Dr. Clarke once said, If you don’t understand yourself, you will be confused by others. I will go one step further and say that if you do not understand the motivations of power, the interest of Others, you are more likely to be serving theirs than your own. You will not understand why they put a fox in your hen house. – William A. Foster, IV

Institutional governance is a question of alignment. The board of trustees of any institution is not merely a collection of distinguished names; it is the body that sets strategic direction, approves resource allocation, and ultimately determines whose interests the institution serves. When a board member’s family and political associations stand in direct conflict with the mission and material interests of the institution, that is not a matter of partisan preference — it is a governance failure.

Cecilia Abbott sits on the board of trustees of Huston-Tillotson University, a historically Black institution anchored on East 11th Street in Austin, Texas. She is the wife of Governor Greg Abbott. What makes her presence on that board a matter of serious institutional concern is not her individual biography but the structural context in which it sits: a state whose constitutional architecture has, from its inception, treated its Black public institutions as categorically equal in designation while systematically denying them the governance independence those designations require. Huston-Tillotson does not exist in isolation. It exists alongside Prairie View A&M University and Texas Southern University, two public HBCUs whose founding histories and governance crises together constitute a durable, legally embedded architecture of Black institutional subordination operating across 150 years of Texas history. That architecture is the environment in which Huston-Tillotson’s board composition must be evaluated.

The Texas Constitution of 1876 established the foundational hierarchy of the state’s higher education system through a specific phrase: “institution of the first class.” The Constitution specified that the legislature was to establish and maintain a “university of the first class” to be styled the University of Texas — the state’s flagship institution, endowed from the beginning with its own board, its own land grants, and its own constitutional identity. Texas A&M University was established the same year under parallel provisions. Both institutions were given independent governing boards and, through the Permanent University Fund, access to the mineral wealth of millions of acres of West Texas land, a financial foundation that has compounded for nearly a century and a half. In 1983, the Texas Legislature proposed a constitutional amendment to restructure the Permanent University Fund to include Prairie View A&M University as a beneficiary of its proceeds, and the 1984 amendment dedicated the university to enhancement as an “institution of the first class” under the governing board of the Texas A&M University System. Prairie View A&M thus became the third institution in Texas history to receive the constitutional designation of “institution of the first class” — the same language used for UT Austin and Texas A&M.

There is, however, a structural distinction between Prairie View’s designation and those of the other two institutions so named, and it is not a minor administrative detail. It is the central fact of Prairie View’s institutional existence. UT Austin governs itself through the UT System, which it founded and of which it is the flagship. Texas A&M governs itself through the A&M System, which it founded and of which it is the flagship. Prairie View A&M — constitutionally designated as their peer — is governed by a board whose primary institutional loyalty runs to one of those peers. It is the only institution of the first class in Texas that does not have a system of its own. It is, in the precise legal language of the Texas Constitution, a first-class institution permanently embedded within another institution’s governing apparatus. In its entire history, no Prairie View graduate has ever served on the Texas A&M Board of Regents, the body that governs Prairie View’s strategic direction, budget, and presidential appointments. That statistic is frequently cited as evidence of representation failure, but the framing understates the problem. The goal is not a seat at Texas A&M’s table. The goal is Prairie View’s own table — its own board, its own system, its own governing apparatus answerable to its own institutional mission and its own community. Token inclusion within a structure designed to serve another institution’s interests does not constitute governance. It constitutes the management of dissent. This distinction matters directly to the Huston-Tillotson question: a board seat held by someone whose primary institutional affiliations run counter to the institution’s mission is not representation. It is the same problem in a different form.

