Debbie Allen (A Different World) speaks with the authority of someone who lived HBCU history at Howard University and later helped introduce that world to a national audience. Her remarks deserve to be heard in full: “HBCUs right now are threatened, slashed. Their financial support, just slashed more than half. You know, there's so much curriculum, all the schools in this country. What are you teaching? What are you allowing to happen on your campus? A campus should be the oasis of free speech and ideas. This is where they're born. I was at Howard University when Dr. King was killed and what that turned into, the whole city turned upside down, the school turned upside down. 'Say it loud, I'm Black and I'm proud' was our anthem. We're all like in one of August Wilson's plays, searching for our identity: Who are we? This is what is happening on our HBCU campus right now. Young people whose history is being erased, you know, we have to fight for it. So there's always the joy on a college campus of first time away from home, first love, first... a lot of firsts. In the middle of all of that, what is happening in the world that is affecting the students at the school?” That is not nostalgia. It is a diagnosis. HBCUs have always carried two responsibilities at once: educate students and preserve a record of who they are. Allen is right that those campuses should be places where ideas are tested, not managed. She is also right that students arrive carrying firsts, independence, friendship, purpose while the world outside keeps pressing on their sense of history and belonging. The funding question she raises is equally serious. Institutions that already operate with thinner endowments and deferred maintenance cannot treat one-time infusions as a substitute for durable support. When financial pressure tightens, curriculum, student services, and the freedom to debate all become harder to protect. Allen’s memory of Howard after Dr. King’s assassination is a reminder of what these campuses have already survived: grief, protest, identity, and still the work of becoming. The task now is the same. Protect the oasis. Teach the history. Fund the mission. Let students ask “Who are we?” without being told the question itself is inconvenient.