Dr. Julianne Malveaux, PhD

We are experiencing the most discourteous Presidential administration that we ever had. Seasoned politicos remember the Reagan administration as an ideological shift, but not a total absence of courtesy. Reagan, totally flawed, was at least affable. 45 is a mean, myopic, narcissistic, odious and rude man.

The news in Washington, DC, has explored many aspects of the massacre of Richard Collins III. It is impossible that House Speaker Ryan is unaware of the massacre. Yet Ryan has, to date, been silent about this terroristic massacre. So has the 45th President.

African American college graduates will have a more difficult time than their white counterparts, both because African Americans experience higher unemployment rates and because African American students are less likely to concentrate in the STEM areas than their counterparts. It will be interesting, however, to see how those African American graduates, especially HBCU graduates, fare in this labor market.

We in HBCU Land (my special term for our space) play ourselves cheap. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Columbia, Georgetown, and Stanford aren’t rushing to give Betsy DeVoid honorary degrees. They don’t think she deserves them.

Those smiling people in the Rose Garden were, at best, delusional. They were celebrating the “repeal” of the Affordable Care Act, and its replacement with a paltry, mean-spirited plan to make health insurance more difficult to attain.

Universities are supposed to be places where minds are opened and ideas are exchanged. If provocative speakers can’t visit a university, who can? And where better to hear ideas, no matter how offensive, than at a university lecture or forum.

What do we learn from this? We learn, especially, that advertisers are controversy-averse. They do not want to be associated with an accused sexual harasser, especially when the accusations are persistent and are backed up with numerous settlements to women who have experienced harassment.

Earlier this year, I wrote a piece in a publication that focuses on issues in the African American community, about the rooftop solar business, and expressed concerns that industry bad actors were misleading consumers.