It's been this way for over 100 years.

But let me ask, why is it that we convene today?

Why is it that we celebrate?

On March 2, 1867, Howard University was signed into existence.

And that moment breathed life into an extraordinary campus, unlike any other in history.

Now, Howard existed as an idea many months before 1867.

As the great historian Rayford Logan reminds us, that November, before Howard University came into being, it was originally conceived only to be a theological seminary designed to train freedmen so that they could fortify and expand the moral guidance of the black community in the years after the Civil War.

Originally the word "university" was not even to appear as a part of Howard's name.

In fact, even after our charter was signed, General Oliver Howard himself did not want to be associated with Howard if it were to be a university.

From what I've been able to read, he thought that he could do more for the institution if it didn't carry that label.

No one could foresee in 1867 how quickly the original idea of Howard would morph into something more.

No one could imagine just how expansive Howard would be.

You see, our society's vision at the time was constrained by the veil of race.

Blinders limited the ability to see just how blacks might benefit from, or even be able to grasp and learn the curriculum of the broader arts and sciences.

Many questioned if training blacks in a broader way was even worth the investment.

So March 2, 1867, was a moment of faith, a moment of extraordinary faith in the resolve and the capacity and the promise of a people.

I believe this is one of the reasons why we assemble and why we gather.

Our charter embodies that faith in us.

And this faith is something that we carry with us in our day-to-day activities.

We carry it with us in our lives.

In Howard was bred the belief that freedom from slavery could unleash the full human potential of the race and by association the nation.

[ Applause ] Precisely during a moment in time when many saw higher learning for blacks as a rung simply too high to climb, a rung that could not even be envisioned by many.

The act of Congress that founded us brought into view with clarity, with purpose, the benefits of fully educating every citizen in our country And hundreds of thousands of graduates later, all proud alumni of Howard University, we celebrate what our founders did, some of which we know was done reluctantly and probably against their own core beliefs.

We certainly know that President Andrew Johnson, who signed our charter, who was certainly among the more racist presidents of his day.

Let me just say, there must have been higher forces at work that day.

[ Laughter and applause ] Thanks to that special moment in time, we are surrounded by generations of students, success stories of individuals who have overcome insurmountable barriers.

Some of them are among us today.

We are here at Howard to draw strength from our legacy.

But it is our duty to add new chapters to that legacy.

We must build upon the work of the giants upon whose shoulders we stand upon to fortify Howard for generations to come.

Listen, I want to thank everyone again for joining us this morning.

I wish everyone a wonderful Charter Day weekend.

H.U.?

>> You know!

[ Laughter and applause ] I have the distinct privilege of introducing today our Charter Day convocation speaker, Dr. Michael Winston.

Before I speak about his incredible career, I must say that I first met Dr. Winston this summer as I was transitioning into the role.

And it was a Zoom call.

And while it was only scheduled for an hour, I could have lived with this man for hours.

He knows everything about this institution.

He loves this institution.

He is the appropriate man for the hour now.

Born in New York City in 1941, Michael R. Winston was awarded a bachelor of arts degree in history, magna cum laude from Howard University, Phi Beta Kappa, 1962.

[ Applause ] Now, it wasn't long before Winston was quickly appointed to the faculty of Howard University in 1964.

And in 1968, he returned to Howard as assistant dean of the College of Liberal Arts, now the College of Arts and Sciences, and later the director of research in the Department of History.

From 1973 to 1983, Winston was director of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, where he established a professionally staffed manuscript division, a research department, an oral-history department, university archives, and the Howard University Museum.

He was appointed vice president for academic affairs in 1983 and retired from the University for the first time in 1990.

In 2013, Winston returned to Howard University as president emeritus, Wayne A.I.

Frederick's Academic Council.

And in 2014, he was appointed provost and chief academic officer, a role that he served in until 2015.

In 2019, Howard University awarded Dr. Winston the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters.

And I will say that he told me privately that after receiving this degree did he fully feel like he had arrived.

Dr. Winston is co-author with fellow historian Rayford Logan of "The Negro in the United States, Volume 11," and author of "The Howard University Department of History, 1913 to 1973."

