Leadership of Color: A Call for JEDI-Based Discussions, Analysis, & Recommendations

By Rasul A. Mowatt

This month we welcome Dr. Rasul A. Mowatt, who has served on the AAG JEDI Committee for three years and steps down this month. We appreciate Dr. Mowatt’s perspective on the uphill battle of being a university leader of color, a perspective that is critically important at all times, and especially now.

There is a strange thing that happens once you are hired or appointed to a leadership post within higher education. You, the racialized you, sit in the chair, hopefully a functional one, and the onslaught begins. The type of onslaught that no orientation program or notes from the previous seat holder can prepare you for, because they are often unprepared to actually provide any assistance to you on such matters. What matters? The matters of Race, the matters of gender, and the matters of difference. At least on matters of Race, becoming and being an administrator of color leaves you with very little insight from literature in higher education (most studies and discussions are pre-2000s: Poussaint, 1974; Wilson, 1989). More contemporary discussions have been focused on the (needed) diversification of leadership in the university (Jackson, 2003; McCurtis, Jackson, & O’Callaghan, 2009) or have been focused on pathways that were undertaken to become leadership of color in the university (Liang, Sottile, & Peters, 2016; McGee, Jett, & White, 2022; Valverde, 2003).

But there is an acknowledged issue with the experiences of those administrators of color, and an acknowledged issue with the scant amount of attention given to studying and understanding the experiences of those administrators (Breeden, 2021; Chun & Evans, 2012; Razzante, 2018; Rolle, Davies, & Banning, 2000; West, 2020 — Breeden and West are the foremost scholars on the subject). While there is a multitude of research on this subject in ProQuest searches for theses and dissertations, the published academic book and article barely reflects 10% of that output. So, this results in so many administrators to sit in those chairs, in those offices, within those units of the university that are already unforgiving to the graduate student of color, the adjuncts of color, the early career scholar of color, and staff of color (within operations, student affairs, and academic affairs), with little to no insight on how to navigate the job and one’s life while doing the job.

In many ways we are still stuck in late-1960 questions of how do we get more students of color and faculty of color to come to our respective institutions, so much so that we have fallen far behind the questions we needed to ask in the 1970s (on curriculum), in the 1980s (on degree programs), in the 1990s (on policies of protection), in the 2000s (on strengthening budgets), and in the 2010s (on legislative safeguards). In the 2020s, we are still calling and fighting for representation, when there were greater collective needs for ideas about expansion and fortification. As we have not been prepared to address those collective needs, we have been ill-equipped to address the individual needs of administrators of color. And not the type of individual need to fortify one’s self against a microaggression that may affect one’s emotional state. No: The individual need to fortify one’s self against joblessness, career-ending incidents, and field-wide ostracization. The type of needs experienced by people who serve as chancellors, provosts, vice-chancellors, vice-provosts, associate vice-chancellors, associate vice-provosts, deans, associate deans, department heads, department chairs, associate department chairs, program directors, head librarians, managers, officers, full professors, associate professors, and faculty serving as chairs of a particularly important committees or task forces.

How do you (the racialized you) handle issues that arise from standard operating problems, hiccups in processes, miscommunication, and errors in tasks that become a bigger issue when the subject [or target] is you?

How do you (the racialized you) handle issues that arise from the sabotaging of paperwork processing (i.e., not submitting faculty reimbursements, missing dates for tenure and promotion letters, never sending letters or other correspondence onward on your behalf)?

How do you (the racialized you) handle issues that arise from the number and frequency of complaints against you, rather than the substance or credibility of any one complaint?

How do you (the racialized you) handle issues that arise from every accusation levied against you requiring regular visits to the office of the next level in the protocol system of a university (even when there is no substance or credibility)?

How do you (the racialized you) handle issues that arise from donors not wishing to give to your unit because you are the person that they must be work with (and so, your very being is a detriment to your unit)?

How do you (the racialized you) handle issues that arise when every unfavorable review, report, and decision that may affect someone employed in your unit invokes a particular set of actions and words against you?

How do you (the racialized you) handle issues that arise from anonymous emails that are directed at you but meant for others to see, messages that question your humanity and being (and yet, information and technology units cannot identify the source or put a stop to them)?

How do you (the racialized you) handle issues that arise from people wanting to hire the idea of you instead of hiring  you — all of you, your scholarship, your ways of thinking?

How do you (the racialized you) handle (potential) issues that arise from the need to be extra aware of how a disaffected student, staff, or faculty may react to your decision that may affect them unfavorably (failing grade, removal from a program, termination of a job, or denial of tenure — not knowing the level of concern you may need to have for your own safety)?

