Interview with Sydney J. Freeman, Jr., Professor of Leadership, College of Education, Health and Human Sciences, University of Idaho

In “Take this Assessment: Is Your Institution a Welcoming Place for Leaders of Color?,” Dr. Russell Thacker, a recent graduate and adjunct instructor at the University of Idaho, shared findings from a study interviewing 15 Black Provosts at predominately white institutions, a study he pursued in collaboration with his faculty advisor, Dr. Sydney J. Freeman, Jr. Inspired by this piece, Dr. Freeman and I took a few minutes before the winter holiday to explore questions of racism and sexism in academe, how they impact leadership advancement for women, particularly in the STEM fields.

Crystal:
Tell me a little bit about this new project that was featured on higher Ed Jobs.

Sydney:
So, are you talking about the one that the student wrote about? Leadership, the different leadership assessments for diversity and inclusion. Specifically, on whether or not you had a welcoming environment for faculty of color, administrators of color?

Crystal:
Yes.

Sydney:
Ok, I wrote a couple of things for higher Ed Jobs, so just going back into recesses of my mind. So, thank you again for this opportunity to share. So, this work emanated out of a desire to understand more about Black provosts that serve at predominantly White institutions (PWIs). There is only a small fraction of PWIs that have a Black provost and we wanted to know about their experiences from an anti-deficit perspective. So, our perspective looked at the agency of those individuals to get to those positions rather than all the challenges, all the stumbling blocks. And so we interviewed around 15 Black provosts and wanted to know about their trajectory.

A part of it was that there was a blockage in the pipeline and so, for instance, we had individuals, Black individuals that would move from assistant to associate with tenure. However, they would get stuck in the associate position. And we call it stuck because some people would like to advance to full. Some people were fine with being an associate professor, but some people want to advance to full.

Why that was so important? Full is what opens up opportunities at many institutions for you to go into senior leadership positions. So, the next part is the move to the Chair position and then to the Dean and Provost, and then to the president’s position. If you’re going up the academic side. And so essentially, we found that there were some challenges in that process, and so we highlighted them in this latest article.

One thing that I would like to highlight is and it wasn’t necessarily highlighted in the paper, but I felt that it was still important this idea of looking at policies. And so we know that many higher education policies are shrouded in whiteness or white supremacy, right? And saying in investigating whether your institution is one that is inclusive and one that is supportive of the advancement of leaders of color, one of the things that is important for institutions to do is to audit their policy’s and to figure out if their policies are ones that are inclusive and equitable rather than exclusive and racist.

Crystal:
Yeah, that’s poignant right now, because at ECU we spent just this last semester looking at our policies within the faculty manual as well in our unit codes. From a DEI inclusive perspective, I’m looking at race, gender, LGBTQ, and disability. Looking through those lenses and seeing whether or not a person who’s most disadvantaged you know socially, would be able to navigate our policies in a way that would be fair, and would equally highlight their talents as they navigate those structures. So yeah, very much on point. Question, were there any women provosts in your sample?

Sydney:
You got me on the spot so I don’t remember exactly how many but there were, I would say, a little less than half probably were women.

Crystal:
Yeah, when I had a student doing a study of black women who are provosts at PWIs, there was a very scarce number of them. And when you look at the ACE (American Council for Education) study of presidencies one of the things that you notice is that Black women more so than any other group have a trajectory going through each of those points in the traditional academic path, the ones that you laid out: the department chair to the deanship and then to the provost office and the like.

Did anything strike you about their stories as being similar or different from the men?

Sydney:
Yes, so I think there’s always a consideration of how sexism plays out in various other ways. One of the things that have been interesting if we, if we think about the time in which this recording is happening. We’re at were just maybe about six days or seven days from when an article is written in the Wall Street Journal with regards to Jill Biden using her academic title.

One of the things that you that we’ve found interesting is that Black women had to navigate the sum of the racial stereotypes that were perceived. There were also issues with regards to sexism that plays out in more subtle ways, not as overt as it may have been in the past.

Crystal:
And I know given the number of projects you’ve been working on, you’re grasping right now, can you think of maybe one example? And if you can’t right now, that’s fine.