He is also co-editor with Rayford Logan of the "Dictionary of American Negro Biography" and co-editor, with Genna Rae McNeil, of "Historical Judgments Reconsidered."

In 2012, the Oxford Handbook of Psychology included his collaborative research with his daughter, Cynthia A. Winston-Proctor.

That is of course "The Cultural Psychology of Racial Ideology and Historical Perspective: An Analytical Approach to Understanding Racialized Societies and the Psychological Effects on Lives."

His wife of 60 years, Judith A. Winston, is a former general counsel and undersecretary of the United States Department of Education.

[ Applause ] The couple has two daughters, here today, Lisa Winston-Hicks, an attorney in Dallas, Texas, and Cynthia E. Winston-Proctor, professor of psychology at Howard University.

[ Applause ] Their two grandchildren are Lindsay Elaine Hicks of Dallas, and Winston Michael Proctor of Washington.

[ Applause ] Now, of course, I could go on and on.

But I wanted to specifically highlight his contributions to Howard University this charter day for a particular reason.

From my perspective, Dr. Winston represents a bridge of intellectual genealogy.

He connects the university's historic past to its positive present and to an even more prosperous future ahead.

Howard University produces the best and brightest, and we will always do this.

We always have done this.

Dr. Winston's life and career are testaments to everything that is possible with a Howard University degree.

In fact, would every Howard University, once again, who is a part of our faculty or administration, who is an undergraduate or a graduate student, can you please stand?

Can you please stand, all of you?

[ Applause ] That's a call for everyone.

[ Laughs ] Because I want to note that standing before us, now sitting before us, is the best and brightest of who we are, the very best of HBCUs, the very best of higher education.

And I'm so proud now to turn the stage over to Dr. Michael Winston.

[ Applause ] >> President Vinson, Chairman Morris, and members of the board of trustees, officers of the university, deans, and members of the faculties of Howard University's 14 undergraduate colleges, graduate and professional schools, Howard University staff, students, and alumni, ladies and gentlemen, why am I here?

When Howard calls, I must respond.

To speak at Charter Day is a great honor and heavy responsibility.

I feel the scrutiny of our ancestors, genetic, civilizational, cultural, as well as those more recent men and women linked in an unbroken chain of committed effort that made this institutional moment possible.

In my mind's eye, I see myself decades ago on a late afternoon in San Francisco when I visited Dr. Howard Thurman, the first dean of Andrew Rankin Memorial Chapel.

He said to his wife, Mrs. Sue Bailey Thurman, "We are going to the top room for a talk and some thought."

There as we sat in the silence, overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, he looked at me and said, "Michael, let us explore fate and destiny."

He made this distinction.

Fate is what is given -- where we are born, our parents, our environment, economic circumstances, and so forth.

Destiny, on the other hand, is what we make of our fate, our motivation, our direction as new circumstances emerge, as we struggle to discover who we are, really, when we come to grasp our mission and pathway in life.

The experience guided me to the title for my address today.

"Contested destinies: Howard University, the United States of America, and the Human Future."

[ Applause ] As we witness the beginning of a new Howard University administration, we naturally ask what parts of our many past successes will be emphasized and strengthened?

How will the institution's overstretched and thinly resourced programs be buttressed?

Where will the president and board of trustees find the resources to sustain the positive trajectories that are the result of so much innovative struggle and sometimes exasperating frustration?

When will the real Howard University be recognized as the national treasure that it has proved itself to be?

We find ourselves in a contemporary juncture marked by contending socioeconomic forces, mutually opposed ideologies, and contested views about the future of our country.

Howard University's history has been wrought in the crucible of such struggles to a much greater degree than most universities because of our mission, our constituencies, our values, and our complicated identity.

Here's what I see as the relevant past, the salient features of our present, and my conviction that Howard University must be a leader in forging a better national and global future.

I should say at the very beginning that I will not present an account of Howard University's history as such.

That is a subject for a book, not a speech.

Rather, I will address the meaning of the university in the frame of racial realities of American society and the distinctive institutional values that mark Howard as a unique University among the 3,000 institutions of American higher education.

The national context of the founding of Howard University is well-known.

