Morgan State University’s enrollment continues to climb, edging close to 10,000 students, President David Wilson told an audience of faculty last week.
With 9,808 students enrolled in the just-completed fall 2023 semester, the university set a new enrollment record, Wilson told the Faculty Institute audience Wednesday. The number is an 8% increase over the previous record, 9,101 in 2022.
“Enrollment is very strong across the university…This is the third straight year where we had record enrollment,” Wilson said during his address to the faculty.
As the university continues to experience an influx of students, construction continues for the 604-bed residential building that will sit across from Thurgood Marshall Hall. Both Baldwin Hall and Cummings House remain offline for renovations scheduled to be completed in July 2024.
Wilson said the school is exploring and enacting heightened security measures for all campus buildings in the form of surveillance – upgrading all of the university’s pre-existing security camera systems, in the wake of October’s shootings where five people — four of them students — were shot during a pre-Homecoming event.
“We have 850 or so cameras that have been upgraded and newly installed with very clear image technology,” said Wilson, who credited the same camera system with aiding law enforcement in identifying the two shooting suspects.
According to Wilson, the installation and upgrade of said security cameras is “95% complete, with 100% coverage.” Students and faculty can soon expect to be surveilled in all public spaces on campus, including the library.
Such security measures will take large amounts of time and money to be completed. Wilson revealed that the university has requested $36 million in state funding to put towards “weapon detecting technology” to be installed on campus.
In an effort to raise the school’s funding but ensure that tuition holds at a steady number, the president plans to request $144 million from the Maryland legislature for FY 2025. The money is to be invested from July 1, 2024 to June 30, 2025. The 90-day legislative session opened Wednesday in Annapolis.
“That is the only way that we can continue with the capital transformation that we are under,” said Wilson. “We cannot relax. Quite frankly, the request should’ve been $250 million.”
Wilson reported a rise in dating violence at Morgan since students returned from the COVID-19 pandemic. The president said officials have found that women have formed the majority of dating violence perpetrators.
“We were kind of surprised that the overwhelming majority of the cases had female aggressors. We need to kind of understand what’s going on in this space. I’m concerned, the Office of Student Affairs is concerned,” Wilson said.
Wilson says that he and other administrative bodies have created a “threat assessment committee” to explore the causes of the dating violence as it pertains to students.
The issue is not unusual on college campuses. According to the National Domestic Abuse Hotline, 69% of female students and 53% of male students say they have been victims of physical violence, sexual assault and/or stalking by an intimate partner before the age of 25.
