Building ‘Bridge Leaders’ for Minority Professors and Students

Clarence G. Williams grew up in the segregated South and earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at historically black institutions, where African-American faculty members mentored him and inspired him to pursue a career in academe.

But when Mr. Williams arrived at the University of Connecticut, in 1969, to pursue a doctoral degree in higher-education administration and counseling psychology, black faculty members and students were few. He felt isolated at Connecticut, but one of the people he says played a pivotal role in helping him succeed as a Ph.D. student was a white man.

Today, Mr. Williams — a former special assistant to the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a focus on minority affairs — calls that man a “bridge leader.” It’s a term Mr. Williams uses for non-minority faculty members and administrators who work to bridge racial and cultural divisions in order to make their campuses more welcoming and nurturing to minorities.

While interviewing black students, administrators, and members of the faculty and staff at MIT for a book about their experiences at the college, Technology and the Dream (MIT Press, 2001), Mr. Williams says a common theme was the presence of non-black faculty members and administrators who encouraged and supported them.

That pattern caused him to seek out bridge leaders elsewhere to learn more about their commitment to inclusion, to refine his concept of the role they play, and to discover how to foster that type of support at other institutions. He has collected his research on a website that includes video interviews with bridge leaders and those who have benefited from their help.

“What I’ve found is that there are many people, even in high-level positions on campus, who can have a tremendous impact on bridging racial divisions,” says Mr. Williams, who was hired by MIT in 1972 as assistant dean of the graduate school and is now retired. “When we get top institutions to begin working on this, and they see that it works, other institutions will jump in line.”

Mr. Williams says most non-minority faculty members at predominantly white institutions can do more to support black and other underrepresented minority students and faculty members. Non-minority academics, he says, should acknowledge and empathize with the realities faced by their minority colleagues and students; be willing to push the status quo; and offer thoughtful and intentional overtures that signal a commitment to diversity. Sometimes those who want to step up are not sure how to proceed, he says.

Meanwhile, if minority faculty members and students don’t see openings to connect, they will often seek out those on a campus who share their racial and cultural background. Mr. Williams says minority mentors are bridge leaders in their own right — they are making a positive impact on minority students — but their numbers are few.

Mr. Williams, the founder and director of the Blacks at MIT History Project, urges minority faculty members and students to broaden their idea of just who can successfully mentor them.

Mr. Williams spoke recently with The Chronicle about bridge leadership and the role it can play in minority faculty and student success. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. What can non-minority faculty members do to signal to their minority colleagues that they might make a good bridge leader, or at the very least be supportive?

A. When a black assistant professor comes into a department, you’re looking for anybody who seems positive. Just basic things: Are they friendly? Are they asking you to lunch? Tenured faculty members, and particularly people in power positions, have to show some signs of being open and willing to support black faculty members and show them that they can get a fair shot.

Most young faculty members, barring color, are looking for these signs — but black faculty members even more so. They’re looking for some signs of support, something that says, “This is a place where you can do your work and really get a fair shot at succeeding.”

I tell people to look at how people respond to you when you ask about things you don’t know. Are there people who are consistently positive toward you? How do they treat other people like you? If you’re in a department where you never even see any dialogue between white faculty members and black faculty members, then you assume it’s not possible. Seeing is believing.

Q. What’s happening in higher education and beyond that makes developing bridge leaders so critical right now?

A. If you look at the politics going on in our presidential election, you can see that there are a lot of naïve and uneducated people when it comes to understanding race in our country. For us in higher education, we really have to groom our young men and women of all races to be prepared to have a sense of justice and respect for each and every person — no matter who they are. They need that in addition to expertise in their fields, and bridge leaders can play a role in that.

Q. How do you make the case for bridge mentors to black faculty members and students, some of whom have had not-so-great experiences in predominantly white environments?

A. Black faculty who have been mentors, for the most part, are overworked. And unless they get tenure, it really can be a real problem for them. It’s an extra burden that they carry. That is why I feel so strongly that we have to push the bridge-leadership concept.

The people who can help you navigate these environments aren’t always black. There are some people who are supportive and can be helpful who are not black. They’re not as many of them as we would like to have, but we have to keep pressing and keep making the point and keep working with those small number of people that we have and multiply that.

Q. When were you first exposed to a bridge leader?

A. I actually did not have a bridge leader in higher education until my graduate-school training. My mentors and key people who helped me, beginning on the undergraduate level, have all been black folks.

When I went to graduate school at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, I was in counseling and psychology in the School of Education and there were no black faculty and no black graduate students there. My first year there my adviser was, of course, a white faculty member. He left at the end of my first year and made sure that all of his other advisees were assigned to someone else.

I spent a whole year without an adviser until a black professor who had been a senior faculty member at a historically black institution was hired, and he asked somebody to tell me to come see him. That’s who I did my work under to get my Ph.D.

In the meantime, I had an internship at the counseling and testing center on campus, and the director of that center became the first non-black person who became a real bridge leader for me. I never would have gotten hired in the counseling and testing center had it not been for him. And he made sure there was no difference between me and the other people he worked with.

Q. What should administrators do to make it clear that cultivating bridge leaders is important to them?

A. Top administration must find ways to reward this kind of behavior. When you are fighting trying to get tenure, you don’t get any credit for doing the kind of things we’re talking about here. Top administration have to value this and then find ways to give faculty some credit for it.

Audrey Williams June is a senior reporter who writes about the academic workplace, faculty pay, and work-life balance in academe. Contact her at audrey.june@chronicle.com, or follow her on Twitter @chronaudrey.