When the artillery of the Confederacy and the Union fell silent, 750,000 lives had been forever lost.

A major portion of the country was devastated.

4,500,000 formerly enslaved human beings were in a bitter struggle to make their way with no assets in a hostile world in which poor whites blamed them for causing the war, and plantation owners grieved about the defeated dream of their own country to exploit.

Often overlooked were the 500,000 black people already free but concentrated in the North and Midwest.

The response of the federal government was remarkable.

The United States Congress enacted legislation to establish in the War Department the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands.

Brigadier Oliver Otis Howard of Maine was appointed commissioner.

His mandate and authority were remarkably broad, arming him with an unprecedented discretionary power.

At a distance, it appeared that General Howard and the bureau were undertaking straightforward war-relief work -- far from it.

The bureau was in fact the largest society-building project in the history of the United States.

Its leadership was comprised mainly of Union Army veterans determined to create an entirely new order on the ruins of a slave-exploiting society.

The formerly enslaved would be provided with an education, improved health, and economic opportunity to become participants in a dynamic post-war political and economic world.

The Bureau built 54 hospitals across the South and one in Washington, D.C.

It created a comprehensive, publicly supported educational system, the first in the South, since the slave regime was totally hostile to the education of black people and had a tattered record of educating white Southerners, notably the poor.

Meanwhile, General Howard, in his private capacity, was active in the establishment of the First Congregational Church of Washington, comprised largely of anti-slavery New Englanders.

Like many Congregationalists, they were interested in the future of the freedmen.

Rather quickly the preliminary meetings evolved into something quite unforeseen.

The conceptual foundations of Howard University were all contested regarded as unrealistic for a host of reasons.

In the United States and the rest of the world, education was linked to socioeconomic status, which raises the question, What education is suitable for black people, most of whom had been in bondage for more than two centuries?

A cognate question related to gender -- What kind of education was suitable for women, whose social roles traditionally were different from men?

What would the leadership of the institution be?

Would all the deans and faculty be white?

Where were qualified black faculty to be found?

The most daring of the university's founders with General Howard and United States Senator Samuel C. Pomeroy of Kansas, where some of the most bitter battles over abolition had been fought before the war literally with guns blazing.

Howard and Pomeroy projected an institution that had not existed anywhere in the world.

Both the objectives and process were unprecedented.

I want everyone to hear this very carefully.

Howard University was to be immediately an authentic university comprised of six schools, then called departments, preparatory to provide elementary and high school education, normal for training teachers.

The College, a liberal-arts college, adhering to a strict New England curriculum of Latin, Greek, and mathematics, and three professional schools, medicine, law, and theology.

Significantly, the university would have no religious affiliation.

At that time, nearly all private higher education in the United States was associated with Protestant denominations or the Catholic Church, resulting in a very large number of institutions.

The single state of Ohio, for example, had more institutions than all the countries of Western Europe.

Although all the founders were white, the first board of trustees included two internationally known black abolitionists, Frederick Douglass and Henry Highland Garnet.

Two of its professional schools, law and theology.

were headed by black deans, John Mercer Langston, a member of the Ohio Bar and a public official, and John Bunyan Reeve, a graduate of Union Theological Seminary in New York.

The seven founding members of the medical faculty included two black Union Army surgeons -- Alexander T. Augusta, born enslaved in Norfolk, Virginia, a medical graduate of the University of Toronto, and Charles Burleigh Purvis, of a wealthy Philadelphia family of black abolitionists.

He attended Oberlin College and graduated from what would later be known as Western Reserve Medical School in Cleveland.

Equally radical was the decision that Howard University would admit women to its law and medical schools.

In most of American higher education, women were not admitted at all to universities.

Some institutions would later have so-called "coordinate separate women's colleges," such as Radcliffe at Harvard, founded in 1879, or Barnard at Columbia, founded in 1889.

Others were separate women's liberal arts colleges, such as Smith College, founded in 1871, or Bryn Mawr, founded in 1885.

Howard University's law school and its College of Medicine were conspicuously different from historically white law and medical schools.

To illustrate, Harvard Law School did not admit women until 1950.

