Omarosa Manigault-Newman has one of the most difficult jobs in the Trump administration as the director of communications for the White House’s Office of Public Liaison. The former reality star recently stated that a much-ballyhooed HBCU conference spearheaded by the president is going forward as planned, although critics of the upcoming event have been vocal in shouting it down.
Inside Higher Ed writes:
The White House will go ahead with the planned schedule for its annual HBCU conference next month, despite calls over the last week to postpone the event and warnings that some leaders of historically black colleges would no longer attend.
Those calls appeared to reflect ongoing frustrations with the administration’s approach to historically black colleges as well as concerns that the White House response to white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Va., would distract from the conference.
Representative Alma Adams, a North Carolina Democrat and the chair of the HBCU Caucus, and Johnny Taylor, the president and CEO of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, called in separate letters for the event to be postponed. Adams cited a lack of progress on issues of importance to HBCUs. Taylor raised concerns that “recent national events” could overshadow the conference, making it ultimately counterproductive. A number of HBCU leaders who had registered for the conference have also made it clear they will no longer attend, Taylor wrote in a letter to Omarosa Manigault-Newman, an assistant to the president and director of communications for the Office of Public Liaison.
The conference is still slated for September 17-19, as reported by McClatchy’s Washington bureau.
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