On June 18, Marva Johnson, J.D., was confirmed by the Florida Board of Governors as Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University’s (FAMU) 13th president. Chosen to lead one of the nation’s premier Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Johnson has become the center of a heated debate following concerns about her qualifications, leadership, and connections to the Republican Party.
Despite critics claiming she lacks educational experience, Johnson has a strong educational background alongside her corporate roles. She served eight years on the Florida State Board of Education, initially appointed by Governor Rick Scott in 2014 and continuing under Governor Ron DeSantis until 2021.
According to FAMU’s press release, Johnson championed policies to implement performance-based funding while serving as board chair from 2015 to 2019. She aimed to raise graduation rates and enhance accountability across state colleges by expanding access to affordable, high-quality education while closing achievement gaps. DeSantis also appointed her to the Florida Scholars Academy Board to oversee education for vulnerable youth.
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But despite Johnson’s unanimous approval by the Board, her selection has garnered tremendous pushback from the university’s students and alumni.
“If you guys confirm this candidate, it is to reaffirm to all of us … that our voices do not matter,” a computer engineering student at FAMU, told CNN.
At the heart of the opposition to her leadership is her affiliation with the Republican Party. Critics see her as part of a broader agenda to “take over” HBCUs, especially given her ties to Governor DeSantis. Of particular concern will be her role in the broader national effort by the Trump administration to eliminate “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) programs. “Alumni groups, students and faculty members,” CNN reported, “are largely concerned about Johnson’s work under Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration, who banned funding for diversity, equity and inclusion programs at Florida colleges and blocked advanced placement African American studies curriculum in Florida high schools.”
A FAMU alumnus, Will Packer, posted on Instagram that “HBCUs are under attack,” and said that Johnson is part of a political opposition that doesn’t believe in diversity.
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For years, many universities—including HBCUs—have prioritized DEI in their curricula, hiring, and campus culture. In practice, this has often resulted in suppressed free speech, race-based hiring decisions, and discrimination against certain students—namely, white and Asian students.
At FAMU, the campus leans strongly left ideologically. A 2022 Campus Reform analysis found only one right-leaning student group on campus compared to six left-of-center groups. Worse, according to Federal Election Commission data analyzed by Campus Reform, 77.85 percent of FAMU employee political donations during the 2020 cycle went to Democratic candidates, while just 22.15 percent went to Republicans.
Johnson’s appointment challenges this status quo. She believes higher education should prioritize rigorous academics, career preparation, and merit over identity politics and race-based practices.
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Johnson says she is committed to protecting FAMU’s mission and legacy—empowering its community through innovative teaching, research, and service while honoring its legacy of educating African Americans—but also wants to ensure students are ready to enter the workforce:
It is a profound honor to be selected as the 13th president of Florida A&M University—a historic institution with a rich legacy shaped by giants. As president, I recognize the legacy I carry and remain committed to protecting and extending that legacy and FAMU’s mission, while fighting to ensure that we are positioned for success in the evolving higher education landscape. I am ready to bring a bold, business-minded, results-driven approach to advancing student success, financial sustainability, and long-term institutional growth.
Despite the political uproar, Johnson hasn’t proposed dismantling FAMU’s heritage or opportunities for black students—in fact, she has said the opposite.
Since critics have only raised ideological objections, their concerns seem less about her qualifications and more about preserving a political orthodoxy. Her Republican affiliation—and status as a black woman outside progressive norms—has likely intensified scrutiny. Yet her leadership could bring much-needed ideological balance to campus.
If Johnson focuses on academic excellence and student success, there’s no reason she can’t lead FAMU effectively regardless of politics.
Image: “Tallahassee FL FAMU HD marker” by Ebyabe on Wikimedia Commons
“That is the most racist paragraph that I have read — this century…”
Please explain how that paragraph was racist.
“My “we” have been in Massachusetts since something like 1644 — by the same token, Harvard was created to educate my forebears. But are you claiming that Harvard’s “heritage, history and culture” belongs to me & mine? “So sorry, Harvard, you aren’t allowed to *have* a Department of African and African American studies because Harvard belongs to WASPs…”
You are comparing apples to oranges. I am discussing a college that was built for the expressed purpose of higher education for African Americans, and you are comparing it to a segregated private school. You are also claiming ownership because your family stayed close to the school, when I am saying black people own FAMU because it was a public work to keep in compliance with the states separate but equal policies. FAMU was the states black college. SO the
“Heritage” refers to a generational inheritance that can be tangible or intangible, such as a family’s history, customs, traditions, language, and knowledge, or cultural artifacts, buildings, and landscapes.
