Fifty-three seconds. That’s all it took for Virginia State University President Makola Abdullah to storm the internet and land on ESPN.
It happened on March 16, 2021, just two days before the start of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. March Madness was in the air, and the video landed perfectly: A young student is prancing around campus with a basketball as he approaches the brick walkway in front of VSU’s Foster Hall, which serves as the student commons on University Avenue, the campus’ main street. He spins, dribbles between his legs and behind his back, juking a security guard, another student and a woman wearing heels and a long, red dress, as a friend films the encounters.
Enter Abdullah, wearing a suit and tie, who descends the front steps of the building. He’s all business, moving with purpose, flanked by two administrators. The student, Afolabi Oyeneyin, confronts the VSU president, who immediately snatches the ball away. He takes off his sports jacket, a clear signal that the challenge has been accepted.
Like a business-casual Globetrotter, Abdullah playfully bounces the ball off Oyeneyin’s forehead. He dribbles right, then quickly left, sending the ball between Oyeneyin’s legs, before pushing the ball back to the right and causing Oyeneyin to stumble — “crossing him up” in basketball parlance. Nearby spectators begin to hoot and holler.
It’s classic comeuppance. The old guy shows up the brash youngster. But Abdullah has a secret: It was all scripted.
Abdullah had contacted Oyeneyin a few months earlier after noticing previous videos he had filmed around campus. They were goofy and popular, and he figured doing something together would bring a little levity amid the pandemic. But he had no idea it would go “viral-viral.” The video, posted on Twitter, wound up on ESPN’s “SportsCenter” the same day. To date, it has been viewed 5.6 million times.
“He knew that the old guy crossing over the young guy would be something that old people would like, and that everybody older would believe it,” Abdullah says, marveling at Oyeneyin’s social media skills. “He knew it.”
Abdullah, 53, is one of the youngest university presidents in the country. Academically, he’s a wunderkind: a civil engineer who has published two dozen papers on the effects of earthquakes and extreme weather on tall buildings. He was all of 24 when he graduated with his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 1994.
“Who the heck knows that now?” he says in his campus office in early May, more than a year after the video went viral. “I’m the guy who was in the crossover video. If you search my name, the top five things that pop up [on Google], that’s who I am now.”
VSU president Makola Abdullah greets a former student on campus on May 13, the day before graduation ceremonies.
Founded in 1882, Virginia State University is the state’s oldest public historically Black college and university (HBCU), the first in the South to be established as a collegiate university for African Americans after the Civil War. It has one of the best agricultural programs in the state, a respected business school and an educational training program that partners with public school systems across the region. Academically, it’s ranked among the top 30 HBCUs in the nation, according to U.S. News & World Report.
But it’s often overlooked. Tucked away deep in southern Chesterfield County, in the village of Ettrick bordering Petersburg, VSU is located on a picturesque suburban campus just off U.S. Route 1 in Colonial Heights. It doesn’t garner much media coverage and lacks the name recognition of Central Virginia’s bigger schools — Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of Richmond. The region’s other prominent HBCU — Virginia Union University — is arguably better known thanks to its location on Richmond’s North Side.
When the spotlight does shine on VSU, it’s often for the wrong reasons. Abdullah was named the university’s 14th president in 2015 after the ouster of his predecessor, Keith T. Miller. In 2014, an unexpected enrollment decline of roughly 500 students set off a chain reaction: Money coming in from tuition and fees dropped by more than $4 million, thanks in part to tightening eligibility requirements for federal student loans, which led to losses in boarding revenue. The shortfall forced the closure of two residence halls, reductions in staff and faculty, and other budget cuts.
Students protested on campus, and former president Miller was forced to resign in December 2014. Pamela V. Hammond, former provost at Hampton University, took over the following January while the university conducted a national search to find new leadership.
Wayne Turnage, deputy mayor of health and human services in Washington, D.C., was appointed to the Board of Visitors in 2015. At the time, he says, the university was coming off “a string of bad press.” In addition to the financial struggles, two students drowned in 2013 during a hazing ritual that involved crossing the rough waters of the Appomattox River, which borders the campus to the south. There was a student-on-student stabbing that October, and another VSU student had been fatally shot in the back just off campus in Ettrick.
“He had a pretty big wall to climb,” Turnage says of Abdullah. “The school had a really, really rough path. There was not consistent, steady leadership.”
