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.
