Professionally, DeRionne P. Pollard has always been open about her sexual orientation.
The 40-year-old president of Montgomery College says she doesn’t walk around wearing a pink triangle to let people know she’s a lesbian. But she tells people in other, subtle ways that she’s in a same-sex relationship.
She wears a wedding ring. While president of Las Positas College in California, she said in an interview with a business journal that her proudest accomplishment was “loving and being loved by an incredible woman for 20 years.” And at Montgomery College in Maryland, the last line of her official biography says that she and her partner, Robyn A. Jones, are the proud parents of a young son, Myles Julian Pollard-Jones.
“That was a signal to the community,” Ms. Pollard says. “It’s who I am.”
As one of a small but growing number of gay college leaders (and an even smaller number who include that fact in a biography), Ms. Pollard attracted media attention when she was appointed to the job at Montgomery College last year. Ms. Pollard received messages from people who congratulated her and told her they could not be as open at their colleges. She knows that others navigate the line between their professional and personal lives in different ways, but for her, it’s important to know that she can be open about her family. “I would not do well in a community still grappling with issues of inclusion and diversity,” she says.
In recent years, gay and lesbian professionals who wish to be campus leaders are finding that more colleges will consider them. While some places remain resistant to candidates in nontraditional families, higher-education observers and search consultants say they’re seeing a slow shift toward openness, both by colleges and by candidates themselves who let search committees know they are gay at the beginning of the search process. Last month, for the first time, a group of gay and lesbian college presidents held a panel discussion at the American Council on Education’s annual conference—a natural extension of the organization’s work to promote opportunities for women and members of racial-minority groups, says Molly Corbett Broad, the council’s president. “This is one more dimension of diversity.”
The session allowed gay and lesbian administrators to discuss specific concerns they had about pursuing a presidency. At what point does one have a conversation about sexual orientation with a search consultant? How are same-sex partners treated by the community, and what role do they play in fund raising and entertaining? And what if an institution you are working for doesn’t accept you or your family?
“We really do need to pay attention to the pipeline and make sure we are not ruling out any talented candidates,” says Raymond E. Crossman, president of the Adler School of Professional Psychology in Chicago and one of the founders of the LGBTQ Presidents in Higher Education group. “Although it’s a sign of progress that a group like this can even exist, there are still considerable issues.”
When Ms. Pollard was first considering a college presidency, she and Ms. Jones made a map. After ruling out places where the weather was too hot or too cold, the pair consulted friends and colleagues, crossing off places that were too conservative and looking for locations where their son would see families like theirs, such as the Bay Area. Ms. Pollard also had conversations with search consultants before throwing her hat in the ring, letting them know she was an out lesbian in a relationship.
In her interview with Montgomery College, her sexual orientation didn’t come up, and she and Ms. Jones went out to dinner with board members. Her partner and now 4-year-old son have been welcomed by the campus community, she says. “It’s as it should be.”
Barriers Have Fallen
There is no official data about the number of gay and lesbian leaders in higher education. Four years ago, The Chronicle counted 11 openly gay leaders. Now, the LGBTQ presidents group has about 30 members. There are also at least a handful of openly gay presidents who are not members.
In the last five years, John M. Isaacson, president of Isaacson, Miller, a Boston-based search firm, has noticed that the hiring environment for gay and lesbian leaders has changed. Not only have colleges become more open to hiring presidents who are single, but they have also become more receptive to gay or lesbian candidates who are part of a same-sex couple, he says. And candidates are more open about such relationships, mentioning partners on their CV’s and thereby eliminating speculation about their personal lives among the search consultants or committees.
In presidential searches, unlike for other administrative jobs, boards want to know how a president and his or her spouse will work together, especially in fund raising, alumni, and community activities. Where there are reservations about hiring a gay president, it most often centers on concerns in this area.
Some institutions see no problem at all. Recently, Mr. Isaacson’s firm conducted the presidential search for Grinnell College, which ultimately chose Raynard S. Kington, a medical doctor and deputy director of the National Institutes of Health, who has a male spouse and two young children. Dr. Kington’s family was warmly welcomed on campus and students embraced the choice.
Raymond D. Cotton, an attorney who negotiates many college presidents’ contracts, sees gay and lesbian college presidents following a path to the top job that is similar to the one women took. College boards are cautious by nature, and change can be slow. Trustees, especially at state institutions, prefer to make major decisions such as hiring and compensation in a way that will satisfy all the institution’s constituencies and not rock the boat. Hiring a gay president now “is not the middle of the road, it’s the cutting edge,” Mr. Cotton says.
How open institutions are to considering gay candidates can be a reflection of where the college is located or of its mission. A number of presidents in the LGBTQ group are at institutions with social justice as part of their missions, while places that are less welcoming of gay people and same-sex couples, including conservative religious institutions, can be more resistant.
“We’re in an area of transition here,” says Mr. Cotton. “Our country’s culture is moving in the right direction, but it’s very slow.”
