Mayor targets downtown San Francisco HBCU satellite campus

By Patrick Hoge | Examiner staff writer • Feb 2, 2024 Updated Feb 6, 2024

Hoping to get a new higher education campus in The City’s ailing downtown, San Francisco Mayor London Breed hosted Friday a group of representatives from historically Black colleges and universities to forge ties that are already producing educational exchanges and could lead to new satellite-school operations.

Representatives from more than a half-dozen HBCUs and educational institutions came to Friday’s exploratory event, dubbed “Black 2 San Francisco,” at the Taube Atrium Theater in the War Memorial Veterans Building across Van Ness Avenue from City Hall.

No big campus visions were unveiled, but city officials touted plans for this summer in which 28 HBCU students will come live in University of San Francisco housing. San Francisco State University is making classrooms available, and there will be guest instructors and paid internships in various industries. In addition, 20 students can participate in an accelerator for financial-services startups.

The long-term goal is to launch a satellite-campus partnership with several HBCUs, including a physical location with a full suite of academic and professional programming, city officials said.

Breed recalled for her audience how impressed she was when she was young and visited Spelman College, a historically black liberal-arts college for women in Atlanta, Georgia. In the end, the mayor could not pay the tuition for Spelman, and attended UC Davis instead — but, she said, she remembered what she saw.

“How do we provide those opportunities for our kids right here in San Francisco?” she asked.

Breed and her staff described the “Black 2 San Francisco” initiative as a potential way to give local Black youth access to educational opportunities as well as to expose Black students from elsewhere to career paths in some of the region’s burgeoning industries, such as artificial intelligence.

In addition, they said, a campus could help revitalize The City’s business core, where office vacancies are historically high because of remote work. Breed and others have been trying to interest academic institutions, including the University of California, in using available space downtown.

The “Black 2 San Francisco” initiative was spearheaded by Sheryl Davis, executive director of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, who said Friday’s convening resulted from years of preparation.

“There is a secret sauce, a special sauce that lives within HBCUs,” she told the audience. “We want to ensure that we get that on our hamburgers out here.”

Davis highlighted the need for strong educational programs for San Francisco’s Black population, which she said experiences disproportionate levels of poverty.

Davis was one of a series of government officials and others who pitched the visiting HBCU representatives on the potential advantages of setting up shop in The City.

Crezia Tano, chief operating officer of the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, appealing particularly to those running graduate programs, cited San Francisco’s disproportionately high concentration of venture-capital investment.

“If you want your students to have access to capital, this is where you get it,” Tano said. “You get it in San Francisco.”

Earlier in the morning, Rev. Paul Fitzgerald, president of USF, gave the HBCU representatives a tour of his school’s downtown campus in the historic Folger Coffee Company Building at 101 Howard Street. Fitzgerald said the space the school uses in the evenings and on weekends is available during weekdays.

S. Keith Hargrove, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Tuskegee University in Tuskegee, Ala., said he was intrigued by the possibilities.

“I’m so excited about the opportunity to have that physical presence, but also to be an advocate to promote a culture that exists, of an HBCU experience, and bringing that here,” he said.