“History” the study of past events, particularly in human affairs
“Culture” the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group.
Those things do belong to black people, because they were the only people there for a hundred years. Same can be said for Harvard before integration. That doesn’t mean black people only teach black things, it just means that FAMUs is a significant part of the black community, more so than any other. It is a black institution in a country that doesn’t have many of those.
“Name one White male who graduated from FAMU before (or even after) 1970.”
Why? The point is, FAMU didn’t have any rules against white people attending the university. The fact that none chose to do so, has no bearing on my statement.
“Did you miss what Ms. Harris wrote about “…race-based hiring decisions, and discrimination against certain students—namely, white and Asian students”?”
How does an 90% black discriminate against Asian students? Being black doesn’t give you an advantage in getting into FAMU, being anything but black does. Race based decisions discriminate against the majority at an institution, at FAMU that is black kids.
“And I didn’t know that FAMU was as geographically close to FSU — usually they weren’t, and the biggest mistake made was not simply combining the two when de jure segregation ended. As you may (or may not) know, what really harmed the HBCUs was when their best students were suddenly able to instead the HWCUs and did — and the biggest mistake that Morrill2 states made was in either not outright closing the HBCU Land Grants, or transforming them into open-admission community colleges for the academically unprepared, which is what they largely have become.”
Now this is the most racist statement I have read in this century. To start, HBUCs have their own legacies. The students that attend do so because they want to be part of that legacy. They also do a much better job of educating black students that PWIs.
You are wrong about what really harmed HBCUs, because what harmed them was decades of systemic racism in funding them.
As for transforming them into community colleges because you believe the students are academically unprepared comes from you lack of knowledge about HBCUs. Only 10% of black students that go to college attend HBCUS, but they make up 20% of all black college graduates. They produce 25% of all black STEM degree graduates. They are on average 28% less expensive than similarly ranked universities providing far more opportunities for lower income students. More than 50 percent of the nation’s African American public school teachers and 70 percent of African American dentists and physicians earned degrees at HBCUs. Over half of all African American professionals are graduates of HBCUs. In 2000, Xavier University in New Orleans individually produced more successful African American medical school applicants (94) than Johns Hopkins (20), Harvard (37), and the University of Maryland (24) combined. Spelman and Bennett Colleges produce over half of the nation’s African American women who go on to earn doctorates in all science fields; more than produced by the Ivy League’s Seven Sisters combined. HBCUs produce 44 percent of all African American bachelor’s degrees awarded for communications technology, 33 percent of bachelor’s degrees awarded for engineering technology, and 43 percent of bachelor’s degrees awarded for mathematics. Anyone that thinks they should close these institutions is a racist.
Jackie Robinson killed the Negro Baseball League…
No money did. You can’t have a league if you can’t afford your best players.
They wanted to appoint a “qualified” White man to lead Tuskeegee — on paper, Booker T wasn’t qualified. Look it up…
Of course he was qualified, he attended Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute and Wayland Seminary. He was recommended by Samuel Armstrong for the job.
One of the best Presidents that the UMass System ever had was Billy Bulger and he had never been anything other than a State Senator. Marva has done more.
No Marva has not done more. She has done nothing. And saying that Bulger was good at UMass says nothing about why you think Marva would be any good. You are avoiding the question. Why do you think Marva Johnson is the best candidate? Did you watch her interview for the position? Did you compare her resume to the other candidates? Did you watch their interviews? Do you have a background in education? Because I did all of those things, and she is easily the least qualified, worst prepared, and gave the worst interview by far. She has no relevant experience, and the FAMU community hates her so much she couldn’t even go to the summer graduation on her first day. She released a statement that got so much negative attention that they had to turn the comments off on all the school’s social media. She has six state troopers that take her on and off campus every day. How is that the best candidate?
“Horace Mann, who created the Normal School movement (of which FAMU is one), had no background in education other than being politically appointed by a Governor to run education in his administration.”
Horace Mann wasn’t the president of any university until late in his life, and he failed at doing so. Mann was good politician, and a strong lobbyist for education, but a poor school administrator. The students liked him as a teacher, but he could not run and institution because he lacked the experience and training.
“That only means that many other HBCUs are much worse — and run much worse.
But for subsidies that other C&Us don’t get, many HBCUs would no longer exist.
Avoid the soft bigotry of low expectations — compare HBSCs to CUs in general.”
Now you are just moving the goal post. I told you how effective HBCUs are at educating black students, so your belief that this is due to lower expectations is incorrect.
