Doing more with less: despite having fewer resources, HBCUs have outpaced majority institutions in producing black professionals, but experts say strong leadership will be the key to their long-term survival

Black Issues in Higher Education, June 17, 2004 by B. Denise Hawkins

"What I've observed about many new presidents is that they think that their institution began when they took office." Not so, says Holloway. "When you take office, you take the responsibility for the university if that university is in bad shape when you arrive, it is now your problem. You are not going into a perfect environment."

One of the most troubling leadership shakeups to rock the HBCU community occurred in early May. Dr. Frederick S. Humphries, then-president of the National Association of Equal Opportunity in Higher Education (NAFEO), was forced to step down along with several other senior administrators of the umbrella association for the nation's public and private Black colleges after the NAFEO board cited a need to move in "another direction" (see Black Issues, May 20).

"(NAFEO's) leadership has been annihilated," says Dr. James E. Cheek, president emeritus of Howard University, who helped found the association in 1969. Cheek, like other HBCU experts and observers, is wondering what the future holds for NAFEO and who will be the voice for these institutions. Thirty-five years ago, NAFEO was created to be that voice and that face to the government, to corporate America and to the public, aggressively promoting HBCUs as necessary institutions for ensuring a Black presence in American higher education.

Cheek says that voice and the vision that he and other educators had for NAFEO more than three decades ago, blazed until the early 1980s. Today, he says, they have smoldered and are noticeably missing from the Black college landscape.

"Ours is neither the time, nor is the historically Black college and university the place for those of faint heart, feeble courage, weak commitment, confused and purposeless ambition or selfish motives," admonished Check in a 2003 address that ushered in HBCU Week in the nation's capital.

Langston's Holloway agrees. "This is not the time to be headless," he says of NAFEO and the impact the leadership void will have on an HBCU community that is reeling from problems of two recent decades.

"It's a tough time to be a college president. This is a heck of a job whether you are Black or White, male or female," says Bennett's Cole with laughter and exasperation. She should know. The retired anthropology professor came out of retirement two years ago to head Bennett College, the historically Black women's college in North Carolina, when its buildings were eyesores, its leadership was shaky, enrollment was less than 500, it had a $2 million deficit and its accreditation was in peril.

Other Black women are also up for the leadership challenge says Cole who is cautiously optimistic of the modest gains in the number of female chief executives of UNCF's private Black colleges and universities. In 1999, there were 11 female UNCF presidents. Today there are 23. "That is change, but we are far short of where we need to be."

According to UNCF, African American women hold presidencies at less than 10 percent of HBCUs and minority-serving institutions. In late April, the 60-year-old UNCF took its first steps to mentor and develop future female presidents.