Birmingham-Southern College in need of a benefactor

“Son,” the man on horseback said, “how would you like to go to college?”

These words changed the life of an 18-year-old who was hauling a loaded cotton sack from the fields he worked year-round for his mother. This was in rural south Alabama in 1903. The young man, a top student but of little means living on a sharecropped farm, was my grandfather, Oliver C. Weaver Sr.

With financial help from this benefactor, Oliver attended Southern University, a Methodist college in rural Greensboro. It had a faculty of six and a student body of fewer than 100 men. But it launched his professional life. He became senior class president and in time a career educator. One of his sons — my father, Oliver C. Weaver Jr. — attended and taught at the school formed with the 1918 merger of Southern University and Birmingham College.

This is Birmingham-Southern College, a long-prominent liberal arts campus atop one of the city’s westside hills. Its vibrant academic life and national reputation have enhanced the prosperity of the greater Birmingham region and Alabama. It now needs benefactors, too.

If you are reading this, you may be asked to be one of them. BSC’s leaders are in a campaign to raise $200 million in pledges over the next three years — until May 2026 — to secure the private college’s endowment. They’ve already raised more than $45.5 million in pledges from alumni, friends and supporters. They are confident the campaign will hit its target.

But to help pay bills until the endowment is revived, they are asking for a one-time allocation of $30 million from the state of Alabama (including $12.5 million from the state’s portion of federal funds sent during the pandemic); $5 million from the city; and $2.5 million from Jefferson County.

I am writing this as a BSC graduate with family ties to the college that go back generations. But along with my personal bias in support of the school, I have questions.

How did this financial crisis happen? Will there be proper oversight of any public fund expenditures? And a matter that I think must be considered: Is there a possible payback provision?

College leaders have been providing answers. They say the problem began with a campus building program in the mid-2000s that drew heavily from the endowment, which then was further drained by the 2008-2009 national financial crisis. And during this period an error in the accounting of federal financial aid was not caught. Clearly there was a costly lack of oversight.

Also, enrollment fell to around 1,000 in the fall of 2021, two years into the pandemic; it had averaged some 1,200 for the 10 years before classrooms were often depleted by the virus. During this time, the college began operating deep in the red.

BSC President Daniel Coleman, who took the reins of the college in late 2018, arrived after a successful career in financial services and high-tech stock operations. A Birmingham native, his mission soon became one of saving a local institution he revered.

Coleman points out that oversight of college finances is now paramount. With the creation of a $200 million endowment, he says, BSC has formed a separate foundation with a separate board of trustees to provide an extra layer of governance to protect those funds.

I have a personal discomfort with using public funds for private institutions. In some cases, where need is justifiable and the long-term public gain is great, I’m supportive. I hope legislators and city and county officials who hold the public’s purse strings will look closely this spring at the many ways the prosperity of greater Birmingham and Alabama has been enhanced by BSC.

It may be a small private college of liberal arts and sciences, but for decades — without state public school funding — it has had an outsized impact in medicine, law, business, the arts, philanthropy and religious life. Under Coleman, it will open new student opportunities for achievement in data sciences and modern tech fields like cybersecurity.

The school’s request for $17.5 million also comes at a time when the Alabama Education Trust Fund will have a projected one-time surplus of some $2.7 billion. This is mainly from federal funds that flowed into the state’s economy due to the pandemic. It also means BSC’s one-time request will not take financial support from others in the school budget, which was a record $8 billion when passed last year.

Even so, I think the college should offer the prospect of a long-term repayment plan — possibly through some form of leasing, property sales, student enrichment services, or maybe the kind of imaginative programs that the BSC family is good at creating.

In my era — the 1960s, when Birmingham was a flashpoint of the civil rights movement — there were a number of notable BSC graduates. I’ll mention two whose endeavors were significant as the college moved beyond its segregated past. One is Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Howell Raines, whose oral history, “My Soul Is Rested,” captured the voices of that period. The other is the late Martha “Marti” Turnipseed, a sophomore in 1963 when the school was all-white. She joined seven Black students at a sit-in at a segregated downtown Birmingham food counter, was arrested and expelled.

Turnipseed was allowed back the next year, and in 1965 BSC enrolled its first Black students. Today the school says almost one-third of a diverse student body identify as Black, Hispanic, Asian or other — and 30 percent of current students are the first from their family to attend college. Keeping the school alive is most important to them and others now applying.

The college’s honor roll of graduates includes many now-deceased luminaries, such as U.S. Sen. Howell Heflin, who also was Alabama Supreme Court chief justice; U.S. Surgeon General Luther Terry; and in public education Dr. Fred Whiddon, founder and long-time president of the University of South Alabama, and Dr. Ralph Adams, who helped build Troy State University during 25 years as chancellor.

For me, that man on a horseback in 1903 holds my admiration for his decision to help turn around the hardscrabble life of a young neighbor. I know the man’s name — Harry Lazenby — because my father wrote and published a family history that told the story. My father’s account included what went unspoken at the time: a quiet, budding romance. After graduating from Southern University in Greensboro, my grandfather, Oliver C. Weaver Sr., married Edna Ruth Lazenby, the benefactor’s daughter.

In a memoir, my grandfather described his life in the field in 1903: “Following the plow or hoeing from morn till night, I livened the tedious hours by dreaming of better and brighter days.”

I hope there are better and brighter days ahead for that college on a hill in west Birmingham. But it is in need of a benefactor.

Kendal Weaver, a retired Associated Press correspondent and state editor, is the author of “Ten Stars: The African American journey of Gary Cooper — Marine General, Diplomat, Businessman and Politician.” A 1966 graduate of Birmingham-Southern College, Weaver has lived in Montgomery for nearly 50 years.

This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: Birmingham-Southern College in need of a benefactor