The 1984 constitutional amendment that called Prairie View a first-class institution was, in this respect, a title without full transfer of authority. The state elevated Prairie View’s designation while leaving its governance structure intact, a maneuver that granted the language of equality while preserving the machinery of control. The circumstances surrounding that amendment deserve particular scrutiny, because they illuminate how Prairie View’s governance subordination has operated not merely as passive neglect but as active negotiation between the A&M System and the individuals it controls. Dr. Alvin I. Thomas, who had served as Prairie View’s president since 1966, resigned in June 1982. Within months, the Texas Legislature proposed the constitutional amendment restructuring the Permanent University Fund to include Prairie View and the following spring, the Texas A&M Board of Regents granted Thomas the permanent title of President-Emeritus. The official institutional record attributes his departure to failing health. The Texas State Historical Association’s account states that Thomas requested to be assigned other duties because of failing health, and that Percy A. Pierre assumed the presidency in 1982. What the record does not address is the political economy of the transition: a Black president of sixteen years departs, a constitutional concession arrives, and an honorific is bestowed by the governing board that controlled his tenure — all within a twelve-month window. The constitutional amendment was framed by the A&M System as a response to two simultaneous imperatives: its own stated commitment to academic excellence, and the state’s commitment to “the enhancement of Prairie View A&M University to spur greater integration.” That the state required external political pressure to fund its own constitutionally mandated Black land-grant institution on equal terms with its white counterparts — 106 years after Prairie View’s founding — is itself the finding. The precise internal negotiations that produced that pressure remain, characteristically, undocumented in the public record. That absence of documentation is not incidental. It is what governance without accountability produces. When a Black institution’s president cannot govern without the consent of a board that owes its primary loyalty to a white peer institution, the negotiations that shape his tenure and departure do not enter the written record on equal terms with those of peer institutions. The structural condition was named directly by Prairie View’s own institutional historian as early as 1962: “The control by the A. & M. College Board of the fortunes of the Negro A. & M. was established by statute. The Board itself designated the President of the A. & M. College at College Station the ‘President’ of the Negro school. The on-the-spot Negro head of the school was called the ‘Principal.'” The title changed. The structure did not. And the lesson for Huston-Tillotson is direct: when external interests occupy governing positions, the negotiations that matter most are precisely the ones that never appear in the minutes.

If Prairie View illustrates what subordination looks like when it is designed into an institution’s founding charter, Texas Southern University illustrates what it looks like when an institution is created specifically to deflect the demand for equality and then subjected to the same governance instability that afflicts every Texas HBCU operating within structures it did not design and cannot control. In February 1946, Heman Marion Sweatt, a Black Houston mail carrier, applied to enroll in the law school at the University of Texas. Because Texas was a segregated state, Sweatt was denied admission and filed suit against the University of Texas and the State of Texas with the support of the NAACP. In response, the Texas Legislature passed Senate Bill 140 on March 3, 1947, providing for the establishment of a Negro law school in Houston and the creation of a university to surround it. Under the separate but equal concept, the intention was to create a new university for Negroes in Houston that would become the equivalent of the University of Texas in Austin. Texas Southern University was not founded because the state of Texas believed Black Texans deserved a world-class institution. It was founded because the state of Texas believed a hastily constructed alternative would satisfy the courts and allow the University of Texas to remain segregated. The institution was, from its first day of existence, a legal instrument of racial exclusion dressed in the language of educational opportunity. That origin has never stopped shaping its relationship with the state.

In early 2020, the Texas Southern University Board of Regents abruptly suspended and then terminated president Austin Lane, offering a vague public explanation. The decision sparked outrage among TSU students, alumni, and staff. Walter Kimbrough, then president of Dillard University, responded with a public op-ed calling for the entire TSU board to be replaced immediately — and calling on all Texas Southern supporters to pressure Governor Greg Abbott to make this happen. Abbott, who appoints TSU’s board members, did not replace the board. Kimbrough issued a direct public warning to any aspiring president considering the TSU position: “Stay away until they clean the board. Don’t get caught up in the idea of wanting to be a president, because any president working under this board is asking for a tenure filled with micromanaged misery.” The mechanism at TSU in 2020 was structurally identical to what Prairie View has experienced across its entire history: a board appointed by the state’s governor exercises authority over a Black institution’s presidential leadership without adequate transparency, accountability, or alignment with the institution’s mission. The governor with the power to intervene chose not to. That governor was Greg Abbott. His wife now sits on the board of Huston-Tillotson University.

