Living with no money can make us do things that look wrong.
When I say living with no money, I mean having less in your bank account than the looming cost of necessities – cellphone, mortgage, Jordan 11s – and still figuring out a way to stay solvent. Living with no money means we sign up with a different email address to get another free trial period or take our daughter’s camera, which she never used anyway, to the pawn shop, or play the American Express billing cycle like a hand of spades. Sometimes it works, sometimes it only delays the inevitable. It’s called “how to make a dollar out of 15 cents” (a dime and a nickel). It’s called survival.
I’ve seen the inside of a few check-cashing joints. So, as I watched a cascade of financial calamities hit historically Black Tennessee State University this year – from its marching band getting yanked back from Howard University’s homecoming to mass layoffs of employees to talk of selling off parts of campus – I wondered about the backstory. As TSU’s 8-3 football team prepares to play for the Big South/Ohio Valley Conference title Saturday against Southeast Missouri, what is truly behind the strife at this proud HBCU, whose history includes legends such as talk host Oprah Winfrey; John McLendon, the nation’s first African American pro basketball coach; and Olympic sprinter Wilma Rudolph?
Turns out, it’s a lot.
After speaking to seven members of the TSU community – alums, current and former administrators and members of local and state government – I believe the following is true:
For decades, the university on the north side of Nashville has suffered from racist underpayments by the Tennessee state government – TSU did not receive funding equal to that of predominantly white state campuses. After a temporary surge in federal COVID-19 economic relief money, TSU hit a rough patch when it enrolled more students than it could handle (like when I bought a new car and then lost the job that was paying for it). TSU had little margin for error (also known as living paycheck to paycheck) which was compounded by alleged sloppy or negligent financial practices (I’m still getting around to filing my 2023 tax returns). As freshman enrollment plunged 50% this fall, these mistakes snowballed into a $39 million budget deficit for 2024.
As a state university, TSU is controlled by a Tennessee government that might want to seize the land on which TSU sits. When the budget shortage was revealed, Gov. Bill Lee and his Republican legislature swooped in, pushed out former TSU President Glenda Glover, removed the entire board of trustees, and installed new leaders receptive to their desires. All of which drew only moderate attention in the world of struggling HBCUs until TSU interim president Ronald Johnson said the school could not afford to send its band to Washington for Howard’s homecoming in October.
Marching bands are the beating heart of HBCUs. And this was the Aristocrat of Bands, which became the first college marching band, HBCU or otherwise, to win a Grammy in 2023. And this was the 100th anniversary of Howard’s homecoming.
Johnson’s announcement came just a few weeks before the game, denying the band a chance to raise the $150,000 cost of the trip. Never mind that Howard, which ended up losing the football game 27-14, ducked all the halftime smoke and said the Aristocrat of Bands would have had to perform in the Fifth Quarter after the game. To many in the TSU community, denying the band any participation in such a huge cultural moment felt like a slap in the face and a kick in the butt at the same time. That’s when my phone buzzed with a call from a Nashville homie – “Yo, Jess, something ain’t right down here” – and I started to pay attention.
George Walker IV/AP Photo
By now, you can tell I ride with the folks with no money. I empathize with the widespread feeling in the TSU community, amid the current financial crisis, that their school was set up to fail. In 2023, the U.S. government told the governors of 16 states they had broken federal law by funding Black land-grant colleges at lower levels than white ones. The federal report said TSU was denied $2.1 billion between 1987 and 2020.
“If we had a fraction of that money, maybe we wouldn’t have had to wiggle around and try to do things,” Austin Wille, a TSU graduate and former band member, told me. “I’m not absolving TSU as a whole of any mismanagement … any mistake they might have made. But we have to call a spade a spade. The government owes us money that we could be using for the thriving of this campus. And without it, in a lot of different aspects, we see that it’s causing the experience to suffer.”
State officials and Johnson have consistently blamed Glover’s administration for the crisis. I was not able to contact Glover, who recently told a Nashville TV station that the state government was trying to “destroy” TSU.
Sharon Hurt, a 1979 TSU graduate and former city council member, told me that the recent problems were inseparable from the school “trying to serve champagne on a beer budget.”
“Trying to give a top-quality education when we’ve been denied the funds that would have allowed us to do that,” she said. “It’s amazing the institution has stood as long as it has and produced the quality of students that they have.”
I feel that in my bones.
