HBCUs & The Philanthrocapitalist Swindle
A practical landing page for teachers, students, and scholars.
Last week, we wrapped the second act of “A Tale of Today.” This seven-episode arc was inspired by the Knobs University Swindle plotline in Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s The Gilded Age (1873), during which a cabal of lobbyists and congressmen attempt to found a “Negro University” in Tennessee as cover for a massive redistribution of government funds to land speculators, industrialists, politicians and their families.
Barely a week passed during the airing of this arc, when HBCUs were not making national news. Kamala Harris, an HBCU grad, gave her concession speech in the 2024 presidential election from the campus of her alma mater. Reports on the Fall 2024 enrollment cycle showed the HBCU enrollment surge continuing. Rutgers University’s Center For Minority Serving Institutions started canceling programming related to HBCUs in response to the Trump administration’s first wave of anti-DEI executive orders.
The unusual amount of attention HBCUs have been receiving from politicians in both parties, legacy news organizations, and influencers in tech and finance is testament to how urgent their history is, but also (unfortunately) how central they are likely to be to the escalating contestation of U.S. higher education by an (once again) openly segregationist federal government.
As (I hope) we establish in the course of this arc, HBCUs are, as they have always been, the foremost target of destructive schemes of exploitation and extraction. We can expect that vision of HBCUs as a laboratory for wage theft and profiteering - a vision which has persisted throughout their history - to be adapted to HigherEd more broadly by the Frankensteinian mollusk of private equity, venture capital, education technology, corporate consultancies, and anti-intellectual punditry.
But we can also continue to look to HBCU students and faculty as models of resistance.
While there is obviously continuity between this act, the five-episode act on methods of history and historicism which preceded it, and the political economy of Gilded Age mass media which will soon follow, I had always intended that each would be able to stand alone. And to my tremendous joy, I have already been contacted by several professors who are designing syllabi around the “HBCUs & Philanthrocapitalism” run of episodes.
With utility for such projects in mind, I’ve created this landing page with ready access to each episode homepage (where you can find bibliographies and guest bios) and links to some readings which I think might make good supplements to each episode, but do not require purchasing any books.
Of course, you may wish to assign some books. More than a dozen books were prominently featured in this run of episodes. They are listed, with hyperlinks to their publishers, at the bottom of this landing page.
The Black University Concept & The Second Curriculum (A Tale of Today, Episode #6)
A brief history of HBCUs through conversations with five scholars about the second curriculum which informs movement for Civil Rights in the midcentury US, segregation scholars and the long withholding of post-baccalaureate education from HBCUs [40:00], the aspirational Black University Concept in W.E.B. DuBois and Vincent Harding [75:00], and the challenges facing HBCU students today [84:00].
Featured Scholars: Matt Seybold, Jelani Favors, Crystal Sanders, Andrew Douglas, Jared Loggins, Dominique Baker
Recommended Reading:
“The Second Curriculum” - Jelani M. Favors, The Point (2021)
“The Lost Promise of Black Study” - Andrew Douglas & Jared Loggins, Boston Review (2021)
“The Field & Function of The American Negro College” - W.E.B. Du Bois, Fisk University (1933)
Philanthrocapitalism U (A Tale of Today, Episode #7)
A Morehouse college commencement speaker makes an extraordinary financial commitment, but there’s a “profound story” to tell about the durable funding of HBCUs in the US since the Gilded Age [12:00]. How does philanthrocapitalism work? [42:00] What is the Double Tax? [48:00] How might EdTech extract “intellectual capital” from HBCUs? [54:00] Can the second curriculum be sustained inside a philanthrocapitalist university? [64:00] Are HBCUs the vanguard of a new era of disruption to education? [74:00]
Featured Scholars: Matt Seybold, Andrew Douglas, Jared Loggins, Kelly Grotke, Crystal Sanders, Jelani Favors, Dominique Baker
Recommended Reading:
“Expanding The Student Persistence Puzzle to Minority Serving Institutions: The Residential Historically Black College & University Context” - Dominique Baker, Journal of College Student Retention (2021)
“John D. Rockefeller, The American Baptist Education Society, & The Growth of Baptist Higher Education in the Midwest” - Kenneth W. Rose, Rockefeller Archive (1998)
“This Private Equity Firm Is Amassing Companies That Collect Data on America’s Children” - Todd Feather, The Markup (2022)
The Education Gospel, Enshittify.edu, & The Expansion of Lower Ed
An episode built around an interview with Tressie McMillan Cottom, author of Lower Ed (New Press, 2017) covers what lessons the rest of Higher Ed can learn from HBCUs [3:00], the vectors of financialization in the New Gilded Age [19:00], the migration of the for-profit model into not-for-profit institutions [60:00], and how Modern Monetary Theory might invigorate the Black University Concept [84:00].
Features Scholars: Jared Loggins, Matt Seybold, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Kelly Grotke, Andrew Douglas
Recommended Reading:
“The Way Harris Lost Will Be Her Legacy” - Tressie McMillan Cottom, New York Times (2024)
“Modern Money & The Black University Concept” - Andrew Douglas, Money On The Left (2024)
“Broadening The Divestment Debate Beyond DOI” - Kelly Grotke & Stephen Hastings-King, Inside Higher Ed (2024)
Half Castle 'Gainst The Scott Walkers (A Tale of Today, Episode #9)
“A Tale Of Today” returns after an brief hiatus with an episode inspired by The Teaching Archive. Its authors discuss the pedagogical innovations of HBCUs and strategies for teaching literary history, followed by the legacy of New Historicism in the classroom [14:00], the model of the Monks of Lindisfarne [24:00], the historical rivalry between professors and journalists [36:30], the archives of HBCU student newspapers [43:00], and a reporter who spent decades on the education beat [64:00].
