By Rev. Donald L. Perryman, Ph.D.
The Truth Contributor
I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
– Maya Angelou
The Onion didn’t lie. And we out here know it.
The satirical publication recently named the University of Toledo the nation’s top school “to attend for a semester before dropping out to do hair.” The university president made a self-deprecating video. The mayor joked about his thinning hairline. Toledo’s leadership declared, as always, that we are a city that can take a punch.
You know what? A joke only lands when it exposes something true. The Onion called out a reality at UT—many students, especially Black and brown students, drift through or leave without finishing. That is not new or funny to us; it’s something our community has faced alone for years.
UT’s enrollment is dropping fast. Meanwhile, Bowling Green State University and Owens Community College are surging.
The explanation is urgent, but simple: It has a birth certificate. The 2007-08 Great Recession sharply and relentlessly suppressed birth rates nationwide. The babies not born during that period are today’s missing college students. Now, a dwindling pool is divided among as many or more Midwestern institutions. Every university in the region is scrambling for fewer students.
But what Higher Ed administrators call the “demographic cliff” did not fall evenly. Black births have held steady. Latino birth rates, instead of plateauing, surged by a third in the last decade. By 2045, Latinos are projected to compose a quarter of the U.S. population. Which universities survive this contraction hinges entirely on Black and brown students. Every enrollment strategist already knows this.
So why isn’t the University of Toledo acting like it?”
Community observers say the issue is not resources, location or program quality. UT has a College of Nursing, a College of Engineering, a College of Law, and its own medical center — UTMC. Moreover, UT recently earned R1 research designation — the highest Carnegie classification for research activity. On paper, UT should be drawing students from across the region.
The core issue is belonging. UT has programs and accolades, but students—especially from Black and brown communities—do not feel at home. That is what’s missing.
When asked to explain the gap between UT and BGSU, both community members and higher education observers, unprompted, pointed to one word: belonging.
Here’s the reality: belonging is not a program. You can manufacture task forces, rename offices or departments, rebrand websites—none of it creates true belonging. It’s embedded in the culture, or it’s absent, with no in-between.
The theologian Walter Wink wrote that every institution — every school, every corporation, every organization — has both an outer form and an inner spirit. That inner spirit, he argued, is not metaphor. It is as real as the buildings and budgets, and something you can feel as soon as you walk into a building or set foot on a campus. It animates the institution, legitimates it and either draws people in or pushes them away. What our community has been describing — that feeling you get when you walk onto the BGSU campus versus the UT campus — is not sentiment. It is Wink’s inner spirit made visible in a golf cart, a move-in-day handshake and a sweatshirt sported on a weekday.
At Bowling Green, the university president gets in a golf cart to personally greet a promising recruit. On move-in day, leadership helps families unpack their cars. These are not photo ops or grand gestures. They are daily acts that communicate a single message: you matter here. BGSU has deliberately built that culture, and it shows — in enrollment numbers, in retention rates, in the Falcon gear you see on an ordinary Tuesday.
When was the last time you saw an African American in a UT sweatshirt or tee, period? Or driving around town with a UT license plate? I haven’t. That’s not an accident—it’s a warning sign.
Pride and belonging aren’t just feelings; they signal institutional health. By this measure, UT is falling short—especially for Black and brown students.
UT’s silence is also damning. The last publicly-accessible campus climate survey was conducted in 2017. Nearly a decade has gone by. We have no published data on whether people at UT feel they belong. Has anyone even asked?
UT’s board, I am told, is operating under genuine political pressure from Columbus. The systematic dismantling of diversity programs has produced what one observer called institution fear — leaving a university gone quiet on inclusion, quiet on community partnership, quiet on what it is doing to recruit and retain Black and Latino students — at precisely the moment when the community it sits in needs it to speak.
BGSU faces the same pressure but acts. The difference is stark: they have the will. UT must find it—fast.
This is not a one-sided conversation. The Black and brown community needs UT — its programs, its credentials, its pathways to professional futures. And UT needs this community just as urgently.
The demographic math is clear. The pool of traditional 18-year-old college students is shrinking and will not recover. The only pipelines able to sustain enrollment are communities with stable or growing birth rates—Black and Latino communities—and non-traditional adult learners, whom community colleges have long embraced but four-year universities have not. Black and brown students are key to the institution’s survival.
We ain’t hard to find. People in the North end, in East Toledo, in barbershops, and in Black churches — they already know why Black students choose Bowling Green over Toledo. Go ask them. Then listen instead of doing all the talking. Do the same in the Latino community. Treat the experience as a covenant, not a photo op or press release.
Then, put those answers into policy, into scholarship endowments, into hiring, into the physical culture of welcome that currently exists 20 minutes south down I-75 and somehow not here.
Yes, Toledo can take a punch as well as anyone. But we would like, for once, to stop getting punched and having to get back “up out of the mud.”
Yes, The Onion came to Toledo in search of a laugh. What it found — a university associated with interrupted ambitions rather than realized ones — is something this community has not had the luxury of laughing off.
So, the core question is: Do Black and brown students truly “belong” at the University of Toledo? Or do they not?
Contact Rev. Donald Perryman, PhD, at drdlperryman@centerofhopebaptist.org