Cecilia Abbott sits on the board of trustees of Huston-Tillotson University, a historically Black institution in Austin, Texas. She is the wife of Governor Greg Abbott — a UT Austin alumnus whose institution spent sixty years absorbing Black East Austin through eminent domain, 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 University drove that institution toward governance collapse. There is a common assumption that private HBCUs occupy safer ground than their public counterparts — that self-governance insulates them from the gubernatorial power that has always threatened public Black institutions. The Huston-Tillotson situation exposes that assumption as dangerously incomplete: the governor’s influence does not require statutory authority when it can walk through the front door of a private institution’s boardroom. Continue reading →