- During the antebellum period in the United States, anti-literacy laws were a major strategy used by Southern plantation owners to dehumanize and control the enslaved black population.

Anti-literacy laws were an extension of the infamous slave codes, which governed a plethora of activities, including slave interactions with non-slave owning citizens.

After slavery, Jim Crow segregation, separate but equal, were all state sanctioned forms of systemic, institutional and structural racism, which perpetuated forms of white supremacy and oppression of African Americans.

Institutions of higher learning would not allow black students to enroll, let alone allow African-Americans to teach or hold a place of leadership in a college or university.

However, in 1823, Alexander Lucias Twilight became the first known African-American to graduate from a college in the United States.

He received a bachelor's degree from Middlebury College in Vermont.

It took over 200 years for a black man to enter and graduate from a college in America.

Edward Alexander Bouchet was an African-American physicist and educator and was the first African-American to earn a PhD from any American university, completing his dissertation in physics at Yale in 1876.

Then there was WEB Du Bois.

He was one of the most influential intellectual scholars, public figures and writers of the 20th century.

Du Bois was a doctoral student at Friedrich Wilhelms-Universitat, was the first African-American to receive a PhD from Harvard in 1895.

In 1856, Martin Henry Freeman became the first black college president at Avery College.

It has been a long and arduous journey for African-Americans in higher education.

Black scholars still make up a very small percentage of provosts, deans, college presidents and chancellors.

But right here on Courageous Conversations, we have three such people.

Hello, I'm Phillip Davis, the host of Courageous Conversations.

Joining me today to talk about the challenges, barriers and victories of being high level African-American administrators in predominantly white institutions are Dr Tina Richardson, chancellor and CEO of Penn State Lehigh Valley campus, Dr Christopher Hunt, associate provost for Community Equity and Diversity, Adjunct Teaching Professor, School of Arts and Sciences at West Chester University, Dr John McKnight, dean of Institutional Equity and Inclusion at Connecticut College and soon-to-be dean of Haverford College in Pennsylvania.

Thank you all for taking the time out of your extremely busy schedules to join me on the show today.

I'm so excited to be able to have this conversation.

Dr Tina, I want to start with you.

You knew in middle school, in middle school, you would one day get your PhD in psychology.

How did you know so young and what were the influences that got you there?

- Thank you, Pastor Phil, for giving us giving me the opportunity to be here today.

It is a pleasure to talk about my journey, but my journey was full of a lot of influential people.

And so very early on, I learned that I wanted to help people.

And through my research and curiosity, I learned that to be a psychologist, I would have the opportunity to help people with a range of problems.

And so being, you know, people oriented and caring, I realized that in order to become the psychologist that I wanted to be, I had to get a PhD.

So I learned I needed a PhD before I really knew what a Masters degree was!

And so I went from going on to college and earning an undergraduate degree to immediately being admitted into a PhD program.

- So being so young and really having that drive and that knowledge surely gave you purpose and direction, and I'm sure it allowed you to avoid a lot of the things in relationship to education that so many of your peers ran into.

So, you are the chancellor there at Penn State, Lehigh Valley.

What type of things do you see when you see young people coming into college?

Are they prepared?

Specifically, our minority community.

And what kind of challenges are you faced with when you're dealing with them?

- So, what I will tell you is I see the range, but the biggest piece of preparation for college or any education experience is motivation.

And so many of our students come from, you know, environments, education environments where they're prepared for college and others come from environments where they've had less exposure to the rigor that's involved in college.

- Sure.

- But all of that's overcome by having the ambition, the determination, persistence and a support system around you.

You know, some might have said that I was underprepared.

And there are certainly great leaders from the African-American community, really from every community, who may have been underprepared in some way, but their determination and the support systems that they have resulted in in outstanding outcomes.

- Thank you.

Thank you for that.

Dr John, you are operating, as all of you are, at a very high level in college administration, and many times there's not people who look like you in many of the meetings that you walk into.

What have you found surprising in terms of the challenges you face as a person of color in educational leadership?

- Well, again, thank you for having us today, and that is an important question.

I would say that when you are underrepresented in these spaces, you are carrying the weight of representation.

