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Southern University Commencement

Fall 2025 Graduate School Ceremony Speaker

Headshot of Melva Wallace

Melva K. Wallace, Ph.D.
President and CEO of Huston-Tillotson University

 

For over 20 years, Dr. Melva K. Wallace has worked in higher education as a leader and as a fierce national advocate. Today, she proudly serves as the seventh President and CEO of Huston-Tillotson University, an HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) and one of the top private liberal arts colleges in the country. It was the first institution of higher education established in Austin, Texas.

Since she took the helm in 2022, this powerhouse institution boasts increased fundraising efforts, increase in new student enrollment, increased international student enrollment, increased graduate enrollment, increased online enrollment, and boasts the largest male new student enrollment at 55 percent of the population. As a fiscal conservative, Wallace has been highly successful in assisting institutions reach their financial goals and trains higher education CPAs on best practices for enrollment, cost controls, and fiscal compliance. To date, Wallace has been instrumental in amassing over $20 million in grants and gifts.

From all of Wallace’s higher education leadership, she provided leadership in several roles within the Southern University System (Louisiana), the only HBCU college system in the world. She served in various capacities, including: vice chancellor for student affairs and enrollment at Southern University at Shreveport, where she increased three historic enrollment classes and assisted in securing funding for three new campus buildings; interim vice chancellor for student affairs and enrollment at Southern University at New Orleans, where she was instrumental in ensuring their reaffirmation; and chief of staff for two System presidents as the first chief of staff, during which she managed life campuses with over 15,000 students throughout the state of Louisiana.

Although much of Wallace’s work has been within the higher education HBCU space, Wallace formerly worked in academic affairs as associate dean of the college at Centenary College of Louisiana. Centenary is lauded as one of the top four-year liberal arts colleges in the United States. Under her leadership, the College realized a 4 percent increasein retention. She currently serves as a member of the Centenary College of Louisiana’s Board.

Wallace is a founding board member for the Higher Education Leadership Foundation, which has provided leadership training to over 500 HBCU leaders across the country. Many of those leaders are now serving as university presidents, vice presidents, deans and directors at HBCUs across the country. In 2011, she co-founded the Shreveport Charter Foundation, which built Magnolia School of Excellence Charter School, the first school built in the city of Shreveport, Louisiana, in over 30 years. Additionally, her service as vice president and president of the school’s board also solidified the building of a second school, Magnolia High School, in 2016. These two schools now enroll over 1,000 students in the Shreveport community.

Since arriving to Austin, she has continued her community service work as a member of the board for Ballet Austin, Austin PBS, and the Black Fund which provides over $1 million of funding for Black businesses. She is also a member of the National Association for University Women and board president for the Extensions of Excellence Arts Organization in Shreveport founded by Mr. Vincent Williams.

In 2016, Wallace, a then Presidential Leadership Scholar, was selected to study leadership under the tutelage of three former American Presidents: President George H. W. Bush, President George W. Bush, and President William J. Clinton. In 2020, she was heralded as a “futurist” by former President George W. Bush and was invited by the Bush Institute to be a featured writer for the Summer 2020 edition of The Catalyst: A Journal of Ideas from the Bush Institute on How Educators Can Prime First-Generation College Students for Success.

Wallace is also the 2018 recipient of the ATHENA award, which is the highest honor in the state of Louisiana for professional excellence, community service, and for actively assisting women in their attainment of professional excellence and leadership skills. In 2022, Wallace was lauded by Diverse: Issues in Higher Education as one of the top 25 minority women leaders in the world who are paving the way for others in higher education. Additionally, in 2022, Wallace was recognized in the city of Shreveport as a Virginia Shehee award nominee as one of the most influential women in the city.

In 2023, Wallace was honored by the United Negro College Fund as a president in leadership. Because of her national prominence in higher education as a national spokesperson for HBCUs, she has been featured in a number of magazines and media publications expressing her views on these beloved institutions. In 2023, she was named by Austin Monthly as one of the “Texas 100 Top Influential Professionals to Watch.”

Wallace received a bachelor’s degree in mass communication and a master’s degree in public administration from Grambling State University. She earned her Ph.D. in urban higher education from Jackson State University. She is married to her phenomenal husband, Dr. D.L. Wallace, of Flower Mound, Texas. You can follow her on Instagram at @MKWalltx to learn more about her views on Historically Black Colleges and Universities.