And so many more questions and scenarios that seem to not have answers, much less discussion in any known book, article, workshop, training, tutorial, and the like. You begin to question your sanity when you raise these issues and the particular ways that they occur for you because of the racialized you and not because of the administrating you. It can be argued that some progress has been made on the diversification of the faculty (in certain fields and disciplines, or departments of geography). It can also be argued that there have been some gains, in some places, for some faculty of color in moving through the ranks of the professoriate. But it cannot be argued that we have quite found a way to think of how we can best serve, protect, support, and grow leadership of color.

In the meantime, sitting in such chairs and offices comes with a decreasing quality of health that brings on its own set of issues from long late-night emergency room visits due to dizzy spells, lack of pain relief from constant stomach churning, or the mounting stress that comes with the knowledge of a potential diagnoses of social death.

Such a social death is not inevitable, even at times of much publicized oppressions and increased levels of scrutiny in campus operations. In fact, now is the key time to close the gaps in our literature and discussions, to document and address the plight and experiences of leaders of color in academia. What we do not have today as intellectual resources are a product of what was not explored yesterday, thus, it is our obligation to gift tomorrow with insight. The readings below are an important start in this discussion, yet only a few are recent enough to reflect the pressures and aggressions — micro and macro — that leaders of color confront on campuses right now, in an anti-JEDI, anti-immigrant, anti-difference era. Only by documenting our experiences, and acting on what we know, can we break through and begin to make campuses sites of true learning and liberation.

References

Breeden, R. L (2021). Our presence is resistance: Stories of Black women in senior-level student affairs positions at predominantly White institutions. Journal of Women and Gender in Higher Education, 14(2), 166–186. https://doi.org/10.1080/26379112.2021.1948860

Chun, E., & Evans, A. (2012). Diverse administrators in peril: The new indentured class in higher education. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.

Jackson, J. F. L. (2003). Toward administrative diversity: An analysis of the African-American male educational pipeline. The Journal of Men’s Studies, 12(1), 43-60. https://doi.org/10.3149/jms.1201.43

Liang, J. G., Sottile, J., & Peters, A. L. (2016). Understanding Asian American women’s pathways to school leadership. Gender and Education, 30(5), 623–641. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2016.1265645

McCurtis, B. R., Jackson, J. F. L., & O’Callaghan, E. M. (2009). Developing leaders of color in higher education: Can contemporary programs address historical employment trends? A. J. Kezar, ed., Rethinking Leadership in a Complex, Multicultural, and Global Environment: New Concepts and Models for Higher Education (pp. 65-91). Routledge.  

McGee, E. O., Jett, C. C., & White, D. T. (2022). Factors contributing to Black engineering and computing faculty’s pathways toward university administration and leadership. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, 15(5), 643–656. https://doi.org/10.1037/dhe0000407

Poussaint, A. (1974). The Black administrator in the White university. The Black Scholar, 6(1), 8-14. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41065748

Razzante, R. J. (2018). Intersectional agencies: Navigating predominantly White institutions as an administrator of color. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 11(4), 339–357. https://doi.org/10.1080/17513057.2018.1501082

Rolle, K. A., Davies, T. G., & Banning, J. H. (2000). African American administrators’ experiences in predominantly White colleges and universities. Community College Journal of Research and Practice, 24(2), 79–94. https://doi.org/10.1080/106689200264222

Valverde, L. A. (2003). Leaders of color in higher education: Unrecognized triumphs in harsh institutions. Rowman Altamira.

West, N. M. (2020). A contemporary portrait of Black women student affairs administrators in the United States. Journal of Women and Gender in Higher Education, 13(1), 72–92. https://doi.org/10.1080/26379112.2020.1728699

Wilson, R. (1989). Women of color in academic administration: Trends, progress, and barriers. Sex Roles, 21, 85–97. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00289729

Rasul A. Mowatt, Ph.D., is Department Head and Professor in the Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management, College of Natural Resources, at North Carolina State University (NCSU); and Affiliate Professor in Sociology + Anthropology at NCSU. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was formerly Professor in the Departments of American Studies and Geography in the College of Arts + Science at Indiana University. His primary areas of research are Geographies of Race, Geographies of Violence/Threat, The Animation of Public Space, and Critical Leisure Studies. His most recent publication is The City of Hip-Hop: New York City, The Bronx, and a Peace Meetin (Routledge, 2025).

The AAG Culture of Care column is an outreach initiative by the AAG JEDI Committee. Don’t forget to sign up for JEDI Office Hours. The current theme of Office Hours is An Ethos of Care in the Research Enterprise.