David A. Thomas wrote the book on how to get an executive-level job if you’re an African-American man. Mr. Thomas is dean of the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. Earlier in his career, he spent four years at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, followed by 21 years at Harvard Business School as a professor and associate dean. He holds a Ph.D. in organizational psychology from Yale University.
As he built that career, Mr. Thomas had a template to follow: his own research. His 1999 book, Breaking Through: The Making of Minority Executives in Corporate America, written with John J. Gabarro, compared the trajectories of minority employees with those of white employees, looking for differences in success patterns and other factors that help make or break careers.
In conversations with The Chronicle, Mr. Thomas and other African-American men who have achieved high-ranking administrative jobs in academe described the patterns that have shaped their own careers at Ivy League and major public universities, liberal-arts colleges, historically black colleges, and community colleges. And while their experiences are “incredibly varied,” as Raynard S. Kington, president of Grinnell College, puts it, they share some common threads—such as the importance of finding mentors, getting as much hands-on experience as possible, and cultivating excellence in the face of subtle and not-so-subtle race-driven prejudice.
“As an African-American executive, you have to go into every situation with both eyes open,” says Benjamin F. Quillian, echoing a theme that came up repeatedly in interviews with black male administrators. Often “there is a prejudging that you’re incompetent and don’t know what you’re doing.”
Mr. Quillian has decades’ worth of experience as a top administrator. He recently stepped down as chief financial officer for the California State University system. Before that, he held a number of high-level jobs at different institutions, including Southern Illinois University, and served as a senior vice president at the American Council on Education. He’s now an adviser to the California system’s chancellor. And while the kind of prejudice he’s talking about diminished some for him as he rose through the ranks, “I do not think it has diminished very much in the culture of higher education,” he says.
That said, each career path is different. “There’s a huge amount of heterogeneity even within these groups,” says Dr. Kington, whose own path led him to earn M.D., M.B.A., and Ph.D. degrees. “Thinking in a monolithic way can actually hurt” the effort to open up more opportunities. “All of us want to be taken as individuals. At the same time, we’re incredibly proud of our background.”
Mr. Thomas, Dr. Kington, and their African-American male colleagues make up a diverse group, but not yet a large one, in the upper ranks of higher-education administration. According to the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, black men held 8,572—or about 3.6 percent—of the 238,718 executive, administrative, or managerial positions at all U.S. degree-granting institutions in the fall of 2011, the latest year for which statistics are available. (Hispanic men held just over 2 percent of those jobs, and Asian-American men about 1.5 percent.)
African-American men made up 5.3 percent of college presidents in 2011, according to a report from the American Council on Education’s Center for Policy Analysis. That proportion was unchanged from 2006 and up only slightly from 1986, when it was 5.1 percent.
“We are far from where we should be,” says Dr. Kington. “We’ve had one black president of an Ivy League school.” (An African-American woman, Ruth Simmons, is a former president of Brown University.) He worries about the prospects of those coming up through the academic pipeline. There have been “major improvements, and that’s great, but we’re not where we should be,” he says. “I think we have a better understanding of the challenges.”
Mr. Thomas, the Georgetown dean, studied some of those challenges in his book about the career paths of business executives. He and his co-author found that people of color aren’t encouraged to jump on the fast track the way their white colleagues are. In the business world, “whites who make it to executive-level positions move much faster in their earlier careers and are pegged as being people with executive potential faster,” he says. “The same is true when it comes to thinking about grooming people for executive leadership jobs in academia.”
He’s witnessed the phenomenon firsthand—for instance, “in moments when people were talking about who might be the dean of a school, and a set of names go out,” he says. “You often don’t see the name of potential black candidates. They’re sort of not in the zeitgeist.”
Mr. Thomas recalls that the first time he mentioned he wanted to be a dean, “people were like ‘Oh, I never thought of that, but now that you mention it, it does make sense.’”
Mark Makela for The Chronicle
Shaun R. Harper, executive director of the Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education at the U. of Pennsylvania, says it’s well known among black professionals that to be taken seriously, “you have to work twice as hard.”
Shaun R. Harper calls this “the tapping problem.” Mr. Harper is an associate professor at Penn’s Graduate School of Education and executive director of its Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education. He’s often called in to assess employment conditions at other institutions.
Many people who end up as academic administrators do so because someone encouraged them to. “A department chair or dean or provost will tap someone and say, ‘Hey, we think you have enormous potential,’ " he says.
That’s great—if you’re one of the people so chosen. But, Mr. Harper says, “tapping is not equitably distributed by race or sex. Women and people of color are considerably less likely to be tapped.” That leads to a shortage of people of color in senior roles, he says.