My father, a Black man born in 1937, was not permitted to work, rent a home, or own real estate in places that would have provided equal financial opportunity. But if I’m being honest about my own history and how I responded to the generational effects of discrimination? Some Black folks from similar circumstances have better financial habits. If they have 15 cents, they spend 12 and save 3. They don’t buy their children expensive gifts. They pass on the Jordan 11s and wear the treads off some Nike Cortezes.
George Walker IV/AP Photo
I thought about that after talking to state Rep. Harold Love Jr., who graduated from TSU and marched in the band. Following in the footsteps of his father, former state Rep. Harold Love Sr., he researched and exposed state underfunding long before the 2023 federal report and helped allocate hundreds of millions to compensate for it.
But Love says that an audit of Glover’s administration shows that it badly mismanaged university finances — not fraudulently, but in a way that resulted in problems such as students not receiving promised scholarships or students with outstanding balances being allowed to enroll without a payment plan.
Love knows the full scope of TSU’s underfunding as well as anyone. “It was based upon discriminatory practices that were put in place when the school was founded,” he said. “The discrimination started from the beginning, and it got perpetuated because it’s baked into the system. It’s probably one of the clearest of systemic racism because it is literally just in the system.”
When I asked him how much responsibility for the current crisis lies with the Glover administration, he replied, “All of it, because they were the ones in charge of the university at that time.
“My mother worked at TSU for 57 years. She ran a program called Upward Bound for pre-college, first-generation or low-income students. I love TSU. All my family went there. My sisters, my father, my mother, a niece, and two nephews graduated from there. I’m invested in TSU’s future. I will vigorously defend my president when they’re doing the right thing, and I will vigorously call out my colleagues on the House floor when they’re mistreating the school. But when the administration is putting student education in jeopardy and then pointing to the underfunding as the cause …
“I don’t think that the underfunding of the university did not play a role in TSU’s financial issues,” Love said. “But I cannot just put it all on that and say that the administration had no other options.”
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
At this point, much of the TSU crisis feels like the meme with two Spider-Mans pointing at each other. I’m not sure how much of Glover’s defense is accurate compared to what Love and the state government said. I tend not to trust the government. And TSU folks have been saying forever that the state wants to “take over” the school, which owns an additional campus downtown and more than a hundred acres near the Cumberland River. This crisis, such thinking goes, is an opportunity to further that sinister agenda.
“The problems are a narrative that Gov. Bill Lee and the state legislature want to have within our community,” Hurt said. “It’s a message of divide and conquer. And if they got us infighting about something small, they use the most powerful weapon of all. It’s not a weapon of destruction, it’s weapons of distraction. While we’re distracted focusing on all of this other stuff, they are working very fervently to do what they have to do to take over. It ain’t about them necessarily wanting to take over the school, even though that might be what comes with it. What’s most valuable to them is the land.”
Hurt’s argument rings true when state comptroller of the treasury Jason Mumpower, whose name is on top of the critical audits, says things such as the new TSU administration has to “take it down to the studs” while urging them to sell the downtown Avon Williams portion of campus to developers he just so happens to know. I took a spin through the past three years of Mumpower’s account on X, formerly known as Twitter. There are plenty of posts about Tennessee’s predominantly white public universities. I did not see a word about TSU.
“Forcing President Glover out, the whole board change, there’s a feeling like what’s going on – the whole withholding of the money thing,” Wille, the former band member, told me. “This just seems like another way to hold TSU down from really spreading its wings and allowing it to be what it can.”
“It’s no secret that there are a lot of people in higher-up places in the state of Tennessee that aren’t too fond of some of the ways this HBCU carries itself pridewise, if you will,” Wille said. “I’m trying to use my words carefully – I think there are some people who are pulling strings behind some doors to keep us from thriving. Pinpointing who those people are exactly, I can’t do that. But I will say that it might fall under some form of government leadership.”
I asked Love if the state was trying to take TSU’s land. “If there are persons out there within state government who have desires to exert more control over TSU when it comes to its land and the future, here’s a question I would ask ourselves,” he said. “If that’s a possibility, why would we give them any advantage by not properly managing the school?”
After all the current budget slashing is done, I hope TSU still has a firm grip on all its property. I hope that the Aristocrat of Bands crushes the next Howard homecoming, that the state of Tennessee fulfills all its obligations, and that TSU finds a path to sustainable prosperity. Living with no money is no way to live.