You are trying to bring to the forefront the issues, the concerns that affect a whole lot of people, right?

People of color, people who might have other marginalized identities.

And the pressure is really on to do a good job of representing all those perspectives.

I would say what I find surprising is that sometimes you may experience a little bit of, you know, disagreement around what those concerns really are and how they should be brought forward even from within the community of color that you might be representing.

So that, to me, is one of the challenges.

Sometimes you're there to raise concerns on behalf of a group of people who don't even fully understand that you are actually there advocating for them.

So that it can be a complicated thing.

- Yeah.

Do you find many times from your counterparts that, you know, I've heard one individual say, you know, as an African-American leader on a college campus, like, well, what sport did you play?

Right?

There's a stereotype that if you're an African-American, you've got to use athletics to get to that level.

Do you find that many times there's that pushback with even your counterparts?

- Absolutely.

You know, there's always a second guessing or questioning that happens about truly your value, your intellectual capacity, your ability.

I've been confused many times throughout both my college career as a student and as a professional for being an athlete, which always makes me laugh, because I'm not a particularly athletic person.

But, you know, it is something that we run into all the time.

And we have to consistently find ways to combat those stereotypes that people are carrying about who we are as folks of color.

- Yeah, you know, that's one of the reasons that we started Courageous Conversations, is really to change the narrative, right, that narrative that African-Americans are intellectually incapable, you know, are not astute, not motivated.

And so we bring people like the three of you on to really paint a different picture and really change the conversation.

Now, Dr Hunt, Dr Christopher, you've worked with students of color on predominantly white campuses.

How do you help them adapt to an environment that may not be welcoming to them?

And how does them seeing you give them some sense of hope to be able to achieve and acquire their degrees?

- Yeah.

Thank you for the question and again for having us on.

It's a really important question, and it actually gives me an opportunity to talk about some of my own scholarship, because I've done research around this over the generations.

And I think back to, you know... You gave a wonderful intro about, you know, higher ed and black people or African-Americans, and it was back in the later 60s and early 70s when baby boomers really set out to make these predominantly white institutions more diverse.

And so they hit many of the roadblocks that our current students are facing now.

But there weren't as many of them back then.

The biggest thing that these students had to do is figure out how to navigate white spaces, and the level of culture shock that they experience, especially if they are coming from predominantly black neighborhoods, once they got to the white campuses was pretty profound.

And I saw that during the boomer generation as well as the millennials and Generation Z era.

The biggest thing that was helpful for them is when they were able to build small communities, when they were involved in Black Student Union, when they were involved in a male student of color support organization.

One of the campuses that I looked at had a gospel choir and so they would talk about how they would be exhausted through the week, trying to, you know, code switch and navigate predominately white classes and spaces.

But when they got a chance to build community and have these shared experiences, that was the energy and boost they needed in order to be successful throughout the week.

So really, it's just letting the students know from the beginning that you're going to probably experience this and to develop some strategies to be able to deal with things like racial battle fatigue.

- You know, I had a chance to read some of your writing specifically around code switching.

If you would, just kind of briefly talk about what code switching is and why was it important enough for you to literally do your dissertation around, you know, how black students have to interact on college campuses?

- Yeah, absolutely.

It was one of my findings when I was speaking with these boomers, and, you know, men who are in their 60s and 70s and then speaking to young men who are in their mid 20s and early 30s.

That was one of the common things that they talked about.

The theory is called communication accommodation theory, and it's just the idea that if you are in a situation and the environment is not aligned with your own way of interaction, in order to sort of assimilate to that environment you will have to make some accommodation of the environment, you'll have to change your method of communication so that you are not as marginalized, I guess, if you will, in that situation.

But, you know, that the challenge is knowing what is, in their words, knowing when to do it, knowing how often to do it, understanding that if and when you do use that strategy, that it takes a piece of you away in the moment and over time.

And so I refer to this idea of racial battle fatigue.

It's like can you appreciate what it means to have to do that navigation on a regular basis?

It's draining.

And I wouldn't say that it's something that only happens with students.

I would say that happens with faculty and professional staff as well.

- Sure.