The tapping problem compounds another factor that Mr. Harper has both studied and experienced: the discouraging effect of not seeing people who look like you in roles to which you might aspire. For African-American students, that’s not a problem at historically black colleges and universities. But at predominantly white institutions, students often see too few minorities among the ranks of presidents, deans, and tenured professors, Mr. Harper says. “Furthermore, where the people of color are disproportionately represented in groundskeeping, food services, and so on, it might suggest to a student of color that this is how higher education works—that there is very palpable racial stratification.”
That pattern can perpetuate itself through graduate school and on into a scholar’s or administrator’s career. “These things have a snowballing effect,” he says.
Being part of an underrepresented group can take a psychic toll as one climbs the ranks. Mr. Harper, for instance, knows what it’s like to be the only person of color in a department. “There’s something that comes along with that—the stress of having to prove myself and not to mess it up for other people who come after me. These things feel really consequential.”
That pressure doesn’t end once someone makes it to the upper ranks. Mr. Harper describes a “longstanding recognition among professionals of color that in order to garner the same level of respect and to be taken seriously and to be promoted, you have to work twice as hard, you have to run twice as fast, often to get half as far.”
Race has cut both ways in shaping the career of Mr. Quillian, the California administrator. He has developed a two-pronged approach to deal with the pernicious race-based skepticism that he and other African-American professionals often encounter. First, he says, “is to keep my eyes open and be aware” of it. Second is “to try to build personal, legitimately positive relationships with individuals who I know don’t think I’m the right person for the job.” He’s made it a point to have an open-door policy and to spend a lot of time with faculty and staff members, so that people got to know him personally. “I had relationships with everyone from groundskeepers and custodians to senior leadership.”
In some situations, he says, being a black man has advanced his career. “There were times when I felt that being an African-American man helped me get in the door,” he says. “I’ve benefited from affirmative action.” The first senior administrative role he held was as the affirmative-action officer at Southern Illinois.
His background also helped equip him for some of the challenges he’s faced as an administrator. When he was the top financial officer at California State University at Fresno, he stepped in to be interim athletic director at a time when the university was having difficulties with some of its athletes, he says. “Being an African-American man helped me help the coaches understand some of the issues that the African-American players faced. Some coaches are more interested in what they do on the field than in giving them the skills they need to survive in a predominantly white culture.”
Dr. Kington, Grinnell’s president, says that being a member of a nonmajority group can equip an administrator with “a richer experience to bring to the position.” The son of a physician and a teacher, Dr. Kington had many advantages growing up. “There was no doubt that I was going to college and little doubt that I would go on to graduate school,” he says. But he also recalls the many restrictions that segregation-era Baltimore placed on his family.
As a black and openly gay man, Dr. Kington has spent much of his life negotiating differences. He doesn’t downplay the racism that he and other black male administrators have encountered. But when diversity comes up, “it’s always a deficit discussion. There’s a flip side to that,” he says. “Maybe we can talk about what diversity brings to the table other than that you’re diverse.”
Although they’ve worked in very different roles at very different kinds of institutions, the administrators interviewed for this article share certain experiences and approaches that they say helped propel them to top jobs. Most of them had a mentor, or a series of mentors, at key stages of their careers. Many have taken part in leadership-training opportunities like those offered by the American Council on Education’s Fellows Program, the Harvard Institute for Management and Leadership in Education, the Executive Leadership Summit at Hampton University, and the Millennium Leadership Initiative run by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.
The administrators share a keen interest in paying forward what they’ve learned. “I’ve had the advantage of benefiting from the sacrifices of huge numbers of people who didn’t accept the world as a given,” Dr. Kington says. “It really forces me to think more about my obligation to open doors for people who follow behind me.”
When asked what advice they’d give up-and-coming versions of themselves, they return to certain themes: Work hard and be excellent. Figure out how you can have the biggest impact. Learn by doing.
Mr. Thomas, of Georgetown, knew by the time he got tenure in the late 1990s that he wanted to have the option of being a dean or other high-ranking academic leader by the time he turned 50. Equipped with the knowledge that writing Breaking Through had given him, he set out to acquire the skills he knew he’d need. At Harvard he worked as both an assistant dean and a department chair at the same time. “I knew there was something to be learned from both jobs, so I did them, without any course relief,” Mr. Thomas says. “I wanted to learn.”
He took additional steps that many academics don’t take. For instance, he joined the boards of a major bank and a hospital. “It’s often hard for people to imagine African-Americans as big and successful fund raisers,” Mr. Thomas says. Being on boards equipped him “to sit down and talk about fund raising” in a persuasive way.
“I also proactively did some things that were designed to give me feedback about myself and how people perceived me,” he says. As department chair, for instance, he opted to have a 360-degree assessment of his own performance done. “I learned some things that were actually quite helpful,” he says.
