Within the Historically Black College and University (HBCU) context, conversations about boards of trustees and presidential leadership frequently surface during moments of crisis, such as rocky accreditation reviews, financial strain, and leadership transitions. Yet governance relationships are rarely built in crisis. They are shaped over time through norms, structures, and habits that either stabilize institutions or leave them vulnerable during pressure-filled situations.
To better understand what healthy board-president relationships look like at HBCUs, I spoke with a group of experts who bring deep experience as presidents, HBCU governance scholars, senior administrators, and board professionals. Their insights reveal a consistent theme: breakdowns in governance are rarely due to individual personalities alone. They are about structure, discipline, and whether boards understand their role as stewards rather than managers.
Role Clarity and Discipline of Governance
According to Adriel Hilton, Vice President of Institutional Strategy and Chief of Staff at Columbia College Chicago and a scholar who researches HBCUs, “A healthy board-president relationship at an HBCU is grounded in clarity of roles, disciplined governance practices, and a shared commitment to institutional protection rather than institutional politics.” During periods of recovery, growth, or accreditation pressure, Hilton argued, the relationship must be “structured and principled rather than personality driven.”
John Silvanus Wilson, the Executive Director of the McGraw Center for Educational Leadership at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education and the former President of Morehouse College, offered a complementary and expansive framing of the issues rooted in governance theory and presidential experience. He shared, “A healthy board-president relationship begins and is sustained when they each understand their role in the service of the institution. Historically, many trustees and boards have tended to misunderstand their role, at the expense of the institution. They simply fail to see or respect the bright line between governance and management.”
Together, Hilton and Wilson underscore the same point from different perspectives: governance failure is about having too little discipline in how authority is exercised.
Mission, Sustainability, and Institutional Stability
Ashleigh Brown-Grier, a researcher who focuses on HBCUs, similarly emphasized that effective governance must remain anchored in mission and institutional sustainability, particularly during periods of recovery or accreditation pressure. She stated, “A healthy board-president relationship at an HBCU is grounded in a shared commitment to the institution’s mission, vision, and long-term sustainability. Governance decisions should consistently center on students, faculty, staff, and the overall health of the institution.”
When Tensions are Structural
While tensions and disagreements between boards and presidents exist across higher education, the experts I talked with were clear that HBCUs face a distinctive mix of structural and avoidable challenges. Hilton described structural tensions as firmly planted in state control (of public HBCUs), politically appointed boards, chronic underfunding, and long-standing narratives that question the legitimacy of or capacity of HBCUs. More specifically, he noted, “These dynamics often place boards under external pressure from legislators, governors, and other stakeholders, which can lead to reactive or overly interventionist governance behaviors.”
Wilson emphasized that some tensions become structural when board culture itself normalizes overreach. He explained, “The most common tensions arise when trustees wittingly or unwittingly cross the line. They tell their president who to hire and how much to pay them. A toxic board culture can make such overreach structural.” Wilson also pointed to board composition as a recurring source of tension, noting, “It can be structural when boards are overrun with alumni, who tend to think they know more than the president about what the institution needs.” Trustees who have not been active in higher education since their own commencement, he explained, sometimes override the judgment of presidents who have spent decades leading campuses. With a sense of frankness, he stated, “Sometimes those trustees are correct and helpful, but all too often they are just flat out wrong. It can be exhausting.”
Overall, the experts agreed that many of the most damaging conflicts are avoidable. Hilton pointed to trustees acting as individuals rather than as a collective governing body, informal communication channels that bypass the president, and shifting expectations that are often unrelated to policy or contracts. He stated, “Governance breakdowns at HBCUs are frequently less about presidential performance and more about boards failing to follow their own structures, bylaws, and decision-making processes.” Brown-Grier agreed, emphasizing that “Frequent presidential turnover may reflect board uncertainty about institutional direction or unresolved disagreements regarding governance rather than individual leadership failures.”
From Control to Stewardship
When presidents demonstrate strong outcomes, boards face a critical test – do they shift from control to stewardship? Hilton argued that effective boards shift their focus from operational oversight to strategic monitoring. He shared, “Oversight should be exercised through clearly defined performance indicators, dashboards, and evaluation criteria that are aligned with institutional priorities and approved in advance.”
Wilson was more blunt in the way he framed this shift, stating, “A president’s peak performance should literally nurture and deepen the trust a board has in the president. It should shift a board’s mindset away from any and all impulses to engage in overreach. And it should result in the president being free to do his or her best work.” From Wilson’s perspective, successful boards function as “a tailwind and not a headwind.”
Why Success Can Trigger Resistance
One of the most striking themes that emerged across the interviews was the irony that presidential success can often provoke resistance rather than support. Hilton explained this as a disruption of informal power structures. More specifically, he stated, “Effective presidents bring clarity, accountability, and change to systems that may have previously operated through informal influence, tradition, or ambiguity.”
Wilson described this dynamic even more starkly. He stated, “When presidential success triggers board resistance, it usually boils down to a power struggle. For some trustees, managing the president’s glow is all about exerting power and dominance. It is often an ego trip by those trustees who do not understand how to put the institution first. A right-minded board covets a successful president. But a wrongheaded board sees a successful president as someone who is difficult to control or fire.” Wilson also warned that boards, because they are the highest authority on most campuses, can quietly undermine institutional health. He shared, “In private meetings, boards can quietly control the quality of life on a campus by making decisions that stifle or complicate a president’s or senior team’s effectiveness. ”
Other experts framed resistance on the part of board members as misalignment. For example, Trina Fletcher, Interim Vice Chancellor for Research, Innovation, and Economic Development at the University of Arkansas, Pine Bluff, and Ahlam Alharbi, a faculty member at Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University, who have been conducting extensive research on board governance, pointed to ideological bias, emotional attachment to tradition, and internal board divisions that fracture collective governance even in the face of presidential success.
Protecting Process When Conflict Arises
Across all my interviews, experts agreed on one point: performance metrics, evaluations, and contracts are most important during conflicts. Hilton emphasized that fairness must be institutionalized before disagreement emerges. He shared, “Evaluation criteria should be established at the beginning, aligned with strategic priorities, and applied consistently.” Brown-Grier stressed that contracts and evaluations are not merely procedural tools, but safeguards for institutional stability. She noted, “When a president has demonstrated favorable performance metrics and received positive evaluations, termination raises serious governance concerns. Such decisions may reasonably be perceived as personal or political rather than performance-based.”
Linda Oubre, President Emerita of Whittier College, detailed the investments she made in governance infrastructure that made the process hard to ignore, including revised bylaws, codes of conduct, financial authority policies, board portals, and formal evaluation systems. Trustees were educated about their legal responsibilities as employers, not volunteers.
Experts also raised the financial and reputational consequences of ignoring contracts and evaluations. They emphasized that paying out presidential contracts while funding leadership transitions diverts resources from students and signals instability to accreditors, funders, and future leaders. If conflict does surface between the president and the board, the experts recommend structured dialogue and mediation rather than abrupt termination.
Governance as Institutional Protection
As a whole, these perspectives suggest that board-president relationships at HBCUs are more about discipline than harmony. Healthy governance does not eliminate disagreement. Instead, it should channel it through structure, process, and shared responsibility. The experts I talked with emphasized that for HBCUs (and all colleges and universities, for that matter), governance stability is not a luxury. It is central to accreditation, fundraising, enrollment, and public trust.