And, you know, it's crazy because then you are really minimizing your own cultural experience, which can deal with your own self-esteem, your own view of self and the impact that that has on you as a student in a place that may not be welcoming to you.

Yeah, that's a very, very interesting perspective.

And a lot of times we don't think about those things.

Dr Tina, you're Penn State, Lehigh Valley, and of course, Pennsylvania is very high up in the area of hate groups.

Right?

It's in the top ten and the whole United States.

So as the CEO of Penn State, Lehigh Valley and a black woman, have you had to deal with issues of racism or prejudice?

And what are some of the strategies that you employ to persist and continue to do the work that you do?

- I think as a person of color and a woman, throughout my life I have dealt with issues of racism.

So many of the issues that we see today aren't new for me.

To be able to navigate some of the challenges by having the networks, the support systems, having in my current role as CEO the opportunity the to establish the culture of civility and inclusiveness, to be able to do that because I occupy a position of leadership that allows me to is tremendous.

So, yes, I do face the challenges that exist in society.

They exist in this institution and in other institutions.

But I lead change.

As a higher educator, we have the opportunity to use education as a tool and then the many resources of our institutions to facilitate change.

- Thank you.

And so, Dr John, you've been to a number of colleges and institutions of higher learning and worked with students.

What is it about higher education that does not facilitate an opportunity for African-Americans to graduate at the rate of their white counterparts?

I read a recent report that shows that only about 38% of African-Americans are completing their degrees within six years versus about 68% of white students.

Can you talk to that a little bit and share with our audience what you've experienced as a college administrator?

- Sure, yes.

This is a great question.

So I guess what we've been talking about so far contributes to this problem, right?

The problem of the inequities in education in our K through 12 system is really where it begins in this country.

Unfortunately, even in 2021, your educational access and opportunity is based almost entirely upon your zip code and your family's socioeconomic status.

And, you know, children don't have a choice in where they grow up and how they are sort of going through the educational system.

And so what that means is by the time the opportunity presents itself to attend college, there's already an inherent gap in the preparation, in, as Dr Richardson said, the motivation.

You know, there's different approaches that family members have around the value of education and why it's important.

So I would say before they even arrive, there's a whole lot of hurdles that have to be cleared.

And then once you do arrive, we've already been talking today about what the climate and culture of some of these spaces can be like.

You know, there is another concept in psychology called imposter syndrome.

Sometimes people arrive on campus feeling like second guessing that they really deserve to be there because the odds have been so stacked against them and their peers that they almost have survivor's guilt for having made it and having made it out of their situation.

And so all of those things can really negatively affect performance, academic performance, and also, quite frankly, not being able to know what questions to ask and where to seek support when you arrive.

That can be part of the issue.

- Mm hmm.

Yeah, John, I mean, that's really, when you think about it, it is a culture shock for many of our folks coming from the inner cities, and for many of them going to college now, they're first generation.

So a lot of time the support systems are not even there in the household, the finances are challenging.

We know that African-Americans are more severely impacted with student loans and student loan debt, which I hope that gets dealt with in this current administration.

Let me let me go to Dr. Chris.

So Chris, what is it that drives you to do the work that you do?

And why did you choose higher education for your vocation and for your career?

- Well, I think it goes back to my mom, who was a second grade and first grade school teacher for a long time.

And so education was always a big part of that.

And I think I aspired to be a high school guidance counselor.

I didn't end up being that.

But I'm also in this profession in a different way.

I think about my own process going to college, going through my undergraduate program, and I think about the mentors I had there.

And these were mentors who looked like me.

There were black administrators that showed me the way through college, and I wanted to be able to do that on the other side of earning my own credential.

And so when I have the opportunity to speak into the lives of young students, particularly students of color, and help them get through that culture shock and navigate through the environment, be a bridge builder, because often there are some support networks and support offices we have on campus but students may not be willing to use those offices unless they have someone in the middle who's going to intervene and show them the way.

So I, like, enjoy doing that.

And then also, to be quite frank, I also know that there are any number of white students out there who've never been educated by a person of color, by a black man or a black woman.