Featured Scholars: Laura Heffernan, Rachel Sagnar Buurma, Matt Seybold, Jeffrey Insko, Anna Kornbluh, Eleanor Courtemanche, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Jelani Favors, Samuel Freedman
Recommended Reading:
“Race Below The Fold: Race-Evasiveness in The New Media’s Coverage of Student Loans” - Dominique Baker, AnnenbergeEdExchange (2023)
“A New Syllabus” - Rachel Sagnar Buurma & Laura Heffernan, The Teaching Archive (2020)
“Beyond Urgency: Shadow Presentisms, Hinge Points, & Victorian Historicisms” - Eleanor Courtemanche, Criticism (2019)
Fake Work, Fucking Models, & The Archive of Empire (A Tale of Today, Episode #10)
Archives, physical and digital, are suffering from austerity, enshittification, and censorship. In this episode scholars discuss the ambivalent impacts of digitization, what information matters in the data economy [8:30], an analogy involving European colonialism [23:00], the competition to document between corporations and universities [46:00], the duty to tell the truth freely [73:30], preserving the counternarratives to empire [81:00], and managing an archive through Orbanization [95:30].
Featured Scholars: Laura Heffernan, Rachel Sagnar Buurma, Matt Seybold, Kelly Grotke, Asheesh Kapur Siddique, Leigh Claire La Berge, Crystal Sanders, Jared Loggins, Andrew Douglas, Timothy Barber
Recommended Reading:
“The Contingency Contingent” - Leigh Claire La Berge, n+1 (2024)
“Searching For The Indian In The English East India Company Archives” - Amrita Sen, Journal For Early Modern Cultural Studies (2017)
“Don’t Let The Autocrats Erase The Internet” - Suzanne Nossel, Foreign Policy (2025)
The First Curriculum is Work Without Wages (A Tale of Today, Episode #11)
Following Jelani Favors's description of how the second curriculum of HBCUs has been compromised since the 1980s, we look back at the origins of Howard University in the Freedman's Bureau [10:00], discuss the labor history of literature instruction [28:00], and mark the college football playoffs by discussing the dehumanization of athletic workers with the authors of "The End of College Football" [44:30].
Featured Scholars: Matt Seybold, Jelani Favors, Laura Heffernan, Rachel Sagnar Buurma, Nathan Kalman-Lamb, Derek Silva
Recommended Reading:
“Democrats Don’t Need A Coach, They Need a Teacher” - Nathan Kalman-Lamb & Derek Silva, In These Times (2024)
"Madison Square Garden Address on American Desire For Peace" - Franklin D. Roosevelt (1936)
“Gordon Gee’s Draw Check Scheme” - Matt Seybold, The American Vandal (2023)
A Journey of Curiosity
The second act of “A Tale of Today,” focused on HBCUs and the political economy of education in Gilded Ages old and new, concludes with a journey of curiosity through the unschooling movement, a historicist close reading of Ruth Bolton’s time at Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania [24:40], analysis of the transition from secondary schools to higher education [35:00], a summary of this part of the series [82:00], and hope from the forgotten migration [87:30].
Featured Scholars: Astra Taylor, Matt Seybold, Laura Heffernan, Rachel Sagnar Buurma, Alexander Manshel, Annie Abrams, Crystal Sanders
Recommended Reading:
“Unschooling” - Astra Taylor, n+1 (2012)
“How The Advanced Placement Program is Failing Students” - Annie Abrams, Washington Post (2019)
“Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man Belongs in Our Classrooms” - Annie Abrams, Washington Post (2024)
“Sisters of a Darker Race’: African American Graduates of the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, 1867-1925” - Vanessa N. Gamble, Bulletin of the History of Medicine (2021)
Featured Books:
Annie Abrams, Shortchanged: How Advanced Placement Cheats Students (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)
Rachel Sagner Buurma & Laura Heffernan, The Teaching Archive: A New History For Literary Study (U. Chicago, 2021)
Tressie McMillan Cottom, Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges In The New Economy (New Press, 2017)
Andrew Douglas & Jared Loggins, Prophet of Discontent: Martin Luther King Jr. & The Critique of Racial Capitalism (U Georgia P, 2021)
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Education of Black People: Ten Critiques, 1906-1960 (1973) [2001 Monthly Review Edition]
Jelani Favors, Shelter In A Time Of Storm: How Black Colleges Fostered Generations of Leadership & Activism (UNC Press, 2020)
Samuel G. Freedman, Into The Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey & The Fight For Civil Rights (Oxford UP, 2023)
Jeffrey Insko, History, Abolition, & The Ever-Present Now in Antebellum American Writing (Oxford UP, 2019)
Nathan Kalman-Lamb & Derek Silva, The End of College Football (UNC Press, 2024)
Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso, 2024)
Leigh Claire La Berge, Fake Work: How I Began To Suspect Capitalism Is A Joke (Haymarket, 2025)
Crystal R. Sanders, A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, & The Debt Owed to Public HBCUs (UNC Press, 2024)
Asheesh Kapur Siddique, The Archive of Empire: Knowledge, Conquest, & The Making of The Early Modern British World (Yale UP, 2024)
Astra Taylor, The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart (AK Press, 2023)
Mark Twain & Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) [2006 Modern Library Edition]