Undermining Leadership Effectiveness

Introduction

I was hired to chair an academic department in education at a predominantly White regional university in the southeastern United States. I was the first African American female to be hired to chair an academic department on that campus, thus making history. The department consisted of 14 full-time faculty including 3 males and 11 females, all of whom were White. The departmental secretary was White as well. In addition, the director of Graduate Studies for the College of Education, who was a White male, was housed in my department although he reported directly to the dean of the College of Education as did I. The previous chair of this relatively new department had been demoted by the dean and that is why I was recruited and hired. However, she remained in the department and some of the faculty still felt loyal to her, which I later came to realize. She and I were the only ones in the department with the rank of full professor.

I felt confident in my new role, having completed one year as a Fellow in the Regents Administrative Development Program for the University System of Georgia two years prior to assuming this position. The purpose of that program was to prepare more faculty of color who were within the university system to assume administrative roles at the system’s predominantly White Colleges and Universities. It was the university system of Georgia’s answer to integrating its administrative faculty without having to go outside the system although normal search procedures still had to be followed. The way the program worked was to re-assign faculty from their home institution to another institution within the university system where they reported directly to the president of that institution. While there, they got hands-on experience with all aspects of university administration, attended board meetings with the president and were considered a member of the president’s administrative team for that year. Some of us were re-assigned from a Historically Black institution to a predominantly White institution. Minority faculty who were already at a predominantly White institution were reassigned to a different predominantly White institution within the university system. I was reassigned from a Historically Black institution to a predominantly White institution. All the Fellows were supervised by higher education faculty from the University of Georgia.

I had 20 years of experience in higher education which included holding faculty positions at other predominantly White universities in the north and Midwest, at Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the south, and at a regional university in Nigeria, giving me international teaching experience at the collegiate level. In addition to teaching, I had designed curricula; I had been the director of different programs at some of these institutions. In my view, my leadership skills were well-honed. I also had public school teaching experience.

One month into my job as a department chair, I went on an administrative retreat and had the opportunity to meet and mingle with other administrators across the campus, all of whom were White, except for one Black male who was the head of an academic department in the College of Business. He and I were the only African American department chairs at the university. He had been promoted to that position from within his department which gave him an automatic connection to his colleagues in the department, whereas I had been hired from outside the university. However, I still felt confident. I was not assigned a mentor and in the absence of a mentoring program, minority faculty at Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) are basically left on their own to figure out university norms and how the informal power structures work, and usually do not experience as much professional success at the institution as those who have mentors (Taylor, 2017;Turner, Gonzales & Wood, 2008).

The great advantage of attending this mandatory retreat was that it put me in tune with the vision for the university moving forward which was instructive for deans and department chairs as we focused on how our departments fit in with this vision and how we could facilitate this as leaders. I left the retreat feeling empowered to serve my department, college, university and the students.