Theodora J. Kalikow, who has been president of the University of Maine at Farmington since 1994, says she hasn’t experienced any of the problems that some board members might fear would impede a gay leader. She has never detected that being a lesbian with a partner has affected her standing in the community, other than reading an occasional comment from a reader of her local newspaper column alleging that she’s pushing a gay agenda (though she doesn’t write about the topic). The same goes for her relationships with alumni, students, and state lawmakers. Most people are very polite, she says, and care more about how she’s performing in the job she’s paid public money to do than who her partner is.
What matters to people is that you can relate to them, she says. “People are mostly concerned about themselves and their needs,” Ms. Kalikowsays. “If you’re meeting their needs, you’ll be recognized as doing a good job.”
Handling Disclosure
At the American Council on Education panel in early March, Ms. Kalikow was applauded when she told the audience that it is possible to be gay and live in the president’s house with one’s partner. When she and her partner first moved in, they waited for something negative to happen. Nothing did. (“Because it’s Maine,” she joked.)
About 50 people attended the Tuesday-morning session. Five presidents—two women, including Ms. Kalikow, and three men—sat in front facing the room. They talked about the roles that their partners play on campus, including helping with fund raising and social events. Mr. Crossman, one of the panelists, joked that his partner is known as the First Lady on campus. His partner, along with another panelist’s, had come to the conference and attended an earlier meeting for presidential spouses.
Not everyone in the audience described feeling welcome on campus. One vice president at a community college said that he had to keep his romantic relationship under wraps when he worked at a previous institution. (The panelists suggested that he apply for jobs at places with a track record of being open to gay administrators.) Neal King, president of Antioch College Los Angeles, said he used to have two CV’s: one that indicated he was gay, and another that didn’t. Eventually he threw away the version that obscured who he was.
Lynn M. Gangone, dean of the Women’s College at the University of Denver, said she was attending the session because it felt like a historic moment. She also wanted some practical advice for when she begins to look for a presidential post: how and when, during a search, to have a conversation about being a lesbian. “I still don’t always know what language to use,” she said.
Ms. Gangone has spent her career in administration, pursuing positions that will help prepare her for a presidency. She’s also spent her career negotiating how much she discloses about her personal life. Early on, she didn’t talk about being a lesbian. Then, she began sharing that information with people once they got to know her. Before taking her current position as dean, she was open with the provost about her personal situation because the job would require a move of thousands of miles for her and her partner.
Ms. Gangone, who is in her 50s, is careful not to make too much of her sexual orientation. “It’s just a fact,” she says. “I don’t want it to be something that sets me apart, either positively or negatively.”
At the same time, being honest is part of what she sees as being an authentic leader. She recognizes that for college presidents, there isn’t much separation between professional and private life. “If I’m a leader whose life is being part of an institution, then you need to know about my life,” she says. “And then we move on and do the business of the college.”
Thomas J. Minar, vice president of development and alumni relations at American University, had the good fortune to work closely with a mentor who had successfully negotiated being gay and a college president, Charles R. Middleton at Roosevelt University. Mr. Minar, who is 47, has had a vice presidency at three institutions and found each of them welcoming to him and his husband.
Earlier in his career, he hid his sexual orientation at work because he thought being out at those institutions would be uncomfortable. Now, he wonders if he was closeted longer than he should have been. Too often, Mr. Minar says, people can limit their options by assuming that some places will be unwelcoming, before finding out for themselves if that is the case.
“A lot of these filters are too easily applied and not fair,” Mr. Minar says.
In his job, Mr. Minar works with alumni and donors—the people most often cited as potentially objecting to gay leaders. But Mr. Minar says a donor’s relationship with the college has never been damaged by revelations of his sexuality, though he’s run across a few people who became confused when he mentioned his husband. He usually just moves on in the conversation, he says.
Scott M. Mory, the chief executive officer of the University of Southern California’s alumni association, which counts 320,000 members, is open to letting people get to know him, but doesn’t feel the need to share too much personal information. Occasionally, an older trustee or donor will ask Mr. Mory if he is married or if his wife is with him. It doesn’t feel like disapproval, he says, just a social question. Typically, he answers that he’s single.
“Part of being a leader is having some sort of emotional intelligence and social awareness about disclosing any sort of personal information,” he says. He doesn’t feel the need to come out to every person he meets, but he also doesn’t feel the need to hide it. “It’s one part of who I am, not who I am. I don’t want to be judged on a demographic, positive or negative.”
He was open with the senior vice president who hired him, in the final conversation before he was offered the job. He told her he was gay and asked if that would be a problem for any reason. She said it wasn’t an issue at all.
Mr. Mory has found in his career—he’s 36—that the coming generation of college leaders and donors are used to working with gay and lesbian people and don’t see it as unusual.
“If it’s not an issue for me,” he says, “by and large it’s not an issue for anyone else.”