“Degreed”, not “educated” — and he won the majority of males 18-20, many of whom are Black.
You picked a demographic of two years, and a group of the least informed voters, with the least education. And the lowest turnout. How exactly does that make your point?
American Pravda (AP) wrote:
Every president gave HBCUs the money, trump just locked it in at the same number every year.
“No, they are run by the “Never Educate Anyone” (NEA), the teacher’s unions.”
The teacher’s union doesn’t set curriculum, they don’t set funding, they don’t hire teachers, they don’t create programs. What they do is fight for teachers’ rights in the workplace.
“Maybe the school needs to be shut down”
Why? Because we don’t want it to be run by an unqualified friend of the governor? Black people take pride in FAMU, you don’t. You don’t think it should even exist. Which begs the question, why do you care then? You think that HBCUs aren’t important, and they should go away, then why would anyone believe that you have our best interest at heart with your comments? You have a different opinion of what success looks like than we do, you want HBCUs to go away, so to you Marva would seem like the perfect candidate. That makes sense now, Marva is who you would pick if you don’t think HBCUs matter.
This was the most dishonest telling of this situation I have ever read. Johnson has never earned a job in education. She has never managed a large organization. She has never worked in school, at any level. The entirety of her educational experience comes from appointed positions, that she was given because she is a republican lobbyist, not because she has displayed any skill or knowledge in the field. She also has no ties to the university or any HBCU for that matter. She has zero educational background in administration, leadership, pedagogies. She doesn’t meet the minimum qualifications for the listed position. They had to replace three board members to get her elected. One of those members is part of a lawsuit claiming that the hiring process wasn’t fair. But this article ignores all of that and tries to make this about her being a republican. It also doesn’t mention that the interim president is a republican, and no one protested him. This article discusses the amount of conservative political groups on campus at an HBCU, totally ignoring the fact that African Americans are overwhelmingly democrats. This article is clearly intended to make this a culture war issue, instead of focusing on what the alumni are actually saying.
First and foremost, African Americans don’t “own” this or any other university — no more than WASPs own Harvard or Yale. A man by the name of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. fought for an end to segregation, you may have heard of him. And find a copy of his “I have a Dream” speech and read it…
There was another man by the name of Booker T. Washington — look into him as well.
FAMU is somewhat unique because it is both a Normal School (teacher’s college) AND aPhase 2 Land Grant where Congress told the Southern states that if they wanted a White land grant college (Agriculture and Mechanical Arts (i.e engineering), hence the A&M), they also had to have a Black one. (They didn’t want to.)
What Florida has been doing for 20 years now is first trying to improve K-12 and then trying to improve undergrad college so that both can be a bridge to good jobs for kids. And I don’t think I need to tell you that Black K-12 essentially sucks just about everywhere, and we REALLY need to improve it. And one way to do that is to impose higher college admission standards — over time — so that the high school kids will meet them.
That’s why she is probably the best pick for FACU right now.
And if people aren’t happy, they can go form their own college — how do you think that Amherst College got founded (Harvard professors left Harvard and founded their own college).
And I think the most scary thing about all of this is what Republicans such as Trump and DeSantis are saying to Black voters — “you’ve been voting for the Democrats for 60years, and what’s it gotten you?”
Republicans are offering better schools and good jobs to EVERYONE and Trump got something like 30% of the Black vote in 2024. And this is the same Evil Orange Man who extended the HBCUs a financial lifeline circa 2019 — without which, many of them wouldn’t be here now.
But it’s not your university — it belongs to the residents of Florida — ALL of them.
It is my university because I attend FAMU. But it is also black people’s university because we are the reason it exist. Florida A&M was created to provide higher education to African Americans. You are correct that it doesn’t belong to black people, but the heritage, history, and culture of the university does.
I am not sure why you bring up MLK as if FAMU was ever segregated. You are thinking of the school across the street, FSU. FAMU accepted all students from it’s founding day to present day.
Booker T. Washington founded an HBCU, why are you bringing him up? Do you think he would have wanted the governor of Alabama to appoint one of his unqualified friends to be the president of Tuskegee University?
But the part of your comment that I find most confusing, is why does wanting to raise standards for education makes Marva the best candidate? She has literally never done anything like that before. She has never taught in a school, worked in a front office of a school, never worked in administration in a school. She has no experience with any HBCU at all, never attended or worked in or with one. She has never managed a large organization of any kind. How would that make her perfect to run the number one public HBCU in the country six years running? The school is the third ranked HBCU overall. It has been run better than any public HBCU, it has some of the highest admission standards of all HBCUs only being beaten by small private HBCUs.
