When the Future Fights the Past: What FAMU's Hijacking Reveals About Power, Time, and the War on Black Excellence

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Publisher’s note: Eight years after I launched Hobbservation Point, today’s feature is the first for a guest columnist—a Hobbs no less—my brilliant cousin W. Cecyl Hobbs, a Tallahassee native who shares my passion for the preservation of Florida A&M University, an institution that's meant so much to our immediate and extended families and “FAMUly” since its founding in 1887. Enjoy!

By Cecyl Hobbs | FAMU Class of 1995

Cecyl Hobbs

Some want to run a 2040 institution on 1980 rules. Others want to destroy it entirely.

That's what Marva Johnson's installation as FAMU's president really exposes: a systematic dismantling disguised as reform. While FAMU alumni, students, and faculty are building toward R1 research status, global competitiveness, and generational mobility, Florida's political machine is demanding something else entirely: demanding submission.

This is more than simply a clash of choices in leadership profiles. It is a temporal war — between those building for the future, and those determined to control or destroy the institutions that create Black excellence.

They aren’t even pretending to hide it anymore.

The Real Crisis: When Time Becomes a Weapon

Let's be clear about what Governor DeSantis' higher education agenda actually does when stripped of its talking points. It weaponizes time itself:

Short-term destruction masked as efficiency:

• Eliminating DEI programs with 30-day deadlines, wiping out decades of institutional knowledge

• Forcing universities to justify their existence based on 12-month employment statistics — while UF gets to count its century of alumni networks

• Appointing trustees based on political loyalty, not institutional understanding, then demanding immediate "results"

Meanwhile, FAMU operates on the timelines that actually matter:

• Building research infrastructure that takes decades to mature (loss of our $16.3M NIH grant that the politically-connected Board of Governors did little to mitigate)

• Creating first-generation college graduates whose families need 2-3 generations to build wealth

• Training scientists, engineers, and leaders for industries that don't yet exist

FAMU produces Black graduates at rates that should embarrass every other institution in Florida:

• 28% of our students are Pell Grant recipients—the most economically vulnerable

• We produce a disproportionate share of Black engineers, physicians, and judges relative to our resources

• Our alumni anchor communities and build companies across every major sector

Yet when the Board of Governors revised the performance-based funding formula to give greater weight to graduate salaries and employment outcomes, institutions like UF and FSU received significantly larger funding increases, while FAMU's share remained comparatively low.

This was not because FAMU's outcomes were worse — FAMU consistently ranks among the top universities nationally for advancing Black student social mobility — but because the new metrics favored universities with longstanding wealth, larger alumni networks, and historically higher average graduate salaries, rather than those focused on access and opportunity for underrepresented students.

The Anatomy of Institutional Capture

Marva Johnson's appointment isn't incompetence; it is strategic demolition.

Consider the pattern:

• No higher education leadership experience (unlike FSU's Thrasher, who had deep institutional ties)

• No connection to FAMU's mission or culture (a feature, not a bug)

• Appointed despite overwhelming opposition from students, faculty, alumni, and even some trustees

• Deep alignment with an administration actively hostile to HBCUs and shared governance

When Board of Governors Vice Chair Alan Levine can secure $48 million for UF's AI hospital while blocking FAMU's public health research center, that's not market forces. That's structural sabotage!

When not one of the 17 BOG members is a FAMU college or graduate school alum, but several hold degrees from UF, FSU, and USF, that's not oversight; it’s occupation!

When FIU scores highest on the BOG's own "performance-based funding" model but gets less money than UF and FSU — while FAMU isn't even in the conversation — that's not competition. That's rigged math!

This Is Not Just Political. It Is Existential.

The deeper threat is more than poor policy choices, which are detrimental to the present and future — it is temporal fragmentation designed to make excellence impossible:

• A state government compressing all value into four-year outputs while defunding the long-term investments that create transformation;

• A student body investing in life trajectories over decades while being told their worth is measured in immediate employment stats;

• Faculty trying to conduct generational research under trustees who demand quarterly results;

• Alumni building networks across decades while politicians demand instant, visible "returns.”

Trust is breaking, but so is a notion of shared time — the ability to operate on the timelines that excellence requires.

And that's the point.

You can't destroy an institution overnight without looking like the obvious villain. But you can fragment its relationship to time, choke its resources, install hostile leadership, and then point to the resulting dysfunction as justification for further "reform."

The Real Choice: Reform or Resistance

Here's what they're counting on: that we'll exhaust ourselves fighting each individual crisis while they systematically dismantle the foundations.

• They own the Board of Governors. We fight for better trustees.

• They rig funding formulas. We argue for better metrics.

• They install hostile leadership. We demand a better process.

All legitimate fights. All necessary. All insufficient.

Because while we are playing defense, they are busy rewriting the rules of the game!

Building Power That Lasts

The center cannot hold because it was never built for institutions like FAMU. But we can build a new center — not one anchored in their approval, but in our excellence and our solidarity.

That means:

Immediate accountability:

• Documenting every funding disparity, every biased decision, every rigged outcome;

• Making the patterns visible through data journalism that forces a reckoning;

• Demanding real representation on boards that control our futures.

Long-term power building:

• Creating independent research networks that don't depend on state approval;

• Building alumni coalitions that write new rules, not just play by theirs;

• Investing in political candidates who understand the value of HBCUs;

Strategic clarity:

• Refusing to accept metrics that ignore our realities;

• Supporting leadership that sees students as future builders, not cost centers;

• Treating institutional excellence as non-negotiable.

FAMU Is Still Ours to Shape

This Board may make decisions we reject (and we’ll fight those). But that doesn't end the story.

FAMU is more than a presidency or a campus; our “College of Love and Charity” is a proving ground — for vision, for strategy, and for the future of Black excellence in public education!

We've been here before. When the state tried to merge us out of existence in the 1960s, we organized and survived! When they tried to defund us in the 1990s, we built national coalitions and thrived!

Now they're trying something more sophisticated: capture and control rather than outright elimination.

Our response has to be more sophisticated too!

We organize. We build. We expose. We create alternatives. Not to preserve the past, but to expand the future it made possible!

The future fights the past every day at institutions like FAMU. Usually, we win — because we operate on timelines that matter, with purposes that endure, in service of communities that understand what's at stake

This time won't be different. Once again, the dark clouds are gathering, but that is our tradition! That is our power! This is our time to Strike, Strike, and Strike again!

Cecyl Hobbs is a 1995 graduate of FAMU and writes about strategic justice, higher education, and building power for the long term. Follow his work via Cecyl@BlackLotusLeadership on the Substack app