Tennessee State University is one of the most underfunded historically Black land-grant universities in the country. In a 2023 letter to Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, former Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and former Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said the state owed the institution more than $2 billion, accrued over the past three decades.
According to another tally in 2021 from the Tennessee Office of Legislative Budget Analysis, the state owes the university anywhere between $150 million and $544 million in unpaid land-grant funds over the last 50 years.
The state report set off an advocacy campaign to recoup the unpaid money. At the center of the fight was TSU’s then president, Glenda Baskin Glover. In 2023, the state invested $250 million in the college, but Glover and other advocates said it wasn’t enough to stabilize the struggling institution or make up for the decades of underfunding.
In her new book, How Dare You: A University President’s Fight for Half a Billion Dollars Owed—and the State’s Actions to Avoid Payment, Glover gives an account of how she learned about the structural deficit and her fight to recover the funding. Glover led TSU from 2013 to 2024, a period of financial instability and controversy, including a year when TSU enrolled more students than it could house and had to put hundreds of students in hotels. The debacle led the state comptroller to call for a change in leadership in March 2023. Glover retired the following year after receiving a contract buyout, according to local news reports.
In her book, Glover offers her side of the story. She covers the historical background of structural underfunding at TSU, how the Black Lives Matter movement influenced the funding discussion, her view of state audits and what the path forward for the college might look like. She said she hopes the book will put the university’s budgetary situation in context and dispel the idea that the university’s financial stress was a result of mismanagement by her administration.
“I love my university. It shaped my thinking, grounded my values, and helped make me the leader I became. This is not about a fight with TSU—it’s about my fight for TSU,” Glover writes. “What this book reveals is not simply an injustice in funding, but the machinery that protected that injustice. It details the decisions, omissions, and calculated maneuvers used to keep TSU from receiving the funds it was owed—allowing a century of inequity to continue without accountability.”
Glover spoke with Inside Higher Ed about her book and her tenure at TSU. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: You say in the book that you wanted to put the truth about what happened at TSU on the public record. What is the biggest misconception about your presidency that you want this book to correct?
A: I think the biggest misconception that I want to correct is the belief that Tennessee State University had a severe financial crisis and that there was overspending and administrative failure. There was not.
The crisis was caused by more than two decades of state underfunding, structural underfunding. This was created long before I arrived and it was documented repeatedly during my tenure. TSU did not lose any money. The state withheld it. TSU did not create a deficit. The deficit was imposed on TSU. TSU was forced to operate without the funds it was legally owed. So TSU’s financial instability was never an internal failure—it was a predictable result of external neglect that came from the state withholding funds.
My presidency was defined by stability in the face of deprivation, not mismanagement in the field of abundance. So, to me that’s the biggest misconception that needs to be corrected.
That the narrative surrounding all the charges or comments that were made by the comptroller and others, that narrative is focused on the symptoms rather than the cause. The cause was underfunding.
Q: When describing your first 100 days on the job, you said you were warned to tread carefully and avoid getting on the wrong side of state leaders. How did you interpret that advice, and did it shape how you approached the presidency?
A: I was warned not to get on the bad side of certain legislators. They gave me some names, but honestly I don’t remember them. I was happy to hear any information I received.
But I didn’t get on the bad side of legislators. I did not. What I did was insist consistently, professionally and factually, that Tennessee State University receive funding it was legally owed. Some people interpret that insistence as a conflict. It was not a conflict; it was accountability. I was warned not to press too hard, not to ask for too much, not to challenge the status quo. But the truth is simple: I did not oppose legislators, I opposed underfunding.
The Morrill Act said both state land-grant universities had to be equitably funded. That was my challenge. So I didn’t create any tension. The tension was already created between what was owed to TSU and what TSU received. My responsibility as president was to advocate for the institution.
Q: You argue that TSU’s financial difficulties have to be understood in the context of decades of underfunding. How do you distinguish between problems caused by that structural underfunding and problems for which your administration should be held accountable?
A: There are things that TSU could have done better and so we take responsibility for that. For example, the housing problem that they used as a smoke screen. It was a good problem. We had so many students who wanted to attend Tennessee State University. That should have been celebrated, and the state should have worked with TSU to ensure that we had adequate housing.
We had a place on campus that used to be a residence hall that we were using for classroom purposes; we considered using that temporarily. They said no to that. We went to Texas to look at manufactured housing, and we came back and presented that as a temporary option. They said no to that. The third option was the hotels, so we pursued the hotels. Other universities—other HBCUs—were doing it, so we didn’t think we were out of order.
What the Legislature didn’t understand, and refused to do, was to separate housing from education. We were able to serve the students to make sure they got their classes. We had more adjunct professors. We did everything within the rules of making sure students were educated and we could accommodate them.
Q: You’ve now had about two years away from the presidency. Is there anything you would do differently if you could go back to 2022 or 2023?
A: I would communicate earlier and more forcefully about the decades of underfunding that shaped TSU’s financial reality. I would have framed the issue not as a budget challenge but as a structural injustice, one that required statewide partnership and not institutional blame. And I would have insisted that the conversation begin with the context that the financial difficulties were the predictable results of long-term underfunding, not any short-term decisions.
Now, had that context been established earlier, the narrative surrounding TSU would have been clear, would have been fair, would be more accurate. So, the only thing I would change is not the advocacy, not the leadership, not the decisions, but the timing and framing of the truth.
Q: What do you think the state should do now—not just about the money, but about the relationship between Tennessee and TSU? Is it possible to repair it?
A: Well, the relationship with TSU and the state was good until we started pressing for the money. TSU does not need punishment. It needs parity. It does not need scrutiny, it needs support.
And the state should acknowledge the decades of underfunding, correct their structural deficit that they keep maintaining with TSU and commit to a predictable funding model that allows TSU to thrive as the state’s only public HBCU. You know, this is not to blame, it’s just the truth. Healing begins with recognition.
I don’t think a relationship is beyond repair. But they have to treat TSU as a partner in statewide economic development. TSU produces the teachers, the nurses, engineers, entrepreneurs, the public servants. Supporting TSU is supporting Tennessee. As of now, the debt is still not paid.