The resource record confirms what the governance record implies. During the 2018-2019 biennium, Prairie View received $23 million in federal land-grant funding but only $4 million in state matching funds, approximately 17 percent of what it was legally entitled to receive, while Texas A&M received $94 million in federal funding matched by $196 million from the state, more than double its proportional share. The federal land-grant system requires state matching funds as a condition of participation. Texas has, for generations, met that obligation in full for its white land-grant institution while delivering a fraction of the equivalent to its Black one. A federal report found that Tennessee State University, whose structural situation mirrors Prairie View’s as a chronically underfunded Black land-grant institution, had been denied $2.1 billion in funding over the course of its history based on its land-grant status alone. This is not underfunding as administrative oversight. It is structural extraction: a land-grant institution, entitled by federal law to state matching funds, being systematically denied those funds by the same state apparatus that controls its governance and whose flagship institution benefits directly from the resource differential. Prairie View alumni leaders have expressed this plainly: “We feel devalued. We feel underserved. We feel like we don’t have a say so. They’re always in control.” The sentiment is not frustration. It is an accurate institutional biography. And it describes precisely the dynamic that Huston-Tillotson’s stakeholders should be asking whether they are voluntarily importing into their own governance structure.

Huston-Tillotson operates in a different institutional context than Prairie View and Texas Southern — it is private, not public, and governs itself independently. But it operates in the same state, within the same policy environment, and in a neighborhood whose Black institutional geography has been shaped by the same forces that have constrained those institutions: the territorial expansion of the white flagship universities whose alumni and political networks exercise disproportionate influence over Black institutional life. In 1928, the City of Austin adopted a plan that displaced all Black residents to east of East Avenue — now Interstate 35 — effectively institutionalizing racial segregation and establishing East Austin as the city’s designated Black district. Forced into this geography by law, Austin’s Black community built what it could: churches, businesses, schools, fraternal organizations, and financial institutions. Huston-Tillotson was the civilizational center of that world not simply a college, but the anchor of a community that had been told, by legal fiat, that it could only exist on one side of a highway. The University of Texas at Austin where Governor Greg Abbott received his undergraduate degree moved east in the decades that followed. UT used eminent domain authority granted in 1965 to force East Austin homeowners to sell their properties, directly displacing Black families from land they had built and inhabited for generations. Research produced in partnership with Huston-Tillotson documents how UT Austin’s eastern campus expansion embodies gentrification in action, with Black families displaced economically by the relentless growth of the same institution. Long-time East Austin residents describe a community once built around Huston-Tillotson, Black-owned businesses, and Black financial institutions including an African American credit union whose records researchers are still working to recover. A building that once housed that institution’s affiliated associations is now owned by the University of Texas.

Greg Abbott is an alumnus of that institution. He did not set its land acquisition policies. But he is a product of the specific university whose territorial expansion has been the most direct institutional threat to the East Austin Black community that Huston-Tillotson serves. His wife now sits on Huston-Tillotson’s governing board. The line runs from UT Austin’s eminent domain campaigns of the 1960s through the displacement of Black East Austin to the boardroom of the institution those displaced families built. That line is not metaphorical. It is geographic, institutional, and constitutionally legible. It is compounded by an administrative record that places the Abbott governorship in active opposition to the conditions on which HBCUs depend. In January 2025, Abbott issued an executive order directing all Texas state agencies to eliminate DEI policies, declaring that “DEI agendas divide us rather than unite us and have no place in the state of Texas.” This followed the 2023 passage of Senate Bill 17, which Abbott signed banning DEI practices at Texas public institutions of higher education. In his 2025 State of the State address, he called to extend the ban to K-12 education and urged lawmakers to “purge it from every corner of our schools.” Members of the Texas Legislative Black Caucus responded directly, describing the policies as “code for anti-Black” and a signal to communities of color that they are “not welcome here anymore.” HBCUs exist because the structural exclusions DEI frameworks were designed to redress were, for most of American history, a matter of explicit law — law written and enforced by the same state apparatus now being deployed to dismantle the remedial infrastructure that followed it. Texas Southern University was literally built to satisfy a court demanding equal access to legal education while preserving UT Austin’s right to exclude Black students. The Abbott administration’s DEI agenda continues that tradition by other means. A governing board that includes the spouse of the administration executing that agenda is not a board positioned to push back against it.