Sydney:
Yeah, I can’t, but I, I, I do say that it also goes back to kind of the opportunity gap that the paper talked about. Some of these things are explicit. And some things are not shared with people. So, one of the things I’m thinking about is a situation women of color face a lot of times. Their mentors were not necessarily other women, but men. There would be White men or Black men, but not necessarily women.  And I think there was a concern about them being intentional about reaching back to women. With this opportunity gap that sometimes they didn’t know earlier on in their careers that this was an option, so they kind of felt quote-unquote were tapped for the position rather than people saying earlier on in their career,” we see leadership potential in you. You should take on these types of opportunities.” It’s kind of like, that happened, but it wasn’t done intentionally.

Crystal:
So, that makes a lot of sense. Almost like in leadership by accident as opposed to on purpose, which I think feeds into that theory of the glass cliff. At what point do you get tapped because everything, you know, gets down to one rail and we need somebody to come in and do academic maid service? If you would, kindly clean up and get things back on track. What would you be your advice for wanting to have a more inclusive leadership, particularly of women, women of color, and perhaps even more women from the STEM fields? How do we assist women in those hard to reach areas given the gender roles and stereotypes of them, the hardships and challenges they have based on your work?

Sydney:
Great, great questions. So, I’ve been reading Diversity Inc. written by Pamela Newkirk where the basic premise of the book is challenging. The way that we do diversity work and try to make our institutions more inclusive. She essentially says that if we need to have more people of color at our institutions, hire more people of color. If we want more women, hire more women. What we do is a lot of times, institutions invest in programs that target White people to essentially, try to convince them to acknowledge our humanity. Right? We spend money trying to convince people that women are capable, that women are can do their job rather than creating. We’re investing in more programs that would support them and then taking an anti-deficit perspective on it. So, one of the challenges that I find is that there’s always this talk of mentoring, mentoring, mentoring, mentoring. From the standpoint of where mentoring you into the culture, socializing you into the culture rather than challenging some of the practices and policies and within the culture and to see ways in which institutional policies are friendly to women, or friendly to people of color.

Those are some basic steps that can happen, I think also being intentional from when the person comes in, what it may take to become a full professor. For instance, what we do is focus so much on tenure which we get because you want to get, that secured lifetime position. But I think it’s also important to expose people early. That we’re thinking about you from not only from a six to seven-year span; we’re looking at your being here long term, and we want you to be all that you can be and contribute to this institution as we invest in you. So, we’re not just investing in you in the first three years when we give you your startup package, what we want to do is invest in you in your whole career. So, we’re going to expose you to different things. You may decide not to be a leader. The leader in the sense of being an executive within the organization, or within the university or the institution, but you would have been exposed to those types of opportunities. So, I think more about being intentional with resources and targeting those resources to the people. And Lastly, I would say to invest in other things around that particular person. For instance, one of the things that  I’ve been doing, shifting from theory to practice, is we reengage our campus community and work with our president to develop a Black faculty and staff association which we did not have. We also work to strengthen our strength and our Black student union and re-establish our Black Cultural Center. All these things help to create a community on campus, and I can see that paralleling if you were talking about women. Does your campus have a women’s center? If it does have a women’s center, is there a women’s group that supports the advancement of leadership for women on campus? Do they have a strategic plan for women as it relates to when women come in? What are the supports for women to advance in their academic and their academic and professional pursuits? All those things help to create an environment where women and also people of color can thrive.

Crystal:
So, I think those things are important. Absolutely. I mean, one way you could describe this,

Almost you know if we were to capture it metaphorically, it’s like the Flint water crisis and whereas the problem is in the pipes and it’s within the water source, but we concentrate on focusing what comes out of the tap as opposed to that foundational structural point where that’s it’s all flowing through. Thank you for that perspective. Are there any other points you’d like to share as we close?

Sydney:
I’m just thankful to be asked these questions. It pushed me to think about some work that we engaged in a year or so ago. These questions are so important to the advancement of people of color and women, and particularly in STEM fields. Whereas I’m from the field of education, and so we think about some of those things you know every day. But someone who is struggling to fight a sexist and racist environment within their particular departments. If they’re in a STEM department in many cases, they’re probably not even thinking about leadership roles. They’re just trying to survive.

I hadn’t planned to say this, but even thinking about this from a graduate student perspective, how are we socializing women and people of color in graduate programs, letting them know about these opportunities? I had a perspective that I wanted to be a college or university president when I was in grad school.  That was something that was already in my head because I knew that was that could be a possibility, right? And so how could we do that? How could we do that for those who may not be in the field of education but may have leadership capabilities? And how can we create programs, a culture, an environment that they can thrive in so that they can move forward in their career? So, thank you again for this opportunity, and look forward to being in conversation with you again in the future.

Crystal:
You’re more than welcome.