Seven years later, the university is on a different path, Turnage says. VSU’s year-end financial reserves have more than tripled under Abdullah, growing from roughly $17 million to $60 million. The endowment has grown from $40 million to $80 million, thanks mostly to a $30 million gift in 2020 from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
With an infusion of state funding, VSU has more construction taking place on campus than at any point in its 140-year history, including a new 30,000-square-foot admissions building, a research and cooperative extension facility, new turf and other improvements at Rogers Stadium, and the crown jewel: a new $120 million Alfred W. Harris Academic Commons, which will span 174,000 square feet and include a theater, exhibition space and a swimming pool along with academic classrooms.
Abdullah, who initiated an update to the university’s master plan in 2017, is steering Virginia State in a new direction, says Joyce Henderson, executive director of VSU’s real estate foundation, which owns the University Apartments in Ettrick near Chesterfield Avenue. He wants to expand the university’s footprint in Ettrick and its academic reputation in the region, attracting more local students who might not have otherwise considered attending Virginia State, including white and Hispanic students.
“With him at the helm, there’s no reason the vision won’t be realized — you know, the vision of continued growth,” Henderson says.
In fall 2021, VSU’s enrollment grew by 7% to 4,300 students, and early spring deposits for the fall 2022 semester are up significantly compared to 2021.
“I’m trying not to say the number, because I’m trying to relax and be cool right now,” Abdullah tells alumni gathered at the Gateway Center dining hall for a breakfast meeting in mid-May, the day before commencement ceremonies. But he can’t help it: “Usually around this time of the year, we have about 600 paid deposits for a class that ends up being about 1,000 students. Right now, we have about 1,300 paid deposits.”
If “going viral” can take the form of a personality trait, it’s on display at the breakfast meeting. Everyone smiles when Abdullah approaches, and several stop him and insist on hugs. Describing the improvements at Rogers Stadium — they are moving the stands closer, he jokes, “so when you yell at the [players], they can hear you” — the room lights up with laughter.
For much of the day, Abdullah scoots around campus in an electric Mini Cooper, detailed with blue, orange and white stripes, the school colors. He frequently stops in the middle of the street, jumping out to greet current and former students. The mood on campus is decidedly upbeat. As he parks to attend an ROTC ceremony, he flags two students walking down the sidewalk. He knows one of them and inquires about the student’s graduation status.
“You walking?” Abdullah asks.
“I’m walking,” says the student, who breaks into a wide smile, holding up his hands to signal that the president needn’t worry.
Abdullah excels at relationship building. Almost everyone interviewed for this story concurs that he has an affective presence that helps generate buy-in from faculty, administrators and alumni to the overarching vision: to grow the university’s academic profile and, with it, enrollment.
“Someone once said some leaders spend their time trying to get others to look up to them, while leaders really should be trying to get others to think more highly of themselves,” says Robert Corley, vice provost for academic and student affairs. “That’s what you’ve seen over the past six years — capacity building, investment in the vision. You’ve also seen a whole different paradigm shift when it comes to students. You now have a president who is very engaged, who is down to earth, who is present — very present.”
Abdullah’s student-first approach extends beyond the easy banter and basketball videos. Sarah Melissa Witiak, a biology professor, says Abdullah has reoriented faculty back to helping and mentoring students, preaching the importance of retention. Many of VSU’s students come from difficult backgrounds and low-income households, and they often need help beyond academics.
“I think that one of our strengths is that we really do care about our students,” Witiak says. “And I think Abdullah has sort of made that culture change a little bit, that we are a place where we don’t like to let people get lost.”
How the university connects with the broader community, in Ettrick and beyond, is also part of the vision. After George Floyd was murdered by police in 2020, and the ensuing protests erupted across Central Virginia, Abdullah contacted Zoe Spencer, a sociology professor at VSU and activist who had experience working with Chesterfield Police a few years earlier. After witnessing an officer stop a Black teenager for no apparent reason, she contacted the department. The police chief invited her in, and she began teaching a workshop in “cultural actualization” to improve relations between officers and minorities. Abdullah wanted Spencer to start another dialogue.
“It was the heat of the moment. I didn’t know if I was even ready to engage with law enforcement to come into a space that was otherwise hostile,” says Spencer, who won a regional Emmy Award in 2020 for her spoken-word video, “Say Her Name,” produced at VSU. Abdullah, however, persisted. “He said it’s just very important for students and our community,” she recalls.
Spencer bit. She contacted police chiefs and sheriffs across the region, and they began meeting with students and staff on campus. The idea, she says, is to simply “develop empathy around people who are different.” In 2021, VSU made the program permanent, establishing the Center for Policing Leadership and Social Justice.
