Lincoln University land grant funding still in budget

Lincoln University would get $467,556 less in state general revenue funds in the version of the budget the Missouri Senate passed last week than in the earlier, House-passed version.

So that difference is one of the items that must be ironed out when House and Senate negotiators meet this week to discuss the final details of the state budget for the business year that begins July 1.

Missouri's Constitution requires lawmakers to complete the budget process by 6 p.m. Friday.

The House-passed budget for LU included $16,018,441 in general revenue funds - almost $172,000 higher than Gov. Eric Greitens' proposal submitted to lawmakers in February, while the Senate-passed version would provide LU with only $15,550,885 in general revenue, almost $296,000 less than the governor proposed.

But both chambers passed a $2.5 million state match for Lincoln's federal land grant funding, which Greitens' budget plan didn't have.

"(That) seems to be going through the General Assembly fairly comfortably," Debra Green, LU's interim provost and vice president of Academic Affairs, told the Faculty Senate Thursday, "but also (remember) that it went through the General Assembly fairly comfortably and got passed last year - and then was cut."

Lawmakers last year also budgeted $2.5 million for Lincoln's land grant match, but then-Gov. Jay Nixon withheld $1 million of that last July.

And Gov. Eric Greitens blocked another $80,837 from the land grant match when he announced more withholdings in January, shortly after taking office.

But, Greene noted, Lincoln got some extra support this year - from the presidents and chancellors of Missouri's 12 other four-year college campuses, which work together in the Council on Public Higher Education, or COPHE.

Its director, Paul Wagner, told the News Tribune last week: "All of COPHE agreed that, along with base funding, the Lincoln land grant match was the top priority for these last stages of the budget process."

But COPHE never sent a letter to lawmakers, Wagner said, because "our discussion also touched on a second tier of priorities - and the consensus needed to produce a letter broke down over other items."

He didn't say what those issues were.

Lincoln is one of 18 historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the nation added to the federal land grant program under an 1890 law, the Second Morrill Act.

President Abraham Lincoln signed the First Morrill Act in 1862.

An Association of Public Land Grant Universities (APLU) September 2013 policy brief reported the 1862 law forged "a new partnership between the federal government and the states to create the backbone for what is today the public system of higher education in America.

"The nation's land grant colleges and universities have provided a 'liberal and practical education,' and these institutions have helped open the doors of access and empower students with the education they need.

"These institutions have also developed groundbreaking research that has moved our country forward, and these institutions continue to provide rural communities in each state with robust solutions to the challenges they face - both agriculturally and socially."

There's at least one land grant school in each of the 50 states under the 1862 law, including the University of Missouri.

The 1890 law added schools in mostly southern states, where African-American students were prohibited from attending the 1862 schools.

The 1862 federal law provided land to the schools, while the 1890 provided money.

In more recent years, the federal law has required states to match the federal money on a dollar-for-dollar basis.

While the University of Missouri's match is included in its core funding, Lincoln's has been a budget add-on only in the last few years.

Sandy Koetting, LU's chief financial officer, told the Faculty Senate in February that, since 2000 - when David B. Henson was Lincoln's president, and continuing through the Carolyn Mahoney, Connie Hamacher and Kevin Rome administrations - LU administrators have shifted some funds in their general revenue budget so they could pay for the state's local match to federal land grant funds, so Lincoln could get the federal money it qualified for.

That's a total of about $43 million LU has shifted from general revenue to make sure it has gotten its needed match.

But LU administrators say the school no longer can afford to keep making that match without the state contributing more - especially in light of the budget reductions in both Greitens' proposed budget and the two legislative versions that must be combined into one plan by Friday.

Rome told the News Tribune earlier this year: "We are hopeful that the state of Missouri will do right by its citizens and Lincoln University and support our land grant mission,"

Lincoln currently could receive up to $7.1 million in federal funds - so the $2.5 million budgeted in the Legislature's plan still is short of the total needed.