Dr. Glenda Glover Has the Audacity to Ask: How Dare You Take From HBCUs?

There is something wonderfully audacious about former TSU president Dr. Glenda Glover naming her book How Dare You. Not We Deserve Better. Not The Fight for Fair Funding. She chose three words that sound like something a mother might say when she catches you doing something you knew good and well you had no business doing: How dare you? During our Chapter & Verse conversation with Dr. Glover, I quickly realized the title perfectly captures both the woman and the fight she has chosen. A proud HBCU alum and the daughter of a civil rights activist, Dr. Glover isn’t approaching the fight over HBCU funding as an academic exercise. And after hearing the numbers, understanding the history and considering who ultimately pays the price, it should be a priority to all of us.

At the center of How Dare You is Tennessee State University and the staggering amount of money the historically Black institution did not receive over decades. A Tennessee legislative committee previously determined TSU had been underfunded by more than $544 million, while a later federal analysis calculated a funding disparity of more than $2.1 billion over a 30-year period. The numbers are almost too enormous to relate to  until you stop talking about institutions and start making the  about people. That money represents classrooms, professors, research opportunities, scholarships, housing, technology, programs, facilities and experiences that students should have had access to. So when we say the government underfunded Tennessee State University, what we are really saying is that generations of students were denied resources that should have been there for them. There is something far more unsettling about saying it that way because suddenly “underfunding” doesn’t sound like an innocent budgetary mistake. It sounds like taking something from students who had every right to receive it.

Dr. Glover knows that fight intimately because she spent more than a decade leading Tennessee State, becoming the first woman to serve as president of the university. She fought from the president’s office, but listening to her speak, you understand that the instinct to fight did not begin with a university title. Her father, Henry Earl Baskin Sr., was a civil rights activist in Memphis who believed deeply in equality and was willing to challenge systems that denied it. Dr. Glover grew up watching that example, and you can still hear it in her today. There is an unmistakable sense that when she believes something is unjust, looking away simply isn’t an option. Perhaps that is why How Dare You doesn’t read, or even sound when she discusses it, like the story of someone looking backward at a difficult chapter in her career. She is documenting what happened because she believes the fight is very much alive, and she wants the truth on the record.

What struck me most during our conversation was how quickly Dr. Glover expanded the issue beyond TSU. She is a Tennessee State alumna and former president, so her loyalty to that institution is undeniable, but her argument is bigger than one university. She spoke passionately about what happens to Black students regardless of where they choose to pursue their education. When Black students attend HBCUs, those institutions have historically had to fight for equitable public investment. When Black students attend predominantly white institutions, she argues that changes to scholarships and financial support can create another barrier. From her perspective, Black students can find themselves squeezed from both directions, watching resources disappear from the institutions created to educate them while simultaneously confronting disappearing opportunities elsewhere. That is what makes this conversation about more than HBCU nostalgia or school pride. It is about whether Black students will have fair access to education at all.

 Dr. Glover remains unapologetic about the importance of education at a moment when the value of college itself is being debated almost daily. Yes, the landscape is changing. Young people have more options, entrepreneurship has created alternative paths, skilled trades deserve greater respect, and not every successful life requires a traditional four-year degree. But that should never be confused with education no longer mattering. Dr. Glover’s message is that education, in all of its forms, remains one of the most powerful tools available to our communities. Knowledge matters. Training matters. Learning how systems work matters, particularly when you intend to challenge those systems. Protecting access to education is therefore not simply about protecting universities. It is about protecting the ability of the next generation to build, lead, compete and advocate for itself.

There is also something important about hearing this argument from a Black woman who has accumulated almost every credential a person could reasonably pursue. Dr. Glover holds a Ph.D., is a certified public accountant and an attorney. Before leading TSU, she served as dean of the College of Business at Jackson State University, where she helped establish the first business Ph.D. program at an HBCU. She understands higher education from inside the classroom, inside administration and inside the rooms where financial decisions are made. She also understands that degrees and titles do not magically insulate Black institutions from inequity. Sometimes having a seat at the table simply allows you to see more clearly how unevenly the table has been set.

That may be the most important lesson in How Dare You. Dr. Glover is refusing to allow institutional language to make injustice sound polite. “Funding disparity” is a comfortable phrase. “Historical underinvestment” sounds almost clinical. But there were students on the other side of those decisions. There were Black families sending their children to college believing the institutions entrusted with educating them were being given a fair opportunity to do so. There were presidents, professors and administrators being asked to accomplish extraordinary things while working with resources that did not match those afforded to other institutions. Dr. Glover is challenging us to stop accepting that reality as simply the way things have always been.

Her response is the same response she learned watching a civil rights activist for a father: stand up. Speak up. Document what happened. Demand what is owed. And perhaps most importantly, refuse to become so accustomed to inequity that we stop being offended by it. Dr. Glover has taken her fight beyond Tennessee State and into a national effort advocating for equitable funding of land-grant HBCUs across the country. She describes this as an educational civil rights battle, and after our conversation, it is difficult to disagree. Civil rights fights have always been about access: access to the ballot, access to housing, access to opportunity and, certainly, access to education.

So maybe audacity is exactly what this moment requires. The audacity to ask why an HBCU had to operate for decades without money it should have received. The audacity to ask what opportunities Black students lost because of it. The audacity to question systems that can acknowledge inequity and still move painfully slowly toward repairing it. And the audacity to remind people that HBCUs are not asking for favors when they demand fair funding. They are asking for what should have been theirs in the first place.

Dr. Glenda Glover has spent much of her life believing education can change what is possible for Black people. She still believes it. She is simply making it clear that access to that education cannot be separated from the willingness to fight for the institutions providing it. How Dare You is her challenge to the government, but after listening to her, I think it is also a challenge to the rest of us: How dare we know what happened and decide not to fight back?