CONNECT . MOTIVATE . INSPIRE .
THE IMPACT OF BLACK WOMEN PRESIDENTS AT HBCU s BY DR. MARIA LUMPKIN LeADHERSHIP
D r. Glenda Glover, president of Tennessee State University, Dr. Roslyn Clark Artis, president of Benedict College, Dr. Karrie G. Dixon Chancellor of Elizabeth City State University (ECSU), Dr. Aminta H. Breaux, president of Bowie State University, Dr. Valerie Montgomery Rice, President and CEO of Morehouse School of Medicine, Dr. Ruth Simmons, former President of Prairie View A&M State University, Dr. Dianne Boardley Suber, former President of Saint Augustine's University, Dr. Cynthia A. Warrick, President emeritus of Stillman College, and Dr. Dorothy Cowser Yancy, former President of Johnson C. Smith University and Shaw University are among the longest serving HBCU women presidents in the nation. They have all managed to shatter the HBCU presidents’ tenure anathema by exceeding the three-year life expectancy for this role. What has characterized each of their leadership prominences
is their revolutionary “LeaderHERship” in transforming these institutions. Respectively, each of these women who offered themselves in service to “glass cliff,” institutions in peril, a term coined by University of Exeter Scholars, Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam to denote how women and other minoritized groups are most likely hired into high-risk leadership positions as a passage to ascend into presidential leadership. These under amplified SHEroes of the academy revivified these institutions back to good bills of health, each of them navigating their institutions through the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing their endowments, achieving significant enrollment growth and stability, drastically improving infrastructure, metamorphosing fiscal solvency, deepening community engagement, re-imagining academic programs, and traversing board issues, and accreditation challenges. HBCU women presidents driving
audacious innovation are deserving of more than plaques given out at banquets, reserved tables for HBCU presidents and chancellors, the all too common conference session presentations to talk about the woeful underrepresentation of Black women in leadership, pulpit recognitions about their “great work,” lines of HBCU women president superfans that ask for pictures with them at HBCU events, and contracts that lack parity with their male counterparts. These women, amid the prevailing inequalities in the workplace noted by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA-HR), which affirms that representation is sparse for Black women and other women of ethnic and racial minority groups, make a tacit quantifiable difference. Thus, Black women presidents of HBCUs deserve our complete honoring, and a discursive libationary tribute for the contributions made to this
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