Focus on the Presidency: Transforming Morgan State into an R1

The dozens year I have spent as president of Morgan State University, the culmination of my more than three-decade journey of learning and governance in higher education, can best be characterized as transformative. During my tenure at Morgan, I have had the extraordinary privilege to lead the brightest of students, an extremely able and dedicated faculty, and an enormously talented team of administrators and staff at Maryland’s preeminent public urban research university and the state’s largest Historically Black College or University (HBCU). Along the way, I have had the opportunity to utilize my own under- graduate HBCU education at Tuskegee University, and my graduate education at Tuskegee and at Harvard University, to become a leader who is adept at navigating metamorphic growth and leading Morgan’s entire campus community toward its North Star—the goal of achieving Carnegie classification as an R1: very high research institution, in the coming years.

Achieving such a feat means enlisting the full support of every component of our institution, particularly that of our board of regents. And in that area, Morgan has been blessed. During my courtship with the university, it became clear that, unlike many boards seeking a successor for a long-tenured, successful president, Morgan’s regents fully grasped the need for a transformational rather than a transactional leader, a leader with an undeterred focus on success in the face of today’s extremely dynamic and evolving higher education sector.

As a new president, I understood the gravity of what lay ahead: infrastructure and organizational challenges that could very well preempt the high and very high research activity envisioned. HBCUs generally suffer from a combination of factors that contribute to the difficulty of raising their research status: a student population that is severely socioeconomically challenged; faculty with teaching loads twice that of faculty at other research universities; and research laboratories that are undercapitalized in terms of state-of-the-art instrumentation, both in number and in kind. Another significant challenge for Morgan was the fear of a cultural shift that might undermine the university’s longstanding mission of providing upward social and economic mobility for its students.

Pursuing a lofty research designation was a foreign concept, but, over the past decade, the board and I worked hand-in-glove to effect the metamorphic growth I sought to steward. My goal was to elevate Morgan in all aspects of our mission: historic retention and graduation rates; more students going on to graduate and professional schools; more high-value research contracts and collaborative agreements; and unprecedented alumni giving and philanthropic and state support.

To this end, one of my first actions was establishing a research division at Morgan to enable our institution to compete on the world stage and reach our research potential.

This decision was pertinent to moving Morgan State from a moderate research classification of R3 in the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education—a ranking it had held since 2006—to the elevated level of R2: high research activity.

Infrastructure improvements also are crucial for major research institutions, and today the buildings and other facilities that populate our campus are as diverse as our faculty and student body: from legacy buildings harkening back to our institution’s storied history to new, modern facilities that boldly represent Morgan’s future. With the investments we have received from the State of Maryland over the last decade, we have been able to make vast infrastructure improvements—including nearly $1 billion in new facilities—that meet our students’ and faculty’s research needs and extend our outreach to the community.

Our new 10-year strategic plan, “Transformation Morgan 2030: Leading the Future,” will continue to position Morgan as a top institution in socioeconomic mobility, while simultaneously moving us toward R1: very high research activity. We are working to achieve this through a vision, shared with the City of Baltimore, to expand and deepen our role as an anchor institution with a broad research and economic impact on the city and its communities. We are committed to conducting research with high social impact that not only identifies inequities but also creates the solutions to problems facing urban and marginalized communities, in areas including health equity, equitable artificial intelligence/machine learning, microeconomic development, internet of things/cybersecurity, crime reduction, climate science and its impact on urban communities, and closing the educational achievement gap. Morgan’s current economic impact in Maryland is undeniable. We support more than 4,200 jobs in Baltimore City, and we contribute more than $1.1 billion in economic activity to Maryland each year, of which $640 million is in Baltimore City. With R1 status, Morgan’s impact is bound to increase.

The nation should not be satisfied that its highly touted, diverse system of higher education has not produced or elevated a single HBCU to the research penthouse, R1. Morgan, with strong support from its board of regents and the State of Maryland, seeks to occupy that space.

David K. Wilson, EdD, is president of Morgan State University, in Baltimore, Maryland.