Brian Lamb: From DEI champion to enabler of Florida's "anti-DEI" university overhaul

Get the Point!

The irony is unmistakable: Brian Lamb, who once oversaw JP Morgan Chase's multi-billion-dollar initiative to close the racial wealth gap, now oversees Florida Gov. Ron Desantis’s systematic dismantling of diversity programs in higher education.

Brian Lamb

As chair of the State University System’s Board of Governors (BOG), Lamb, the former corporate diversity champion, is now the chief enabler of Desantis's "anti-Woke" and “anti-DEI” crusade as he rubber-stamps policies that gut the very programs he once championed, and orchestrates the politicization of the university administrations that threaten academic integrity.

Arguably, nowhere has this transformation been more controversial than at Florida A&M University (FAMU), the state's sole public HBCU where yesterday, Lamb joined a unanimous vote by his fellow governors to install Marva Johnson, a lobbyist with deep ties to the Republican Party, as the school’s 13^th President despite fierce opposition from FAMU students, alumni, and supporters. Ms. Johnson’s confirmation, only two weeks after the same BOG rejected an extremely well qualified Dr. Santa Ono as the new president of the University of Florida due to backlash from Donald Trump, Jr. and other prominent Republicans who labeled him as “woke,” crystallizes questions about whether Florida's universities will remain places of free inquiry, or be remade as laboratories of conservative conformity—with Lamb as the unlikely architect of their transformation?

Home Team

In full disclosure, I first met Brian Lamb about 34 years ago when he was a stellar scholar-athlete at FAMU High School in Tallahassee. I did not know him well as he was several years younger, but whenever my friends and I came home for Christmas or Spring breaks from Morehouse College and Tennessee State University, we always found time to watch the FAMU High basketball team playing in the local holiday tournaments and in March, the State Basketball championship tournament at the Tallahassee/Leon County Civic Center. Lamb, a gifted 6’2” combo guard, teamed up with our younger brothers (and future collegiate athletics) stars like Delwyn Jackson (FAMU basketball), Sam Madison (Louisville/NFL), Ronnie Dugans (Florida State/NFL), Theon Rackley (Florida State football), and Anthony Robinson (FAMU baseball/MLB) to propel the Baby Rattlers to a three year run of post-season success.

Photo of Lamb and me shortly after we touched down from a Delta flight from Atlanta to Tallahassee in 2023

As such, Lamb was taught and coached by many of the same FAMU High faculty members who not only instructed me and thousands of other young Black students about their areas of academic expertise, but also about their lives growing up during the Jim Crow segregation era. Meaning, whether you attended FAMU High for three years, from K-12, or some number in-between, those who learned within those hallowed halls knew fully well what systemic white supremacy looked like in general—and how systemic white supremacy impacted FAMU, specifically!

The ”FAMU High Factor” is what renders me confused as to how Lamb, a star point guard at the University of South Florida whose NBA dreams were clipped due to an injury—but still excelled and earned his undergraduate and MBA degrees with honors—could oversee MAGA policies that are in direct opposition to all that FAMU has stood for since its founding in 1887?

I’m similarly confused as to how Lamb, JP Morgan Bank's former diversity guru who was praised for “building a culture where all employees and customers are treated equally and feel welcome," could sit idly by and preside over a systematic attempt to destroy DEI initiatives throughout Florida government and within its 12 universities?

Ascending to Power Under DeSantis

In March 2019, then newly elected Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed Lamb to the state's BOG, the group which provides operational oversight for Florida's 12 public universities. Lamb’s appointment filled one of the 14 seats (17 total) that are directly controlled by the governor—a power center through which Desantis has reshaped Florida’s higher education system according to his political vision.

During this time, the University of Florida rose as high as #4 in the U.S. News & World Report annual rankings of public colleges and universities, while FAMU rose to #1 among HBCUs in the same rankings. But ever since Desantis declared that “Florida is where ‘Woke’ goes to die” in 2022, and launched his crusade against Critical Race Theory, DEI, and Black History, a number of scholars, frightened by Desantis’s desire to tie tenure tracking to political ideology and activism, have begun leaving UF, FAMU, and other state schools in droves. This brain drain has led UF downward to #7 in the latest U.S. News rankings, and threatens a stability that took decades for the state’s higher education apparatus to build.

Lamb has not publicly challenged any of Desantis’s political positions that have detrimentally impacted minorities in the State University System, and his relative silence led him to being named chair of the BOG in 2023, a position he will hold until the end of the year.

Again, knowing that Lamb is in the last months of his tenure, even assuming his early silence was best to place himself in a position to help the masses of minorities, that assumption surely looks non-existent as Desantis continues to run roughshod over the state’s educational complex.

The Transformation: From Inclusion to Exclusion

In June of 2020, just as vast segments of America awoke from their racial awareness slumber following George Floyd's murder in Minneapolis, Lamb, admirably, was busy co-authoring a BOG memo proclaiming the university system's "clear and steadfast commitment to prioritize and support diversity, racial and gender equity, and inclusion." The memo explicitly recognized the prevalence of racism and pledged to "repair the racial divide" and pursue "equal justice for all" on Florida campuses.

Astonishingly, five years later, Lamb has become the gatekeeper who has allowed Desantis to fulfill his goal of having Florida emerge as the first state to “wipe out DEI at our public universities."

