Last week we reported on Marva “MAGA Marva” Johnson being selected as FAMU’s 13th President. The newest leader of The Highest of Seven Hills got her name in response to her close affiliation with not only Rick Scott and Ron Desantis but also Donald Trump himself. Previously, Johnson served as the group president for Charter Communications.
In a post by Brian C. Johnson, an alum of FAMU, he writes “perpetrators of the MAGA take over” used “your low giving percentage as a key justification” for their selection of Johnson. The post has since sparked a lot of conversation around Black alumni giving, the agenda with Johnson, and so much more.
Chuck Hobbs describes the conversation as nothing more than “a ruby red herring and a Red State Republican talking point combined.” According to his Facebook post, FAMU Board of Trustees made rude comments about FAMU’s giving hovering around 6%. For context, the national average is 7.7%. Public state-institutions should not be reliant on alumni donations and truthfully, FAMU Alumni are known to go hard for their orange and green. These comments would be better suited in pursuit of the federal funding that HBCUs deserve and need.
Hobbs ends his post by saying that what the “State of Florida needs to be doing is providing FAMU the BILLIONS of dollars it failed to deliver when FAMU was supposed to be “separate” but “equal” to UF and later FSU during the Jim Crow era, and the BILLIONS more in underfunding from 1968 to this very day, six decades after Jim Crow was supposed to have ended.” The precarious nature of higher education means we must be hyper-vigilant of dog-whistles and propaganda designed to have us lose faith in public institutions.
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