Awesome and Fab: Howard University

As the HNIC continues to piece together his administration, a current of intellectualism has been identified as one of its most distinctive characteristics.

Which is great.

Smart people are awesome.

But I do hope Pres. Homeslice remembers that intellectual elites don't just come from the Ivy League.

They come from Georgetown, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. From Duke and Emory and the University of Southern California. From Stanford and American and Berkeley.

And they come from Howard.

It's a school with a list of cherished and proud alumni that any institution would be proud to have, and he'd be a fool to ignore the academics from it.

We don't just produce entertainers (Diddy, Phylicia Rashad). We produce our share of talented intellectuals too (Toni Morrison, Thurgood Marshall).

We produce more black people with graduate degrees than any other institution in the world, and let me tell you, it's not because they're all getting easy rides.

There are many who harbor the belief that HBCUs such as Howard, Morehouse, Spelman, and others are somehow inferior to other insitutions. That the graduates of Howard could not possibly be as gifted as those from Harvard.

And they would be wrong.

Obama's been to Howard. We gave him an honorary degree. In a month or so, he'll live right down the street from it. He would be remiss to ignore the products of one of the nation's greatest institutions of higher learning, and it would mean so much if he would recognize them.

Because while most people in the DMV, regardless of race, recognize and understand, at least on a rudimentary level, the legacy and historical significance of Howard University, few non-blacks outside the area do.

A couple of high-level, merit-based appointments could change that.

Cough, cough, Shirley Franklin, cough, cough.

I won't call Howard the "black Harvard," as it's been called before, because it's a backhanded compliment if there ever was one, as this Morehouse grad attests in the New York Times, which labeled his institution as a black Ivy League school.

Howard isn't the "black" anything. It's just Howard.

And that's more than good enough.