We're pleased to see historically black colleges and universities like Lincoln University are getting a little something in their basket this Easter.
Last week, we reported on March 23, the federal spending bill President Donald Trump signed includes more money for HBCUs. POLITICO said the bill has a $35 million increase, or 14 percent, to a program meant to help HBCUs strengthen their physical plants, financial management, academic resources and endowment-building capacity.
Fourteen U.S. senators wrote a letter seeking the additional funding to Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Missouri, and another member of the Senate's Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies. Blunt is chairman of the committee.
A bill in the Missouri House also pushes for funding for LU and Harris-Stowe State University, another HCBU. The bill would provide supplemental funding to Lincoln and Harris-Stowe to ensure they are funded at the same level as the University of Missouri, on a per-student basis.
The additional funding also would compensate the two schools for historical disparities in their funding, said Rep. Courtney Allen Curtis, D-Ferguson and sponsor of the bill.
LU and the University of Missouri-Columbia are both designated as "land grant" universities under a program first signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln in 1862. That designation allows both universities to qualify for federal funding - if they contribute matching money.
The problem is that, for years, the Legislature has built that local match money into the core budget of MU, while LU is left to lobby for the funding each year. Some years, it receives some matching funds, and some years it doesn't - but it never has gotten the full match that MU has received.
Curtis also is pushing a resolution seeking the General Assembly's commitment to ensure Missouri's historically black higher education institutions "are comparable to and competitive with the Columbia campus of the University of Missouri in all facets of their operations and programs, and that such institutions are funded at the same level as the University of Missouri in Columbia, on a per-student basis."
Between these federal and state efforts, we hope LU can get the funding it needs to continue its educational mission for students of all skin colors for many years to come.