Financial Aid Woes, Poor Student Service Dog Tennessee State University

On a drizzly October afternoon, nearly a dozen students sit slumped inside Tennessee State University's financial aid office. Many have been waiting an hour or more. All they want is some face time with the school's financial aid counselors, hidden behind the employees-only door. Like much of TSU's student body, most of these kids are poor and black. They've got no choice but to wait.

Trapped and listless, they stare off into space or text aimlessly—a scene familiar to anyone who's spent a workday getting jerked around at the DMV. Except these kids aren't waiting to renew a license. They're waiting for the cash they've been promised to stay in school. Tuition, rent, food—all that rides on these badly needed bucks. And that's for a semester already almost half over. Some of these kids can't even buy textbooks. Too bad their midterms are less than two weeks away.

A stylish young woman breezes into the office and asks to make an appointment. As she fidgets with her raincoat-yellow beret, a counselor checks the schedule. The next opening isn't until Monday—six days away.

"Monday?" the student asks. She shakes her head, disbelieving—and leaves without bothering to book an appointment.

The students still waiting look more tired than pissed. For most of them, this is nothing. Not compared to getting run through the meat-grinder of TSU's approval process—a fool's errand that can send students on endless go-nowhere rounds through the school's administrative offices. Worst of all, after jumping through these hoops, many students still leave empty-handed.

A visitor asks the counselor how the situation's going. She gives a disheartened groan, then chuckles cynically. "Let's ask them," she says, turning to the students, some of whom lean wearily against a windowless blue wall. "Well, what do y'all think about what's going on at TSU?"

"Bullshit," mutters a teen in a black sweatshirt and bling, to much snickering and eye rolling.

"See how intelligent our students are?" the counselor asks with a facetious smirk. "Can't y'all answer with something more appropriate to higher education?"

"Fuck that," the kid responds. "This is ridiculous." His defiant tone starts to rouse the others.

"Everyone here just makes us wait," another student says. "They don't help you."

"Technically, I'm not even in any of my classes," says a brunette in a salmon-colored shirt. "They let me go to class anyway, but I got purged, so I'm not really in them."

These complaints are nothing new. They're like the dirty laundry everybody knows inside the family, but the conversation stops when outsiders cock their ears. The trouble, for TSU, is that people both inside and outside the family are talking. The talk turned into shouting in September, when more than 1,300 TSU students learned they were getting cut (or "purged") from their classes because their financial aid hadn't come through. That's in a student body of approximately 9,100. Alumni donations and fundraising rescued about 900 students, but the remaining 416 were left bewildered, devastated—and home.

When those hit hardest sought help, TSU's dismissive student service shifted from private disgrace to public scandal. Rude staff, agonizing waits, slammed-down calls, check's-in-the-mail brush-offs, bureaucratic snafus of Catch-22 absurdity—word of these outrages brought widespread indignation, and rightly so. Many of the people hurt most—black students from low-income homes—were getting the shaft from an institution that had historically been their protector.

Ask some experts, students and school officials, and they say these gripes are overblown. The issues TSU faces, its defenders argue, are hardly different from those at other universities and colleges: rising tuition costs, an economy-wide credit crunch, the hassles of implementing new software. The same storm hit everybody, they say—only the media made it sound like TSU was capsizing.

But worries persist that TSU's abysmal student service is just the tip of a dysfunctional meltdown. At the center of the struggle is the university's president, Dr. Melvin Johnson. A man who has faced down a barrage of recent criticism, Johnson still maintains that TSU can become the state's premier public university. And students believe him.

Nevertheless, for the kids stuck in financial aid, the only promise they can hold in their hands is an appointment card. And that's under the new system. The old system—first come, first served—was even more of a disaster: Lines wrapped two stories high and seven hours long.

As they wait, the sole financial aid worker out front, a lean, soft-spoken gentleman, types appointments briskly into a computer. To his right on the wall hangs an imposing framed photograph of TSU's emblem, a proud, mighty tiger. But the picture on the calendar next to it, flipped open to October, better represents the school's recent service record: a pathetic-looking kitten.

If this were some fly-by-night diploma mill, nobody would bat an eye. But this is Tennessee State University—one of Nashville's best-known academic institutions, and a beacon for black Americans when white schools weren't nearly so welcoming. Back when Vanderbilt was still hemming and hawing about this whole civil-rights thing, TSU was graduating leaders like Xernona Clayton, the pioneering talk-show host and Turner Broadcasting executive, and retired four-star U.S. Air Force Gen. Lloyd "Fig" Newton.