Black voters are aware of who we voted for the last 60 years. We also know why we did. Trump only got 15% of the black vote, with him performing the worst with black college educated voters. Trump didn’t save HBCUs, you can’t listen to what he says because that isn’t true.
Also, both parties want better schools for everyone. But if you look at the states with the worst schools, the majority are run be republicans.
But it is my university, and all are welcome. It is funded by the taxpayers of the state of Florida, but they aren’t the most important stakeholders. The students, alumni. and staff are, and when you ignore them, you are setting the school up to fail. Alumni groups are already diverting funds. Student groups are planning protest. Alumni are planning economic boycotts to hurt the city of Tallahassee. How does getting someone with no relevant experience worth all of that? How do you expect her to succeed if the school isn’t behind her?
It is my university because I attend FAMU. But it is also black people’s university because we are the reason it exist. Florida A&M was created to provide higher education to African Americans. You are correct that it doesn’t belong to black people, but the heritage, history, and culture of the university does.
That is the most racist paragraph that I have read — this century…
My “we” have been in Massachusetts since something like 1644 — by the same token, Harvard was created to educate my forebears. But are you claiming that Harvard’s “heritage, history and culture” belongs to me & mine? “So sorry, Harvard, you aren’t allowed to *have* a Department of African and African American studies because Harvard belongs to WASPs…”
I am not sure why you bring up MLK as if FAMU was ever segregated. You are thinking of the school across the street, FSU. FAMU accepted all students from it’s founding day to present day.
Name one.
Name one White male who graduated from FAMU before (or even after) 1970.
Did you miss what Ms. Harris wrote about “…race-based hiring decisions, and discrimination against certain students—namely, white and Asian students”?
And I didn’t know that FAMU was as geographically close to FSU — usually they weren’t, and the biggest mistake made was not simply combining the two when de jure segregation ended. As you may (or may not) know, what really harmed the HBCUs was when their best students were suddenly able to instead the HWCUs and did — and the biggest mistake that Morrill2 states made was in either not outright closing the HBCU Land Grants, or transforming them into open-admission community colleges for the academically unprepared, which is what they largely have become.
Jackie Robinson killed the Negro Baseball League…
Booker T. Washington founded an HBCU, why are you bringing him up? Do you think he would have wanted the governor of Alabama to appoint one of his unqualified friends to be the president of Tuskegee University?
They wanted to appoint a “qualified” White man to lead Tuskeegee — on paper, Booker T wasn’t qualified. Look it up…
But the part of your comment that I find most confusing, is why does wanting to raise standards for education makes Marva the best candidate? She has literally never done anything like that before. She has never taught in a school, worked in a front office of a school, never worked in administration in a school. She has no experience with any HBCU at all, never attended or worked in or with one. She has never managed a large organization of any kind.
One of the best Presidents that the UMass System ever had was Billy Bulger and he had never been anything other than a State Senator. Marva has done more.
Horace Mann, who created the Normal School movement (of which FAMU is one), had no background in education other than being politically appointed by a Governor to run education in his administration.
The school is the third ranked HBCU overall. It has been run better than any public HBCU, it has some of the highest admission standards of all HBCUs only being beaten by small private HBCUs.
That only means that many other HBCUs are much worse — and run much worse.
But for subsidies that other C&Us don’t get, many HBCUs would no longer exist.
Avoid the soft bigotry of low expectations — compare HBSCs to CUs in general.
Black voters are aware of who we voted for the last 60 years. We also know why we did. Trump only got 15% of the black vote, with him performing the worst with black college educated voters.
“Degreed”, not “educated” — and he won the majority of males 18-20, many of whom are Black.
Trump didn’t save HBCUs, you can’t listen to what he says because that isn’t true.
American Pravda (AP) wrote: https://apnews.com/article/c4834e48841d97c5a93312b1bf75302a
Also, both parties want better schools for everyone. But if you look at the states with the worst schools, the majority are run be republicans.
No, they are run by the “Never Educate Anyone” (NEA), the teacher’s unions.
But it is my university, and all are welcome. It is funded by the taxpayers of the state of Florida, but they aren’t the most important stakeholders.
Really?!?
Remember the New School?
The students, alumni. and staff are, and when you ignore them, you are setting the school up to fail. Alumni groups are already diverting funds. Student groups are planning protest. Alumni are planning economic boycotts to hurt the city of Tallahassee. How does getting someone with no relevant experience worth all of that? How do you expect her to succeed if the school isn’t behind her?
Maybe the school needs to be shut down…