Professor Suggests Survival of the Fittest Strategy For AME Colleges
Closing some campuses and reallocating funds to others could be best option for struggling institutions.

By Herb Frazier

CHARLESTON, S.C.
Like Morris Brown in Atlanta, a number of African Methodist Episcopal Church-sponsored colleges are in financial trouble. A College of Charleston history professor says AME could improve its colleges if it closed weak campuses and moved resources to stronger ones.

Dr. Bernard E. Powers Jr. says the church should recapture the post-Civil War vision of AME Bishop Daniel A. Payne, a founder of Wilberforce University in Ohio and its first Black president. It was Payne’s dream for the church to have a college to train ministers and newly freed slaves.

But as the need to educate preachers in the pulpit and church members in the pews expanded across the South, so did the number of AME campuses.

At one point in its history, the AME church supported 12 junior and four-year colleges and seminaries in 10 states. Today, the number of AME-affiliated campuses has been reduced to eight schools in six states, mostly in the South. All of them have struggled financially.

“The church needs to look at whether it has too many schools, and it may very well find that we have too many,” says Powers, who grew up attending St. James AME Church in Chicago. He is now a member of the steward board at Morris Brown AME Church in Charleston, Payne’s birthplace. “Some may need to be closed or consolidated with an eye toward strengthening those that remain.

“Leaders of the church think it is prestigious to have a college in their district, but we don’t just want to have a college,” he continues. “We want to have colleges that turn out quality students.”

AME Bishop Adam Jefferson Richardson Jr. says Powers’s idea “is not a new one in the least. It is something we have rehearsed again and again. But there are issues that have to be addressed when you talk about consolidation.”