Mr. Thomas may have been unusually strategic in working his way to the top, but he’s not alone in looking for opportunities to learn administrative skills.
“The hands-on experience—I think that’s the most important,” says Jack Thomas, president of Western Illinois University.
A literature scholar, Mr. Thomas spent a year as an ACE fellow that “really changed the course I wanted to do.” He spent that time studying and shadowing two college presidents: Freeman A. Hrabowski III, of the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, and Dolores Spikes, then president of the University of Maryland-Eastern Shore.
“It really helped shape me into the leader that I am today,” Mr. Thomas says. After studying those two leaders in action, “I wanted to make sure that I had a great impact on people, and particularly on college students. There’s no better way to do that than being a college president.”
Walter M. Kimbrough is president of Dillard University, a historically black institution. When people ask him for career advice, the main thing he tells them is " ‘Focus on your job right now and do that very well.’ Every job I’ve had, I’ve tried to be the best at.”
Mr. Kimbrough has been unusually focused on his goals: He knew even as an undergraduate that he wanted to be a college president. He joined a fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, that has produced many black leaders, and started studying the trajectories of college presidents. (He still keeps a folder of articles about presidents that goes back 20 years.)
As a kid, he took inspiration from Benjamin E. Mays, Morehouse College’s longtime president and a key figure in the civil-rights movement as well as the man who presided over school desegregation in Atlanta (where Mr. Kimbrough attended Benjamin E. Mays High School).
“I knew him more as superintendent of Atlanta public schools,” Mr. Kimbrough recalls. “When I got older and became interested in becoming a president, I began to study him. He was very hands-on.”
Mr. Kimbrough went on to earn a bachelor-of-science degree from the University of Georgia, an M.S. in college student-personnel services from Miami University in Ohio, and a Ph.D. in higher education from Georgia State University. He’s held key administrative positions at Albany State, Emory, Georgia State, and Old Dominion Universities. Before he took over as Dillard’s president, in 2012, Mr. Kimbrough served as president of the historically black Philander Smith College.
At every stage, he says, he had mentors who pushed him to try different administrative jobs and to learn everything he could from them. He’s a believer in what he calls “mentoring moments"—even a half-hour conversation can lead to useful, career-building insights.
These days, what he likes best about his job is the contact with students. “You’re part of their family, particularly at a small institution like this,” he says. But that close contact brings him up against some tough realities, too. Eighty percent of Dillard students are eligible for Pell Grants, he says. “The hardest part of the job is to figure out how to get philanthropists to provide support for my students who really need the support,” Mr. Kimbrough says. He reads about wealthy institutions that get big gifts, and thinks of the transformational changes for families that could happen if Dillard had that kind of money. “When we lose students here, most of the time it’s because they don’t have the money to stay in school. I could do so much more good if I could shore up the main vulnerability my students have, and that’s the finances.”
The chance to have an impact on students’ lives drew Elwood L. Robinson into administration as well. He will soon step down as provost and vice president for academic affairs at Cambridge College, a private college in Massachusetts that serves adult learners in particular, and will become chancellor of Winston-Salem State University.
Trained in clinical psychology, Mr. Robinson describes himself as having had “the perfect trajectory in higher ed.” He began as a professor and worked his way up to become founding dean of the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences at North Carolina Central University, the historically black public institution where he earned his undergraduate degree.
“My job was always, as I saw it, creating opportunities for students,” he says. “Being a college professor is the best job on the planet.” He never set out to be an administrator, but opportunities came his way. He was asked to take over the university’s Minority Access to Research Careers program, a federally funded effort that encourages students from underrepresented groups to go into the biomedical sciences. That led to the chance to be dean of the then-new behavioral-sciences college.
That sense of education as “the engine of opportunity” goes a long way back for Mr. Robinson, who grew up poor in rural North Carolina. His parents made it clear early on that they expected him to go to college. “My mother was the consummate mother who believed that her son could do anything,” he says. (He recalls saying to her, after Barack Obama was elected, “‘Mom, we have an African-American president now.’ She said, ‘I know. I thought that was going to be you, baby.’ ")
“It is a path of doing good work,” Mr. Robinson says, summing up his approach to building a career. “Excellence is a cornerstone of who I am.”
From the windows of his office at Cambridge College, Mr. Robinson can see Harvard and MIT. But he’d rather work at a place like Winston-Salem State than take a job at an elite institution. Students need to see people from backgrounds similar to theirs in teaching and administration, he says.
“We have to have those kinds of professors talking to our students, empowering them,” Mr. Robinson says. The main task is to “be an inspiration to them about who they can be.”
