cannot dismantle systems whose power exceeds the individual.
Black student activists while punishing principled dissent among HBCU students, faculty, and staff today. We cannot teach students to challenge injustice in the world while treating trustees, presidents, and administrators as though accountability stops at the campus gates. We cannot claim to be laboratories of Black possibility while reproducing fear, hierarchy, silence, and control inside institutions founded because Black people dared to imagine otherwise. The future of HBCU excellence must be visible in governance, faculty freedom, workplace culture, student voice, financial stewardship, curriculum, research agendas, community relationships, and the courage to confront our own failures without confusing criticism with betrayal. At their best, HBCUs have never simply prepared Black people to enter somebody else’s future. They have helped Black people imagine futures that did not yet exist—and then supplied the teachers, preachers, organizers, thinkers, professionals, artists, institution-builders, and troublemakers necessary to bring them into being.
So what, then, must excellence require? It must require more than placement rates, polished résumés, respectable presentation, and access to institutions whose underlying assumptions we leave unquestioned. It must prepare students to understand how power works: who makes policy, who controls capital, who governs institutions, whose knowledge is legitimized, whose dissent is punished, and whose interests are protected. It must prepare students not only to enter professions but to interrogate them. A lawyer should understand how law has both protected and denied Black freedom. A physician should understand how race has structured health and access to care. A teacher should know that curriculum is never politically innocent. An entrepreneur should understand that wealth creation without community consequence is not the only imaginable measure of success. HBCU graduates should leave our institutions prepared not merely to occupy existing structures, but to ask whether those structures deserve to survive unchanged.
That demands a different understanding of preparation.
That is the inheritance worth calling illustrious.
It does not reject excellence. It refuses to define excellence by whiteness, proximity to white institutions, white standards of appropriateness, wealth, or prestige. It does not reject professionalism. It rejects professionalism as the ultimate measure.
And that is the measure before us now: not merely whether our students can survive the world they inherit, nor even whether they can prosper within it, but whether our institutions equip them with the knowledge, courage, discipline, imagination, collective responsibility, and power required to make that world more just than they found it.
require it to bear the weight of righting racism, sexism, classism, and the many other inequalities reproduced through white supremacy. Martin Luther King Jr., Morehouse’s most internationally recognized alumnus, was assassinated in business attire. Sandra Bland had earned her Prairie View A&M University degree and secured a position at her alma mater before a traffic stop led to her arrest and death in a Texas jail. Attire, credentials, employment, and individual discipline
It does not reject discipline. It asks: discipline for what purpose?
Anything less may be preparation.
And that standard cannot apply only to our students.
But it is way too small to be our definition of HBCU excellence—or, ultimately, of Black excellence itself.
The future of HBCU excellence must be not merely individual, but institutional. We cannot credibly venerate yesterday’s
HBCU TIMES FALL ISSUE 2026 | 1 9
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