With Historically Black Colleges and Universities literally hurting for money, survival instincts cut in: who wouldn’t take a $25 million check to stop the hemorrhaging? That question got a bit more complicated when the nefarious Koch Brothers – typically caricatured as ultra-conservative evil twins on a world domination binge – dropped that stunning amount on a hungry United Negro College Fund desperate for a save.
The UNCF, a longtime reliable fundraising funnel for HBCUs, definitely grit its teeth when accepting the Koch donation, but ends justify the means. As they apparently did when the Los Angeles-area NAACP was called out for accepting annual donations from the notorious Donald Sterling.
But, HBCUs are between a heavy rock and a hard place these days: on one hand, their very survival threatened by everything from lack of academic and irrelevance to precipitous drops in federal financial aid. They face competition from mainstream or predominantly White public and private schools because Black students can go anywhere they want now. Then sudden and draconian Obama administration changes in Parent PLUS loan cut financial lifelines to 28,000 HBCU students who couldn’t meet tuition deadlines – not to mention the schools that, as a result, lost $160 million in cheese (see WashingtonPost graph below).
HBCUs, through its benefactor UNCF, had no choice but to simply grin and bear the source of that $25 million life preserver, the irony – of course – heavy considering the Koch Brothers very active and central role in pursuing political causes, candidates and policies that are not perceived as ideal public policy for Black folks. But, technically, the UNCF is non-partisan and … well … beggars can’t be choosers. It’s not like high profile and wealthy African Americans had huddled up in a dramatic emergency session to fill the gap. Overall, Black financial hands are tied and spread thin in a number of areas as is.
Politics make for strange bedfellows. So do philanthropic donations. Most non-profits, regardless of cause, are put in tight spots when forced to follow the money – the Koch Brothers are not the first billionaires with sketchy political backgrounds and they won’t be the last. The UNCF, along with Black college presidents, were probably ready for the public backlash and viral conversation that ensued following a Koch donation. But, they may not have expected being caught in an ongoing political war between Big Business and Big Labor that’s intensified in recent years. Labor, still stinging from the Supreme Court’s unfavorable and unanimous ruling on President Obama’s recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (an obscure, but critical federal agency unions could always turn to on critical workplace issues), would be damned if their arch rivals David and Charles Koch would curry favor so easily with what is perhaps their most trusted constituency.
Hence, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (otherwise known as “AFSCME”) – one of the larger public sector unions in the nation – made a move and pulled out of a key partnership with the UNCF. AFSCME president Lee Saunders went public, cursing what he described as the UNCF’s “profound betrayal of the ideals of the civil rights movement” – a charge not much different from an open “sellout” taunt and sure to trigger years of bad blood between the two organizations and its leaders.
That the UNCF pissed back at AFSCME and still holds on to the check is telling. A large chunk of AFSCME, along with its current president, is Black with more than a quarter of public sector workers being African American. Overall, unions represent more than 15 percent of the Black public and private sector workforce. UNCF doesn’t seem to worried; AFSCME may have officially cut the partnership, but it’s certain many of AFSCME’s Black members are either parents with kids at HBCUs or former HBCU alumni who don’t want their alma maters going extinct. It’s a delicate rope to walk since AFSCME, among the many labor unions suffering from declining membership, really has to pay attention to its Black customer.
There’s a bit of divide and conquer in the way the Koch Brothers played this. Perhaps realizing the controversial donation would create a political rift, the Kochs have exploited growing tensions between President Obama and HBCU leaders. Whether that stirs a larger sense of Black disappointment with Obama himself is a mystery – Black approval ratings for the president, while lower than they’ve been in recent years, are still higher than any other group. HBCU presidents have been vocal in their displeasure with lack of White House support and funding for their plight, including the perception that the Obama administration does more for 2-year community colleges than it does for 4-year Black colleges.
Plus, unions are a major foundation of the Democratic Party’s base, contributing enormous amounts of money to Democratic campaign coffers and partly responsible for the two-term election of Obama. Koch spending in the 2012 elections may have heavily outweighed labor union spending ….
But, AFSCME is among the Top 3 political campaign donors in federal elections, according to the Center for Responsive Politics …
Strategically, it could be a play for Republicans if this issue were to sow deep seeds of discontent between labor unions and loyal African American members suddenly forced to choose between their schools and their jobs. The GOP loathes the influence of labor unions as much as it hates consistent Black voter loyalty to the Democratic Party. The UNCF flap could potentially cut into a major source of dues funding for major public sector unions like AFSCME (which, incidentally, are barely holding the line against state, city and federal budget cuts that have mauled the Black middle class during the recession). That could eventually get nasty and Democrats will have to quietly find a way to manage it soon before midterm elections kick in.
CHARLES D. ELLISON is a veteran political strategist and Chief Political Correspondent for UPTOWN Magazine. He is host of #Uptownhall, Washington Correspondent for the Philadelphia Tribune and a frequent contributor to The Root. He can be reached via Twitter @charlesdellison.