Georgetown in 1951, more than 70 years after the first women were admitted to Howard's law school.

[ Applause ] The same dismal picture was true for medical education.

Because of that exclusion, and Howard's gender-inclusive policy, a substantial number of white women, lawyers, and physicians in this area were Howard University graduates.

[ Applause ] It was also regarded as shockingly scandalous at the time that there was a white woman on the Howard medical faculty, Dr. Isabel Barrows, an ophthalmologist trained in Vienna, who was the first woman in the United States practicing in that specialist field.

Contested destiny runs throughout Howard's history.

Even its location was contested.

Naturally, it was thought that its logical, most practical location would be in the city of Washington.

But there was a major obstacle that echoes even today.

Owners in the city refused to sell any property to the founders, they said, because an institution that would include black people would spoil the property and adjacent parcels.

Those were their words.

As a result, General Howard and General Eliphalet Whittlesey searched for land in the county that would be just north of the boundary line, yet be close enough to Washington City.

I should explain that the District of Columbia at that time had three jurisdictions within it -- Georgetown city, which had been apart since colonial times up until 1871, and then the city and the county, far out in the country at that time.

The boundary is now Florida Avenue Northwest.

You must understand that the city at this time ended at H and I Streets Northwest.

Everything else was empty, there to where we are now.

All of that development came after the Civil War.

They identified a large landowner, John A. Smith, who said the same thing that the owners in the city had said.

He would only sell the entire Smith Farm, an insurance policy against the universally predicted loss and property value.

The university bought all 147 acres in April 1867 at a price of $1,000 an acre.

A plan was developed very quickly that reserved a section for the future university campus.

The surrounding acreage was divided into building lodge, which sold rapidly because of the high elevation and attractive views of the city below.

General Howard and the officers of the university, some deans and faculty, bought lots and built houses.

In just months -- please hear this.

In just months after the charter was granted, the university's founders had created a racially integrated community surrounding a racially integrated university -- a rarity in the country to this day.

That was an objective for General Howard and others because they wanted to prove that it was possible to have a racially diverse community and institution of higher education, hoping that it could be a model for a new society.

I want to draw your attention to something that is not just a curious fact but an important component of Howard University's institutional identity and heritage.

Although Howard insisted on his undergraduate college having a curriculum of Latin, Greek and mathematics, the original seal of the university, in use from 1867 to 1910, was in English to signal the world its purpose and global perspective.

The motto was "Equal rights and knowledge for all."

To make the intention perfectly clear, the seal depicted a white man, a black man, an East Asian and two Native Americans in feathered headdress.

Why was this seal replaced by the one now in use and familiar to all?

By 1910, after the triumph of the American white-supremacy movement imposes statutory segregation in the South and de facto segregation in the rest of the country, the idea of equal rights had become incendiary.

In our own time, equal rights and knowledge for all is contested.

The early history of Howard University that I am speaking about now has been obscure for very solid reasons.

Howard was such an anomaly in the minds of many that it had to be mischaracterized because of American race relations, bowing to the standard etiquette of fundraising for black institutions.

One convention that emerged was an insistence that the institutions had humble beginnings.

Not only were we supposed to be humble as individuals in dealing with white people or the society at large, but institutions that served us were also supposed to be humble.

As a student here, I often heard about the humble origins of Howard, that it started as a simple frame house and the first students were white girls who were children to the first trustees.

That image, which commanded the field for many decades, deviated from the historical reality.

It is true that the first instruction was provided in temporary facilities because there was urgency in beginning the great experiment.

The Freedmen's Bureau provided Howard with the largest sum of money provided to any institution among the many supported throughout the South on the grounds that Howard would be the institution that would educate a significant percentage of the faculties that would teach at to other Bureau-supported schools and colleges.

University Hall, which stood where Founders Library does now, University Hall was a large, imposing building set on one of the highest hills in Washington.

Other buildings were consistent with those in historically white private and state institutions.

Likewise, the student body at the very beginning was diverse and included students from China, East Africa, and the Caribbean.

And for those who might think that the international students first started coming to Howard in the 1940s and 1950s, the actuality is that they have been integral to the institution from its earliest days.

Now, why do I tax you with these details?

