NEW ORLEANS -- (The Root) -- When Walter Kimbrough opted last July to helm 143-year-old Dillard University, his choice stumped friends and colleagues who knew some of what Dillard was up against. Compounding the costs of running the New Orleans campus is a $160 million federal loan for post-Hurricane Katrina reconstruction, a repayment that Kimbrough calculates could consume a quarter of Dillard's overall budget within a decade."We're lobbying the government to forgive the loan, wipe the slate clean," said Kimbrough, previously president of Philander Smith College in Little Rock, Ark., a campus founded expressly to educate former slaves. Kimbrough is credited with helping to orchestrate its revival.
Citing Dillard's longstanding academic viability -- its nursing program is Louisiana's oldest, its digital media and film project draws collaborations with filmmaker Spike Lee and so forth -- Kimbrough continued pressing the case for loan forgiveness during this year's annual conference of the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities. That September confab draws HBCU presidents, lower-level administrators and players in Washington who control federal education policy and purse strings.
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