Photo by Ash Daniel
Makola M. Abdullah calls it “the question,” the one that he has answered, in various forms, so many times before. It is about his faith, his name, his religious background. And in a period of nervous uncertainty about attitudes toward Muslims in America, it has become a question for the ages.
Abdullah says he answered the question even before it was asked in one of his first speeches at Virginia State University after becoming president last year.
“I usually walk right into it,” he says. “I mean if you’ve got a question, you might as well answer before waiting for people to say something.”
Abdullah says he was named “Makola” at birth, as his parents explored their African roots.
“So, for the first nine or 10 years of my life, I was Makola Packard. My father’s last name was Packard, like Hewlett-Packard. And then my mother decided to convert to Islam.
“It is a custom among African-Americans when they convert to Islam, they change their name. So, we changed our name to Abdullah. And that is how I became Makola Abdullah.”
Abdullah, 47, says he is the product of two faiths, one embraced by his mother and the other by his grandmother.
“I would say this: My spiritually and my relationship with God is informed by Islam but not defined by it. I was raised Muslim, but I also was [with] my grandmother and spent a lot of time in church pews. Grandma is Baptist. “So my spirituality is informed by both Christianity and Islam."
Abdullah was primarily raised by his mother in Chicago, where he was born, after his parents divorced when he was young. He has a sister one year younger than he is, and one who is 10 years older.
His mother, Samella Abdullah, was a clinical psychologist, and sometimes an adjunct teacher. But her income was often sporadic. His father, Richard Howard Packard, who died in October, held an MBA from the University of Chicago, and also taught from time to time.
“There would be times when my mom didn’t have a car and there would be times when she did,” he says. “But that was part of our life, and she always made it clear to us that we were fortunate. One, because she was educated and had the ability to be an entrepreneur and we had things other people didn’t. And so we never focused on the things we didn’t have, we focused on the things we did.”
The VSU president says his mother was always direct about her expectations for him. When he was about 8 or 9, she told him that he was smart and had the ability to earn an academic scholarship for college, but he had to do it on his own.
“She said, ‘I’m not going to check your grades. I’m not going to check your homework and if you don’t want an academic scholarship to college, that’s fine. You don’t have to have it. But this is on you, you have the ability to do it, and it’s your responsibility.”
Abdullah says he took his mother’s admonition seriously, and it became a motivator for excellence in his education.
He went to public schools in Chicago for his elementary education until his best friend, also African-American, was to be enrolled by his parents in an exclusive boarding school, Lake Forest Academy in Lake Forest, Illinois. At the time, there were few African-Americans at the school and his friend’s family suggested that Abdullah might want to go there, too, so their son wouldn’t feel isolated.
“We took a look at it,” Abdullah says. “We definitely couldn’t afford the tuition at the time. But I got a scholarship — it was a full academic scholarship — and it was a wonderful opportunity for me to spread my wings a little bit and meet a lot of diverse people.”
When it was time to attend college, Abdullah says, his mother asserted herself. She was a graduate of Howard University in Washington, D.C., one of the nation’s most highly regarded historically black colleges, and she insisted that Abdullah go there, too.
At the time, he says he was anticipating academic scholarship offers from several premier institutions. Once he received the offers, he says he told his mother he would decide which college to attend. She wouldn’t hear of it:
“She said, ‘No, you’re going to Howard.’ And I said, ’No, I’m going to get an academic scholarship.’
"I said, ‘I don’t think you understand, if I can get the money, I can go anywhere I want to.’
“And she said, ‘I don’t think you understand. If you decide to go to any school other than an HBCU, then I won’t support you. I won’t buy your plane ticket home. I won’t buy your underwear. You will be disowned.’ ”
Abdullah assented to his mother’s wishes and went to Howard, where he developed a deep appreciation for the culture and academic commitment of historically black institutions, and he has never looked back.
After earning a master’s degree and a doctorate in civil engineering at Northwestern University while still in his early 20s, he worked for two years at an engineering firm in Chicago. But he says his heart was in higher education.
While Abdullah is not shy about addressing questions related to his family and religious background, he says his focus now is entirely on leading Virginia State University, a historically black institution founded in 1882.
“I think what Virginia State gives is access and opportunity. Virginia State does not give a guarantee to success, but it gives opportunity and access to that success if a young person is willing to do the work that it takes to be successful,” Abdullah says.
One of the university’s most prominent alumni was the late Reginald Lewis, who during the 1980s was frequently described as the wealthiest African-American person in the country. Fortune magazine reported that Lewis, who also graduated from Harvard Law School, had personal assets totaling more than $400 million.
Abdullah says that Virginia State, in the tradition of many historically black institutions, places an emphasis on undergraduate education and teaching. Early in his tenure at VSU, he helped create an Academic Excellence Center on the second floor of the university library where study skills are taught and academic advisers are available.
“When students have a challenge in their path toward graduation, that’s the place to go,” Abdullah says. “And last year, we announced the Trojan advance program ... where students can take online courses in the summer for as low as $199 dollars, as a mechanism to encourage students to catch up and stay in school.”
Abdullah’s immediate family members all have connections with historically black institutions. His daughter, Sefiyetu, attends Virginia State; his son, Mikaili, is enrolled at Morehouse College, an all-male HBCU in Atlanta; and, his wife, Ahkinyala Cobb-Abdullah, who holds a doctorate in environmental science, is a professor at Virginia Union University in Richmond, also an HBCU.
Abdullah arrived at VSU in February 2016, as the school was recovering from a financial crisis prompted by a sharp enrollment drop in the fall of 2014. In the fall of 2016, enrollment at Virginia State reached a low mark in its enrollment over the past decade with a total of 4,584 students, according to statistics kept by the State Council of Higher Education in Virginia. Abdullah says, however, that the number of freshmen increased 30 percent from the fall of 2015 to the fall of 2016.
The 10-year peak for enrollment occurred in the fall of 2012 with 6,208 students, including both undergraduate and graduate students.
Other HBCUs also had enrollment drops because of cuts in federal funding and changes in Parent-Plus loan criteria that made it more difficult for the parents of students to obtain loans.
In addition, VSU experienced several incidents that drew negative attention to the campus. Those included shootings in nearby communities and the April 2013 drowning of two students who were the victims of a hazing incident by a non-university sanctioned group. The totality of those events, Abdullah says, gave students and their parents reasons not to come to Virginia State.
On the topic of safety, Abdullah notes that a million dollars has been spent on campus lighting and that better training and better pay practices have been initiated around VSU’s police and public safety program.
“I think the thing that keeps me up every night is that I worry about the safety and security of our young people at Virginia State University,” he says. “When their parents or grandparents entrust them to Virginia State to keep them safe, I take that very personally.”
Franklin Johnson Jr. of Capitol Heights, Maryland, president of the VSU Alumni Association, says a lot of alumni were upset with the way things played out, and were concerned that the news media didn’t adequately represent Virginia State’s side of the story. He also was critical of the response of VSU administrators.
“The people in place at the time were not effectively communicating with the alumni and the community,” he says.
Johnson was on the search committee that selected Abdullah, and he says he has been impressed by the confidence and energy he has shown in addressing VSU’s challenges and opportunities.
He praises Abdullah for developing a communications strategy that not only better connects with alumni and the community, but also encourages alumni to work with the university to tell VSU’s story with social media.
“Not just the big victories, but the small victories that are happening every day,” Johnson says.
