Leadership Quote by Michael N. Castle

Castle’s line reads like a neutral observation, but it’s doing the careful rhetorical work politicians rely on when education policy bumps into race and class. “Typically” is the giveaway: a softener that pretends to be statistical modesty while smuggling in a broad generalization about who HBCUs are for. By framing Delaware State’s students as coming from homes where college “wasn’t the next natural step,” he positions the institution as a catchment for the “nontraditional” and the “behind,” rather than as a deliberate choice with its own prestige, culture, and intellectual lineage.

The subtext is paternalism with a polite smile. The sentence doesn’t say “underprepared” or “disadvantaged,” but it invites the listener to supply those words. That matters because it shifts attention away from structural barriers (segregated schooling, unequal funding, labor markets that pull teens into work) and onto family environment, which can sound like a moral or cultural deficit. It also quietly narrows the public’s imagination of HBCUs: not as engines of Black leadership and scholarly excellence, but as remedial bridges for students who supposedly didn’t plan right.

Contextually, Castle is a white Delaware Republican speaking in a state where Delaware State University carries enormous symbolic and practical weight: one of the few major public institutions historically built to serve Black students. In debates about funding, admissions, or institutional mission, a line like this can function as a budget argument in disguise: if the students are framed as less “college-bound,” the institution can be treated as less central, less urgent, easier to shortchange. The rhetoric is calm; the implications aren’t.