Growing up in Chicago, the importance of education was drilled into Abdullah by his parents, particularly his mother, who insisted that her son attend an HBCU after graduating from high school. At first he resisted, but he ultimately enrolled at Howard University in Washington, D.C., going on to earn his master’s and doctorate degrees in civil engineering from Northwestern University.
He spent two years in the private sector before shifting to teaching in 1996, spending a decade in the classroom. Abdullah got his first taste of administrative work in November 2005, when he was appointed associate vice president for research at Florida A&M University.
“Higher administration was not at all anything I was interested in,” he recalls. But the school’s vice president of research asked him to step in, so he gave it shot. In the new role he quickly realized that he could have a “larger impact on students, and student opportunities.”
Abdullah found his calling. He was promoted to dean at Florida A&M’s College of Engineering Sciences, Technology and Agriculture in 2008. In March 2011, he became provost and vice president of academic affairs at Florida Memorial University, and then provost and senior vice president of academic affairs at Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach, Florida, in 2013.
Having spent his entire teaching and administrative career at HBCUs, he gained a clearer understanding of the critical role that Black colleges play in offering educational opportunities to students who often have few options.
“When I looked at the real strengths of Virginia State, I tried to figure out, ‘Well, how do we capitalize on those strengths?’ ” he says, pointing out the school’s affordability (with in-state tuition of just over $9,000, VSU is ranked the “most affordable” four-year college in Virginia by website University HQ). “But there was this larger thing happening, where there were many Virginians and many folks in this country who were really just locked out of higher education. … What could we do to tear down those barriers?”
It’s not so much a question as a mission, one that is deeply ingrained at Virginia State, dating back to its original charter in 1882. There was no college in the former Confederate states that provided African Americans with a liberal arts education before the Virginia General Assembly established the Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute in the tiny village of Ettrick.
The all-Black college was born out of political opportunism, says Luscious Edwards, VSU’s longtime historian. After the Civil War, the state’s growing debt obligations had ballooned to $46 million, which had led to budget cuts and dwindling resources for public education. The debt led to the rise of a radical political movement, the Readjuster Party, which gained majorities in the General Assembly in 1879 and won the governor’s office in 1881.
The Readjusters forged a broad, biracial coalition of working men and African Americans who struck a deal, Edwards says. Black voters would support the Readjusters in exchange for a new college. But there was a catch, and it was revolutionary at the time: Unlike most other Black colleges in Virginia and across the U.S., which taught African Americans industrial and agricultural trades in the years after slavery, the new university would include a liberal arts program. It would be coed, the entire faculty would be African American, along with most members of the Board of Visitors, the school’s governing body.
“Black people knew what a college was and what you did with it. You needed people who could write books and lecture and do research and these kinds of things,” Edwards says. “Black people needed more than teachers and people who could be blacksmiths.”
Starrie and Deloris Jordan, who met at VSU in the 1960s, at home in Ettrick
That history of Black empowerment is embedded in the stories of alumni such as Starrie and Deloris Jordan, who met on campus in the 1960s. Starrie, from Hopewell, was the grandson of a sharecropper; Deloris grew up on one of the few Black-owned farms in Sussex County. They both graduated from Virginia State University — Starrie earned a degree in industrial arts, and Deloris became a teacher with an elementary special ed degree.
“We were in the heat of the whole civil rights movement,” Deloris says. “My class was rambunctious, they really got into the marching and protesting, taking over the president’s office.” But it was also a nurturing environment: “We had good, caring professors who wanted us to succeed and did everything in their power to make sure that we got what we needed,” she says.
She met Starrie while working at the lab elementary school on campus. They married in March 1966. Today, they live on Oakland Avenue in Ettrick, a few blocks from campus. Both are members of the alumni association, and they find themselves on campus at least once a week, often in the dining hall, talking and chatting with students.
They think highly of Abdullah, who is always willing to stop and talk. Starrie recalls that shortly after Abdullah took over, he and Deloris cornered him in the dining hall one Sunday afternoon and asked him to take care of the broken alumni fountain. Students had been putting detergent in the water feature to make bubbles, Starrie says, which mucked up the pumps. It had been out of commission for several months.
It was a small thing, but significant in what it represented. That continuum of history, the critical role VSU plays in bridging generations, building the Black middle class, nurturing and educating those searching for a way out.
In 2016, though, Abdullah didn’t know about the fountain. “He said, ‘Where is the fountain?’ He had never seen it working, so he didn’t know where it was,” Deloris recalls. She and Starrie took him for a walk down University Avenue, to Foster Hall, where it sits out front. Within a month, Abdullah had the fountain up and running.
“It’s been working ever since,” she says.
