Education As the Practice of Community: HBCUs and the Reach Model

Author: Amy Yeboah Quarkume, Howard University

bell hooks titled her landmark meditation on pedagogy Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom.^[1] The title itself made an argument that education is not separate from liberation, it is one of liberation’s practices. Julius Mugwagwa asks a related question in his provocation for this series: does the Reach Alliance preview a future in which universities function less as repositories of knowledge and more as platforms for collaborative problem solving?^[2] For many institutions, this is indeed a preview, a glimpse of what higher education might become. For Howard University, and for Historically Black Colleges or Universities (HBCUs) more broadly, it is not a preview at all. It is a continuity that has never actually broken. This spring, I brought fifteen Howard students to Ghana to study climate and sustainability, a trip that sits within decades of Howard’s practice of connecting disciplines, communities, and geographies, domestically and internationally, long before “wicked interdependences” became the language for naming what HBCUs have always understood as their mission.

That orientation is not incidental to HBCU history; it is foundational to it. HBCUs emerged in many forms, as normal schools preparing teachers, agricultural and industrial institutions, theological seminaries, and liberal arts colleges. Their founding purposes differed and were often contested, but each took shape in relation to Black communities’ own demands for education.^[3] W. E. B. Du Bois framed this as a charge to the institutions themselves, arguing that the Black college must be grounded in the life and needs of the people it serves rather than imitate institutions built for others.^[4] This is education as the practice of community: not just civic engagement layered onto an academic core, but the core itself. Historians of Howard University specifically have situated this orientation within a longer institutional conversation about what it means to be, in Andrew Billingsley’s phrase, a genuinely Black university, one whose scholarship is accountable to Black communities rather than merely populated by Black students.^[5] My own research developing Howard’s Young AfricanA Leadership Initiative taught me that this logic extends outward as well as inward, connecting Black students to Africa and the diaspora as an expression of rigorous scholarship rather than a detour from it, requiring institutions to confront real barriers of cost, fear, and cultural distance along the way.^[6] Kwame Nkrumah, who became Ghana’s first president, studied at Lincoln University, and Nnamdi Azikiwe, later Nigeria’s first president, studied at both Howard and Lincoln. For them, HBCU classrooms were sites of what hooks called education as the practice of freedom, and that practice did not stay on campus. It crossed the Atlantic and shaped independence movements. Education as the practice of community extends the same logic: freedom and community flourishing are bound together, whatever distance lies between them.

I affirm much of what Julius names: relational capability, the capacity to connect knowledge across boundaries, and the recognition that technical expertise alone cannot solve problems that are simultaneously local and global. Research on HBCU student success frameworks confirms what practice has long shown — that institutional context, intentional community, and relational pedagogy produce outcomes that purely disciplinary models cannot.^[7] Elsewhere in the Reach network, scholars have documented similar dynamics, noting that the alliance’s significance lies not only in the projects it produces but in its institutional embeddedness and the way it combines local engagement with global partnership across member universities.^[8] HBCUs arrived at this embeddedness earlier, and from a different starting point, shaped by exclusion rather than by design. My hesitation, then, is with the framing of futurity. To call this a future model risks obscuring the institutions that built it out of necessity and mission long before it became a compelling case study.

This is where the deeper concern of this reflection lies. The very model Julius holds up as the university’s emerging future is, for HBCUs, under direct and mounting threat in the present. Funding for HBCUs remains precarious, and the current political climate is actively drawing sharper lines between universities and the communities they serve, treating community-engaged research, interdisciplinary programming, and international partnership as expendable when budgets tighten or as suspect when politically scrutinized. When funding for a trip like the one my students took to Ghana becomes harder to secure, what is lost is not a line item. What is lost is the institutional model itself, the very thing the field is now, belatedly, recognizing as essential. This is not a hypothetical. It is the lived condition under which HBCU faculty currently plan, budget, and advocate for the kind of experiential, community-embedded learning that Julius describes as emergent elsewhere.

There is a real irony worth sitting with. At the precise moment when higher education broadly is being urged toward relational, community-embedded, interdisciplinary practice, the institutions that pioneered this practice, often with the fewest resources and the least institutional protection, face the deepest threats to sustaining it. If the Reach Alliance is a compelling prototype for the twenty-first-century university, then HBCUs are not merely comparable prototypes. They are the precedent. The urgent question is not whether this model works. Decades of HBCU history, domestic and international, already answer that. The urgent question is whether the broader field — the funders, partner institutions, and policymakers — is prepared to defend the institutions that have practiced this model the longest, at the very moment their capacity to sustain it is most at risk.

So I return to the provocation with a modification: Reach may indeed be the model for teaching and research in the twenty-first century. But the field owes it to HBCUs to ask not only whether we should build toward this future, but whether we are willing to protect the institutions already living it.

References

[1] bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994).

[2] Julius Mugwagwa, “Wicked Interdependences and Relational Futures in Education and Innovation: Why the Reach Alliance Is Ready,” Reach Alliance Faculty Mentor “Provocation,” Toronto, Summer 2026.

[3] Anderson, J. D. (1988). The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860 to 1935. University of North Carolina Press.

[4] Du Bois, W. E. B. (1973). The field and function of the Negro college. In H. Aptheker (Ed.), The education of Black people: Ten critiques, 1906 to 1960. University of Massachusetts Press. (Original address delivered 1933.)

[5] Yeboah Quarkume, 2021

[6] Yeboah, 2019

[7] Arroyo & Gasman, 2014

[8] Kate Roll, Marin MacLeod, Sena Agbodjah, and Iza M. Sánchez Siller, “Learning in Action: Embedding the SDGs through the Reach Alliance,” Sustainable Earth Reviews 7, article 15. (2024).  https://doi.org/10.1186/s42055-024-00079-6

About the Faculty Mentor Paper Series

This paper is part of the Reach Alliance’s second faculty reflection series, Is Reach the Model for Teaching and Research in the 21st Century?, in response to Julius Mugwagwa’s “Wicked Interdependences and Relational Futures in Education and Innovation: Why Reach Alliance is Ready.” Featuring contributions from leading faculty scholars across the Reach Alliance global academic consortium, the series opens a timely dialogue on the future of higher education, research, and innovation. Developed as part of Reach’s commitment to advancing research-to-impact and fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, these reflections aim to engage higher education professionals in the emerging discussions around new models of teaching and learning, knowledge creation, and societal impact.