Leading by example: new ACCT chairwoman Brenda Knight points to her own story as evidence of the importance of community colleges - Association of Community College Trustees

Black Issues in Higher Education, August 29, 2002 by Pamela Burdman

OAKLAND, CALIF.

The year was 1994, and Kaiser Permanente was negotiating to build a new hospital on the Laney College football field Oakland. Brenda Knight had nothing to do with Laney College or with Kaiser Permanente, the large California health maintenance organization. But, as an official with the Babe Ruth Baseball League, she had everything to do with athletics.

"Raising African Americans in the inner city, you have to do enough with them or you could lose them to the streets," Knight recalls. "I had this big company wanting to take the only tool I had away. I knew a voice could make a difference."

As Knight turns 50 this month, to say that she has made a difference would be to minimize her extraordinary odyssey from baseball mom to the top echelons of higher education.

Within weeks of her birthday, Knight celebrates two other milestones: First, in mid-August, she will receive her bachelor's degree. Then a month later, she will be sworn in as chair of the Association of Community College Trustees (ACCT), a nationwide organization representing more than 1,200 colleges, 6,500 trustees and 11 million students. It's a swirl ascent that has many in Oakland touting her as a formidable candidate for public office.

But for now, Knight says, it's the students she has in mind. "I want to be able to influence young minds to pursue higher learning," she said before a recent board meeting, looking quite the power broker in a crisp lavender suit. Nothing, she says, pleases her more than the frequent reports she gets about inspiring young women to go back to school.

As the first African American woman to head the 26-member ACCT board, Knight will be in a position both to upgrade the services the organization provides to trustees as well to strengthen ACCT's message: the important role community colleges play in expanding opportunity.

There can be no better example of that than her own story.

Knight started college at Humboldt State University in Arcata, Calif., after high school, but returned home after a few semesters to become a wife and mother--though "not necessarily in that order," she quips.

In the early 1980s, with three young sons, Knight became the first woman to coach a team in Oakland's Babe Ruth league, an amateur baseball and softball program with chapters nationwide.

She had watched her brothers play the game as a child and, what she didn't know, she quickly learned from books and videos--well enough to become coach of the year, then league president in the late 1980s.

When Oakland won a national championship, she was invited to the White House. By 1994, she had become commissioner for the entire East Bay district.

That same year, the Kaiser proposal set Knight off on a new path. Determined to save the Laney field, she decided to run for the community college board seat for East Oakland, a diverse district with a high concentration of Black and Latino voters.

Her grass-roots campaign wasn't seen as a serious threat, and her opponent, a Chinese American man who was board president, seriously underestimated her chances.

"I didn't have money. But I had all the baseball kids. I had all the parents. We were accustomed to wearing T-shirts. So we just wore `Elect Brenda Knight' T-shirts," she recalls. Knight also had strong connections with city officials, the Oakland A's management and the local NAACP.

One of her mentors was Bill Patterson, former manager of recreation services for Oakland and a local NAACP official.

"Brenda was one of the brightest of all of the people I met," he recalls. "Because of all the things her children were involved with, she played leadership roles in everything from PTA to you-name-it."

She defeated her opponent, the board president, by a 2-1 margin, joining the Peralta Community College Board just in time to cast the deciding "no" vote against the Kaiser deal.

"I've Waded sports for education. It was a sneak attack, using sports; and now it's a direct attack," she says.

But Knight quickly learned being a community college trustee was serious business: Peralta is a diverse district comprising four colleges--Laney, Vista Community College, Merritt College and the College of Alameda--with a combined population of around 25,000 full- and part-time students.

In June, the Peralta board of trustees unanimously approved a resolution opposing Ward Connerly's Racial Privacy Initiative, which would bar state government, including public schools, from collecting racial information.

"Community colleges are about accessibility, affordability, accountability and flexibility. We are about moving forward, not backwards in civil rights protection. If we were not able to use racial data, it would be difficult for us to provide effective outreach and educational programs," Knight says.

She said that job has already been made more difficult because of Proposition 209. "It hurts us tremendously. It makes us have to get more creative," she says. "What community colleges are able to do is assist the minorities, the African Americans, the Latinos, by preparing them through the community college doors first and (getting) them better prepared to go to the UC system."