[ Laughter ] Because I believe that the most familiar images are misleading.

For example, one of the best-known images of General Howard is derived from the oil painting in Founders Library that shows him as a venerable old man after he had retired from the regular army in 1894.

When he was commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau, he was 35 years old.

I have only recently seen a photograph of him taken soon before he lost his right arm in 1862 at the Battle of Fair Oaks in Virginia.

What struck me was not just his youth, but also his implacable and focused determination, the camera capturing the intensity of his eyes.

One look at that photograph convinced me that General Howard and his fellow Union Army officers in the Freedmen's Bureau were not primarily missionaries or simple enthusiasts.

They were up to making a new kind of America.

The founders, officers, and early deans and faculty were not only very young, they were for the most part products of the country's leading colleges and universities.

Some examples... General Eliphalet Whittlesey, the first dean of the college, was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale in 1842.

The first professor of mathematics, Alonzo Westcott, was a graduate of Princeton.

The professor of chemistry and physics, Frank W. Clark, was a recent graduate of Harvard.

Some of these pioneers were succeeded by their children, multigenerational Howard stalwarts, such as General George W. Balloch, treasurer of the university, and his son Edward A. Balloch, dean of the College of Medicine until 1929.

The Ballochs served Howard from 1867 until 1929, 62 years.

Benjamin Farnsworth Leighton, former cavalry officer, and the longest-serving dean of the Law School, served from 1881 to 1921.

The open-to-all-humanity vision of Howard has struck some as being a flight from being black, that such a cosmopolitan view is at odds with the mission of educating black people or paying special attention to the blatantly neglected needs of the black population.

Viewed only as a logical proposition, the fundamental ideas that have been integral to Howard can seem to be contradictory.

But if one looks at not only the history of the institution combined with what many of you have actually experienced on this campus, the ideas are not contradictory, especially when you acknowledge what you have personally experienced.

Perhaps the best way to explain this is to recall for you a scenario that took place 40 years ago, when I served as vice president for Academic Affairs.

One day, mid-afternoon, my administrative assistant buzzed me and said, " "Dr. Winston, professor Joseph Morris is in the outer office, insisting on seeing you immediately, though he has no appointment."

I said, "I will see him now."

When he entered my office, he was noticeably agitated, disturbed about something very important to him.

He said, "Mr. Vice President, you just have to face it.

You just have to face it.

You just have to face it."

So far, "it" had not been identified.

[ Laughter ] "Dr. Morris, what is it that I have to face?"

He said, "I know all of the plausible candidates for the position of chair of the chemistry department.

And you will just have to face the reality that for the first time the chair will be white."

I looked at him in puzzlement and said in my clearest voice, "Dr. Morris, for more than 20 years, J. Leon Shereshefsky was the head of the chemistry department."

Then he shot a look at me as if I were a total fool.

"Oh, Mr. Vice President, 'Sherry' wasn't white.

He was Howard."

[ Laughter ] Please meditate some time on what he said.

"He wasn't white.

He was Howard."

Many of you have experienced just that, a state of mind, an acquired ability to see a human being as such.

There is no gene for it.

You become Howard through an experience that is hardly discussed.

[ Applause ] Such a process is hardly conceivable for many people.

You belong here by gaining the capacity to be who you are, to be home in your skin, and deal with the world as it is.

To practice this is to be a pioneer in forging a future humanity, barely conceivable now except by a minority of Americans.

But it ought to be.

The contested visions for Howard University have not been limited to its values and racial identity.

Some are more subtle, such as how high do our academic standards and ambitions really need to be?

How good is good enough?

A subtext in this question is that an institution with a black identity should not aim too high, not stake a claim as a major American University because that is unrealistic in this society as it is, not in terms of what it should be.

My position is that excellence is not optional but critical to our mission of achieving authentic equity in American society.

Without bedrock excellence... [ Applause ] Without bedrock excellence, the discriminatory structures of American society can not be bent to justice.

Those who are beneficiaries of the existing system do not willingly yield their advantages to its victims.

Perhaps the most familiar example in our institution's history was the bitter battle over the law school during the revolutionary deanship of Charles Hamilton Houston, 1929 to 1935.