During the BOG’s November 2023 meeting, Lamb and his fellow governors unanimously approved new rules banning spending on diversity, equity and inclusion programs. These rules further forbade Florida universities from using state or federal funds to "advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion" or to "promote or engage in political or social activism."

The BOG’s action effectively stripped Florida campuses of most resources for diversity initiatives and the message was clear: Florida's university system was no longer a safe space for programs the governor chided as “political indoctrination.”

Rubber-Stamping the “Anti-Woke” Agenda

Under Lamb's leadership, the Board of Governors has systematically implemented DeSantis's cultural agenda across Florida's campuses. The BOG voted to remove sociology from general education core requirements, enacted rules forcing state universities to segregate bathrooms by biological sex—backing DeSantis's focus on policing transgender students—and backed the dismantling of state university chapters of “Students for Justice in Palestine,” a move that had a chilling effect on student and faculty First Amendment rights to free speech following the outbreak of war between Hamas and Israel in Gaza.

Perhaps most significantly, Lamb's BOG has overseen a series of politically tinged leadership appointments, including a so-called "national search" for chancellor of the State University System that resulted in Ray Rodrigues, a local Republican state senator and Desantis loyalist who had sponsored many of the governor's education bills, as the unanimous selection!

Through all of these acts, Lamb offered no objections or full-throated defenses of diversity, equity, or inclusion, the areas in which he had made his mark within the banking industry.

The Lamb Hope

Despite Lamb’s reticence to fight back against various Desantis’s agendas over the last four years, once I learned from Leon County Commissioner Bill Proctor that clandestine moves were being made to place a well-connected Republican, Marva Johnson, into the presidential suite at FAMU, there was a naive part of me that held out hope that Lamb, a celebrated and beloved FAMU High alum, would never allow the MAGA Mob to infiltrate the home of his high school alma mater.

My hopes in Lamb’s loyalty to the Orange & Green proved unfounded…

FAMU President Marva Johnson and BOG Chair Brian Lamb after yesterday's unanimous confirmation vote

As I have noted many times over the past two months in this blog and the Tallahassee Democrat, my objection to Johnson has nothing to do with her political affiliation as I was a registered Republican myself from the early 1990’s until 2014. But when I was a Republican, as evidenced by thousands of articles that I have written since 1991, from my time as a member of the Law School Republicans at UF, to later advising Republican Governors Jeb Bush and Charlie Crist on issues like early voting hours, automatic restoration of civil rights for formerly convicted felons, and pushes to diversify the judiciary, never did I ever go along to get along with bigots who held no interest in the best interests of Black people or FAMU. Trust, when white Republicans were in a room during my tenure, our people had a fierce, articulate, and unapologetically Black advocate and we were successful in a number of areas because I, and we, had enough courage to speak our collective truths!

Lamb, from the record, has been missing in action during a time in which voices on the inside should be striving to make a difference. The very fact that the BOG approved FAMU Board of Trustees presidential requirements that the successful candidate should hold a terminal degree, have experience as faculty or administrator at a research-intensive college/university, and experience with NCAA Division One compliance, and knowing that Johnson lacked those qualifications but still was selected, should have led to Lamb pounding the gavel and exclaiming, “No!”

Knowing that allegations reached up the BOG that one fellow governor, Alan Levine, was text messaging BOT members during meetings and encouraging them to avoid mentioning allegations of impropriety, should have led to Lamb pounding the gavel and exclaiming, “No!”

Knowing that existing investigations into the selection process are still pending by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) accrediting agency, and that the FAMU Foundation has gone on record to note a paucity of funds to pay Johnson $4.8 million over five years, should have led to Lamb pounding the gavel and exclaiming, “No!”

And knowing that a recently filed civil lawsuit alleges that Gov. Ron Desantis was vetting Johnson as a candidate during a meeting with Black legislators during a time when neither Desantis nor those legislators should have even known the candidates due to a law that the governor signed back in 2022 to keep presidential searches shrouded in secrecy, should have led to Lamb pounding the gavel and exclaiming, “No!”

FAMU stakeholders stand and turn their backs in protest as Chair Brian Lamb conducts the confirmation vote for Marva Johnson

But Chairman Lamb did not pound his gavel and when the vote was done yesterday, he joined the majority by exclaiming “yes” to Johnson; what I found curious was that when his fellow governors began extolling Johnson’s virtues during yesterday’s votes, none of them defended her resume or qualifications because they couldn’t in light of the criteria—each spoke about their “personal” relationship with Johnson and how she would be a good fit for FAMU!

FAMU President Marva Johnson's office is adjacent to the very spot where the Tallahassee Civil Rights Movement, led by FAMU students Wilhelmina Jakes, Carrie Patterson, and Broadus Hartley, and Morehouse alumni Reverends C.K. Steele and K.S. Dupont, began circa 1956.

All of which has left me and thousands of FAMU stakeholders to wonder how Lamb, a FAMU High alumnus who crossed the stage in historic Lee Hall—a building that sits in front of the very spot where FAMU students helped launch the Tallahassee Bus Boycott in 1956—could vote for a president whose sole qualification is her relationship with the very MAGA Republicans who are dismantling diversity, equity, inclusion, and Black history each year?

To our chagrin, including many of his old FAMU High school teachers, classmates, and friends as shown from last week's reunion, we may never fully know…