There is a common assumption within HBCU advocacy that private institutions occupy safer ground than their public counterparts. Public HBCUs are directly exposed to gubernatorial power through board appointments, budget appropriations, and legislative oversight. Private HBCUs, the reasoning goes, govern themselves and are therefore insulated from those pressures. The Huston-Tillotson situation exposes that assumption as dangerously incomplete. Governors hold substantial power over public universities from appointing board members to approving capital budgets. For public HBCUs, this centralized authority means that their future can be profoundly shaped, or stymied, by whoever occupies the governor’s office. That analysis is correct as far as it goes. But it does not go far enough. The governor’s power is not limited to formal mechanisms of public oversight. It extends, through social networks, political relationships, and institutional affiliations, into the governing structures of private institutions as well — whenever those institutions permit it entry. Boards are not benign. They decide which programs expand, who gets hired as president, and how to respond to crises. If the governor appoints people who see HBCUs as second-class, those biases become institutionalized. That observation was made in the context of public HBCU boards whose members are formally appointed by the governor. But the same logic applies with equal force to a private HBCU board that includes the governor’s wife. The mechanism of influence is informal rather than statutory. The effect on institutional behavior, the chilling of public advocacy, the softening of institutional positions, the implicit pressure toward self-censorship in dealings with state government is the same. The Cecilia Abbott board seat is not a public governance problem that Huston-Tillotson’s private status insulates it from. It is a private governance problem that Huston-Tillotson’s private status gave it the freedom to avoid and chose not to.

Taken together with Prairie View’s 150-year governance subordination as the only institution of the first class without a system of its own, the systematic underfunding of its federal land-grant entitlements, the forced or negotiated departure of its longest-serving modern president coinciding with a constitutional concession that left the governance structure unchanged, Texas Southern’s founding as a legal instrument of racial exclusion and its subsequent presidential governance crisis under a board appointed by Greg Abbott, UT Austin’s displacement of Black East Austin, and the Abbott administration’s anti-DEI legislative agenda — these are not separate stories. They are chapters in a single account of how Black higher education institutions in Texas have been systematically denied the institutional autonomy that peer white institutions have exercised as their baseline condition since the moment of their founding. That account has a contemporary chapter, and it is being written at Huston-Tillotson’s board table.

The presence of Cecilia Abbott at Huston-Tillotson’s governing table does not represent a neutral act of community inclusion. It represents the placement of the Texas Governor’s wife, a UT Austin alumnus whose institution spent sixty years absorbing Black East Austin, whose administration has made the rollback of Black institutional support its signature domestic achievement, whose state has never permitted its only Black institution of the first class to govern itself on equal terms with its white peers, and who declined to act when his own appointees at Texas Southern drove that institution toward governance collapse — at the board of the most significant private Black institution in Austin. The question for Huston-Tillotson’s leadership, faculty, alumni, and donors is not whether Cecilia Abbott is personally hostile to the institution’s mission. The question is structural: whether her presence on this board advances Huston-Tillotson’s capacity to advocate for that mission, to stand alongside Prairie View and Texas Southern in demanding equitable treatment from the state, and to signal unambiguously to the Black community it serves that its governing table belongs to them. Prairie View A&M has spent 150 years governed by a board whose loyalties run elsewhere. Texas Southern was built as a substitute for equality and has been governed accordingly ever since. Huston-Tillotson has the institutional independence neither of them has ever been granted. The question is whether it will use it.

Disclaimer: This article was assisted by ClaudeAI.