The proud tradition of the law school was providing a legal education to those excluded from legal education and the profession.

The law school produced an estimated 90% of the black lawyers in the United States until the post-war World War II breakthroughs, when historically white law schools finally opened their doors to qualified black applicants.

Many said proudly that Howard was an opportunity law school.

Houston, however, had a mandate from the board and president to make it into something greater.

Houston's way of characterizing it was that it would be the West Point of the Civil Rights Movement.

Many said that his idea was elitist, unnecessarily harsh, and unrealistic.

But was it?

The American racialized system was the most sophisticated in the world.

Let me repeat that.

The American racialized system was the most sophisticated in the world.

And it still is.

It was created by retail violence and sustained wholesale by complex constitutional means.

Any serious legal challenge would be countered by some of the nation's best constitutional lawyers.

In the school-segregation cases, Houston's star student, Thurgood Marshall, faced one of the most formidable constitutional lawyers in the country, John W. Davis, former solicitor general of the United States.

That is an example for every field at Howard.

Excellence is the sine qua non for change of the depth and scope that we have envisioned.

President Mordecai Wyatt Johnson's transformation of the university's schools and colleges was linked to the reality that close to 50% of the country's black physicians were Howard graduates.

When the College of Medicine was rebuilt academically during the deanship of Dr. Numa P.G.

Adams, the first black dean, a program to increase qualifications included fellowships for faculty in the pre-clinical sciences.

Most of those faculty became the country's first M.D.

PhDs.

Dean Adams uncompromisingly told each of them personally, "If you do not get the degree, don't come back."

Moving up was not optional.

The deans whom I have mentioned were often called difficult deans.

That too is a tradition, including difficult administrators.

What was going on?

Many Howard University people refuse to have a place assigned by this society.

Those in the vanguard do not have in assigns place.

They make the institution produce a kind of leadership that is part of our collective destiny.

I hope that many in the audience recall President H. Patrick Swygert's motto -- "Leadership for America and the global community."

To some of our critics outside and naysayers inside, that motto sounds uppity or arrogant or no more than an institutional branding phrase.

The record shows that Howard's outsize role in leadership is not aspirational.

It is an accomplished fact across the board.

Need I underscore that fact by mentioning a member of the Arts and Sciences Class of 1986, the 49th Vice President of the United States, former Senator Kamala Harris?

It is easy to think the Howard that exists now was inevitable.

The current Howard became possible only by the successful development of two major changes -- each contested, each easily misunderstood.

First was the graduate schools' authorization by the board of trustees to add PhD programs to the university's academic resources in the mid-1950s.

Many of Howard's most accomplished scholars, particularly in the Division of the Social Sciences, opposed the change on the stated grounds that such a change which further entrench racial segregation in higher education.

It was also argued that it was unlikely that Howard could find adequate funding for such programs and our excellent.

undergraduate programs would be weakened by spreading departments too thin.

Unstated where the doubts that some had that we had enough capable faculty.

Nonetheless, within a few years, chemistry, physics, and zoology received authorization to begin PhD programs.

I believe the record is clear that these programs in the Natural Science Division were quite successful.

PhD programs in the Social Science division and the Humanities Division were authorized in the following decade.

The second major change was that the 1970s presented a period of crisis in the country... ...marked by widespread racial conflict in major cities throughout the United States, coupled with deep political and generational divisions, powered in part by the Vietnam War and opposition to the draft.

Those drew national attention to Howard.

These considerations bracketed the administration of President James E. Cheek, then only 36 years old, the same age as Mordecai Johnson in 1926.

He asserted that Howard should be a vehicle for addressing certain critical parts of the national crisis.

His requests before the Appropriations Committee in Congress was double that of President James M. Nabrit's final year.

It was rejected flat.

The next year, however, the appropriation was doubled, enabling how to enter a new era.

In one year, the university's 10 schools and colleges grew to 17.

Howard finally overcame nearly 20 years of opposition to the creation of the Howard University Hospital to replace Freedmen's Hospital, which had been directly funded by the government with its own appropriation, an anomaly of a federally funded community hospital located on Howard University's campus but not administered by the university.

