The Private HBCU – Where Administrative Privilege Can Equal…
The Private HBCU – Where Administrative Privilege Can Equal Progress
By: Jarrett Carter Sr. – @jlcarter_sr
HBCU protest season kicked off at Shaw University yesterday, as students rallied outside of the campus administration building to decry shifts in tuition rebates from the school’s marching band, football, and men’s and women’s basketball teams.
Their concern – a new gap in college affordability made by the university’s investment in its Honors College, which will make larger grants available to students earning a 3.5 GPA or higher, who currently receive about $250 in institutional aid for book scholarships.
With cameras and protest signs ready for primetime, Tashni-Ann Dubroy, just into her fourth day as the school’s permanent president, broke an HBCU presidential mold shaped and hardened over years of student dissatisfaction with administration.
She came out and met with the students, told them exactly why the change was made, promised a workable solution, and invited them back for more dialog in the coming days.
Dr. Dubroy faced student angst and negative media coverage, and flipped it into a universal moment of enlightenment on the university’s financial situation and the responsibility of all stakeholders to personalize its improvement. That action, and her response to the student reaction, is something that generally only takes place at private black colleges, where leaders can operate with levels of administrative and outreach autonomy that just aren’t legally or culturally as flexible at public HBCUs.
Private HBCUs, at least the best ones, have run under pseudo-autocratic leadership models for generations. There is no such term as the ‘Tuskegee Machine’ without leadership independence given to Booker T. Washington.
There is no evolution of the ‘Morehouse Mystique’ unless Benjamin Elijah Mays was empowered to permeate his personal vision of excellence and outstanding personality throughout its faculty and students.
There is no ‘Mecca’ without the fundraising and faculty development vision of Mordecai Wyatt Johnson at Howard University. Without Mother Mary McCleod Bethune, there is no HBCU imprint in Central Florida.
There is not a growing push for diversity in health care and medical fields without Norman Francis at Xavier. There is no Hampton University unless William R. Harvey is singularly allowed to build upon a standard of excellence, through a business model designed to achieve academic objectives.
The standard of HBCU philanthropy building and liberal arts education for women is not permanently changed without Johnnetta B. Cole at Spelman and Bennett Colleges, and we don’t have a standard for innovation and technology in HBCU spaces without Dorothy C. Yancy at Johnson C. Smith and Shaw.
Which brings us back to Dr. Dubroy, and her peer group which includes Howard’s Wayne Frederick, Paul Quinn’s Michael Sorrell, Miles’ George French, Dillard’s Walter Kimbrough, and Edward Waters’ Nat Glover. They are the new class of HBCU leaders advancing capital improvement, student outcomes, innovative recruiting strategies and unique fundraising strategies to not only sustain their campuses, but to grow them outside of support from state resources.
None of these examples, historic or present day, thrive without the flexibility and vision granted by the board to these presidents and chancellors. For a group of self-made professionals to put complete trust in a campus CEO, and for that trust to evolve into decades of quality leadership, says a lot about their ability to spot talent, and to allow for growing pains and progress to shape an iconic presidency.
And likewise, these presidents deserve credit for not fancying themselves smarter or more insightful than the boards which hired them. They acted, or currently act, in the purest form of the HBCU presidency – a liaison and advisor between the campus and the board, who uses expertise to administer and to recommend campus policy for its consideration.
It’s not to say that HBCU leadership innovation only takes place in the private sector – presidents like Earl S. Richardson, Frederick Humphries, Edward Fort, Mary Sias and others created all-time great presidencies within state laws on purchasing and procurement, laws for press access to public records and finance, and rules on labor, union negotiation, and shared governance with faculty.
Contemporaries like Harold Martin at North Carolina A&T, Cheryl Davenport-Dozier at Savannah State, Brian Hemphill at West Virginia State and Kevin Rome at Lincoln (Mo.), are making great strides within the same game of publicly-funded education.
Its clear that Dr. Dubroy is strategically investing in the retention and recruitment of high achieving students, with financial aid as the centerpiece to her pitch to choose Shaw. Communication with students affected by the change should have been better, and that same private school autonomy which allows for creativity in organizing in the academic, development and social sides of the campus? It can go for personnel management as well.
The financial aid folks who didn’t get the word out to students about the change in the financial aid package for this semester? They need to be reprimanded.
And then there’s the band director.
Charlie Brown, director of the Platinum Sound, sent a letter to Shaw’s Board of Trustees complaining about the money shift, prompting Dubroy to issue a memo in response. She noted in the memo that Brown refused her suggestions to boost outside support of the band, while Marcus Clark, Shaw’s athletic director, was working on fundraising efforts to provide more scholarships to student-athletes
“Our entire Shaw University family, including students, need to actively participate in raising support for their respective programs. Fundraising is not solely the responsibility of the President of Shaw or the Office of Institutional Advancement,” she wrote in the memo.
Brown not only jumped over his departmental boss and the president of the school to address his issue with the board of trustees, but then refused to obey rule one of HBCU philanthropy – everyone is a fundraiser.
He needs to be fired. And because Shaw is private, Dubroy can do that. Today if she wished. Let the lawyers figure it out later when he decides to sue.
That’s the thing about leadership autonomy at HBCUs – if you work under it, you have equal amounts of freedom to love it, or to leave it. But working under it, as history and recent examples have shown, can reap extraordinary benefits in rebuilding the HBCU brand.
