Verrrry carefully.

The board of trustees at N.C. Central University needs to heed that instruction as it proceeds with the ambitious plan to expand the university's campus.

At a time when many historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are struggling to maintain enrollment and some are in danger of having to shut down altogether -- we've already lost Morris Brown College in Atlanta -- it's encouraging to see that NCCU is actually in the midst of a growth spurt.

Even if massive, people-displacing expansion is inevitable, Chancellor Charlie Nelms and the trustees must be careful to show proper respect. The last thing the university should want to do is to go into the surrounding neighborhoods stomping all over people's homes and memories.

If you travel around the country and visit black colleges in other states, there are two things you can count on seeing: There will be a Church's Chicken restaurant nearby -- sorry, Surgeon General, but we've got to have some grease -- and the school itself will be located in the 'hood.

That's where black colleges belong, so they can, among other things, study the problems of those communities and do some work on solutions.

I've always viewed the homes near NCCU as an integral part of the university's charm, not obstacles in the way of growth. That includes the seen-their-best-days rooming houses nearby, the ones that -- if they're anything like the ones close to my alma mater, Morehouse College in Atlanta -- provide cheap off-campus housing for students who lack the money to afford campus housing or who registered too late to find a spot in a dorm.

It's understandable that NCCU would want its entire campus as one whole and not split up. But a physically divided campus would not be unique, even to Durham. Isn't there another university right here in the the Bull City with an East Campus and a West Campus?

I don't recall that being a major deterrent to its pursuit of excellence.

If it's true that "nothing succeeds like excess," even proponents of the current four-phase development project have to worry about whether expansion will beget expansion, and that expansion will beget still more expansion -- until all the surrounding residents and businesses have been begat into oblivion.

My stay in Bible college lasted only one week -- that voice I thought I heard turned out not to be so celestial, after all -- but I nonetheless recall a Bible verse that went something like "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but lose his soul?"

I hope the trustees at NCCU ask themselves, before gobbling up 136 neighboring homes, what would it profit the university to gain all the land surrounding it and lose its neighborhood?