What was contested was whether the hospital's community-hospital status would remain the same at Howard.

The university insisted on a new university hospital with research capabilities and programs to produce specialists in various medical fields, especially those with no significant black representation.

That was finally settled, and the 500-bed Howard University Hospital was built, the most expensive structure and program package in history.

Just as there was opposition to the construction of Founders Library in the 1930s on the specious grounds that it was "too big for a colored school," there was residual opposition to the new Howard University Hospital, with some arguing that its specialist training facilities and advanced laboratories would be superfluous, while creating a surplus of hospital beds in Washington, D.C. Howard's new development plan called for benchmarks to be applied to the appropriation, not what was appropriate in other people's minds for a "colored" school.

President Cheeks' plan was to tie Howard's budget to average levels of other research universities with an array of graduate programs, including medical centers.

Once that plan was accepted, funding for Howard shifted dramatically.

After a decade -- and this is significant -- after a decade when the worst of the national social crisis was deemed over, a process of relentless budget reductions ensued.

This was a very difficult period indeed.

The first real hope of a reversal emerged under the leadership of President H. Patrick Swygert, when the university's largest private fundraising program to date was launched.

Despite this real progress, by the time of President Wayne A.I.

Frederick's appointment, the financial situation had become dire.

Most of you are familiar with the remarkable successes managed by Dr. Frederick and the board of trustees, one of the most impressive turnarounds in American higher education.

[ Applause ] Where are we now?

I believe that we are poised between the past and the future in a way that could open a path to become in a sustainable way a research university in the first rank of American higher education.

[ Applause ] I wish to make a few, just a few, observations about this objective.

I will argue that for years, the major focus was, naturally enough, on funding and the search for faculty and administrative talent, all absolutely necessary.

My 60 years of association with Howard University provide me with a perspective that could not be common because I am an octogenarian survivor who was provided with an unusual range of experiences as a faculty member and administrator.

I want to address issues briefly that go beyond finances and infrastructure.

A neglected area through these years of development has been the ethos and morale of the institution, which I would argue has not caught up with the ambitious agenda that our leadership has gone a long way to achieving in material terms.

We have still to achieve in an environment that nurtures younger faculty ambitions and productivity.

Neither have we created the range of rewards deserved by our senior faculty, who have been successful teachers and researchers in a difficult environment.

[ Applause ] You know that's true.

[ Laughter ] A fundamental requirement for a research university of the first rank is faculty quality of life.

[ Applause ] We have lost.

We have to face it.

We have to face it.

We have lost some of our most productive and valuable faculty members because of unaddressed concerns.

We must now address those comprehensively.

We are respected internationally, have a vital mission and located in the capital of the United States.

More must be done to compete and retain, compete for and retain cohorts of faculty equal to our best current faculty members -- not just one at a time, but groups.

Equally necessary is to broaden support for our deserving students who cannot afford to attend.

Our percentage of Pell Grant-eligible students is a testament to the University's continuing commitment to real opportunity for those students who here incur staggering debt to secure Howard education.

While we struggle to increase the resources we need to achieve our ambitious goals, I say, Howard, hold on.

Hold on to our spiritual heritage, our belief in the infinite possibilities of every human being.

Cultivate in our students the goal of being at home in the world.

Strengthen their idealism.

Make them wary of cynicism disguised as realism.

Hold on, Howard, to our aspirations for national and international leadership.

Hold on, Howard, to that faith that enabled our earliest professors to look at students and say, "You will become fine contributors to the progress of humanity."

To our alumni who have climbed the heights of the professions, those of you who have become citizens of the world of finance and corporate boards, remember the best of Howard University and convince your colleagues that Howard deserves their support, too.

Build a solid foundation, financial foundation for Howard, but do not lose Howard's great soul, a legacy of infinite worth.

Hold on, Howard, as we embody the spirit of sankofa that grew out of the traditions of the Bilad al-Sudan to seek wisdom from the past, to create a better future.

Push fate aside and bring to reality the destiny that we and humanity deserve so richly.

At the gate that opens to the future, draw upon the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.

Neither flag nor falter.

So be it.

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Thank you.