For Colored Girls Fighting to Survive When a Presidential Title Isn’t Enough
Academia’s long legacy of violence against Black women reared its head twice this past week. Orinthia T. Montague, President of Volunteer State Community College, and JoAnne Epps, President of Temple University, both beloved on their respective campuses, died within days of one another. The distressing news of their passing sparked imperative conversations for me. As a Black woman professor studying Black women in academe, I reached out to Black women in varying roles across the academy, and one thing is clear: We are all left wondering how we continue espousing to protect Black women while watching two Black women at the pinnacle of our profession leave us so suddenly.
Details surrounding Montague’s death are sparse. Contrastingly, Epps fell ill at a campus memorial in front of many of her colleagues. Epps was carted off to the hospital for care, and the event continued in her absence. As the event continued, Epps went on to succumb to her injuries. This tragedy requires that we in higher education reflect on our late-stage capitalist attitudes of “persistence by any means.” And even more important, the continuation of this event raises a question for me and so many other Black women in the academy: What might entice a Black woman to aspire to the presidency if we know that we could be carried off to our death and everyone would keep going as if nothing happened?
Black Women’s Leadership and The Glass Cliff
The public nature of Epps’ passing, compounded by the additional loss of Montague, is a harbinger of a dark path of sorrow for Black women if we don’t improve the academy overall. According to the American Council on Education(ACE), the current makeup of college presidents still fails to reflect the diversity of the college-going population. While women of all races accounted for nearly 60% of all undergraduates in the fall of 2020, women hold just over 3 of every 10 seats at the college presidency. For Black women, the presidency is even harder to reach and may worsen with the recent Supreme Court affirmative action ruling.
Despite Black women obtaining the majority of degrees in the Black community overall, in 2016, only 34% of all Black college presidents were Black women. ACE estimates it will take until the year 2050 for racial parity in the presidency for African Americans to occur; those same estimates for the intersection of race and gender remain to be seen. Although the number of Black women presidents is growing, so are U.S. higher education issues. While the costs of attendance, maintenance, and management of contemporary colleges and universities are on a steady incline, as is the impact of external crisis on internal college/ university decisions, higher education investment is at a relative low despite significant material spending.
In trying times like these, campus trustee boards and management systems are more likely to hire women, a phenomenon researchers call the “glass cliff.” University of Exeter scholars, Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam coined the term glass cliff to denote how women (and other minoritized groups) are most likely to be hired into risky and/or precarious leadership positions. The concept evokes the image of a woman who ascends to new professional heights only to find herself on the brink of catastrophe because of her inherited organizational standing.
For Black women presidents, such leadership failure may seem imminent. Less than 53% of Black women presidents reported that they were given a “realistic assessment of the current challenges facing the institution/system” in the presidential hiring process. Perhaps worse, less than 59% of Black women presidents recounted receiving “a full and accurate disclosure of the institution/system’s financial condition” in the same ACE report. Still, women are on the rise across the board in higher education.
Given all available data, one can reasonably infer that Black women most often ascend to the college presidency during pressing times. Reports suggest President Epps had plans to retire before being asked to helm the interim presidential role. She was appointed to the position after the previous president, Jason Wingard, resigned amid a campus strike and crisis of confidence surrounding his leadership. While Wingard and Epps are both Black, the positioning of Epps, a Black woman, in the University’s top outward-facing role came during a crisis as the university sought “a leader who could calm the waters.” Epps was courted, then, for the presidency with the express role of cleaning up someone else’s mess — a role many have come to expect of Black women. But at what cost?
Compounding Stressors
While my initial reactions to the losses of Presidents Epps and Montague were more emotional than scientific, they were still rooted in my awareness of stress and weathering the issues facing Black women. The cumulative burden of chronic stress is measured as allostatic load (AL) in the health professions. Existing research indicates Black women consistently have higher levels of AL, compared to all other races of women in their age groups and Black men of the same age. Chronic stress is more common for Black women due to systemic discrimination and racism, and this same chronic stress has been observed as a risk factor for heart disease and cancer death.
Because Black women hold multiple, intersecting marginalized identities, they are often subjected to layered forms of discrimination, which may further explain their cumulative stress burdens and poorer health outcomes. Put differently, as Black women report higher levels of discrimination, perceived stress, and hostility, the culmination of which may increase their AL, the impact of these issues combined with presidential roles at the glass cliff may have further catastrophic consequences for aspiring Black women leaders. These consequences may include physiological weathering.
Arline Geronimus, a Professor of Health Behavior and Health Education at the University of Michigan, hypothesized the concept of “weathering” among Black Americans. Her work suggests that the systemic stress from cumulative political, social, and socioeconomic disadvantage contributes to Black people’s earlier and disproportionate health deterioration. In theory, a college president has a wealth of access to the medical system and negotiation tactics that may offer them physical protection. Still, this protection may come after the toll of weathering has already taken its place. And it may not be enough to combat the combination of higher AL and overall physiological weathering. So this week, Black women everywhere are left feeling like even the title of president and all the perceived privileges it would bestow are not enough to protect us.
Leading in Unprecedented Times
As disinvestment and politicization continue to befall higher education, Black women aspiring to the top positions of our colleges and universities may have to endure even more stress and weathering. This reality has left me more restless and heartbroken than I’d ever imagined I would feel for two women I never had the pleasure of knowing, and for the rest of us who may someday follow in their footsteps. As we Black women continue to collectively sound the alarm of the personal and physiological costs of careers in higher education, Black women face the difficult task of choosing between professional persistence or personal survival. For the sake of higher education, I hope a middle road between the two exists and emerges soon. But for now, the troubled roads ahead seem likely to continue.
To the families of Orinthia T. Montague and JoAnne Epps: I offer my deepest condolences. The late, great bell hooks once wrote, “Love invites us to grieve for the dead as ritual of mourning and as celebration… We need not contain grief when we use it as a means to intensify our love for the dead and dying, for those who remain alive.” With this in mind, I believe changing behavior is the best way to honor the late Presidents Montague and Epps. I hope my colleagues across academe will join me in figuring out what those actions might be and begin to actualize them as soon as possible.