And so that's not lost on me as well, to have the opportunity to do this work at a higher level and, you know, speaking to the lives of white students and be influencing in that way as well.

- Yeah, thank you for that.

I mean, when you think about the truth of the matter, that many people go through their whole K through 12 educational experience and never see a black teacher, they're more likely to see a black janitor.

Nothing wrong with being a janitor.

They're more likely to see a black janitor than they are a black teacher.

And so therefore, it reinforces the narrative that African-Americans are only reserved to do those menial jobs that don't require education.

Dr Tina, as a leader there at Penn State, what responsibility do you believe that you have as an African-American leader of a college to impact students of color to excel and to do their best in their educational attainment?

- So one of the, I guess, advantages and opportunities that's presented being a person of color leading a campus is the visibility.

I think my responsibility starts with being engaged in the community, being a visible leader, making sure I provide the opportunity for people to know where the resources are and what the support systems are if they choose a higher ed pathway.

Certainly, people need to see individuals who look like them.

- Who look like them, yes.

- But they also need to be able to access every resource that the college or university has to offer.

Now, I am an advocate of resources for diverse students that are specific, but I also want to make sure that students understand that when they pay tuition, however they pay tuition, through grants, scholarships and in working part time jobs to do it, they are accessing the entire range of resources, and so they should leave nothing on the table.

They should ask for everything, use every resource so that they can succeed.

And the responsibility rests with every employee of the institution to support their success.

That's what they're paying for and that's what they should receive.

So as a leader of an institution and a leader in the community, I make sure I close that information gap so that individuals can succeed not just with partial resources but the entire range of resources at the institution.

- That's amazing.

So a lot of times it's just access to information.

And when there is a deficit of information, right, then folks can't tap into those resources.

So having someone who cares enough to make sure they're directing them to the appropriate offices, to internships, to opportunities in the business community, to resources that are on the college, all of that does make a significant difference.

Dr John, your journey has been extremely inspirational, so I want to just kind of go off script a little bit and ask you what is the most courageous step that you've taken in your journey to arriving to be ultimately the dean of a college?

- Well, that's a great question.

You know, I think taking the next step professionally always requires courage because again, and Dr Richardson was talking about visibility and what it means to be a person of color in a leadership role, it's still not that common.

We're still breaking ground, new ground every time we step into one of these positions.

And people aren't always sure what to expect when you have a kind of high level leader who is a person of color.

And so I think it requires a certain amount of self-confidence, a certain amount of courage.

Some of the things that we've been talking about throughout this, imposter syndrome, all those things affect us as well.

There are days that I wake up and I think, you know, how did I get here?

What am I doing?

How long before they find out that I'm qualified to be here?

You just have to really resist the human nature and the temptation to second guess and have self-doubt.

So to me, it requires courage every day to show up and be a black man and be fully kind of proud of all of those aspects of myself and bring that unapologetically into the leadership spaces that I'm in.

- Yeah, thank you.

I mean, when you think about, you know, being a very small minority, as you know, I'm in a doctoral program as well, and they remind me, hey, listen, you're going to be in a small group of people in the African-American space who have attained a doctorate degree.

You know, what will you do with the opportunities that are presented before you?

And that, to me, is so important, that we're mindful of the sacrifices of those that have gone before us to make a path for us.

So, Dr Chris, I want to ask you a question.

What would you say to a young student who is maybe questioning whether they have the capacity to go to college or not sure where the resources are?

Maybe they don't think they have the money to be able to get it done.

How would you encourage a young student who may be watching the show?

- Yeah, absolutely.

I would show them models of it.

One of the biggest things I think about is unless you have seen someone do whatever it is that you might aspire to do, you might think you can't do it.

And so that was one of the reasons why I love to look back at those people who have come before us.

Think about what it is that you want to do.

Is that what you want to do?

OK, let me show you people who have done it before you.

Let me show you the pathways, plural, pathways, not just one pathway, but there are many different ways to get to an end.

And so that is some of the guidance that I would show them and I would use myself as an example of that.

- Mm hmm.

Thank you.

I mean, just being there, right?

Because you can be what you can see, and that's why each of your roles are so important on the universities and the communities in which you live, work and move to be able to be a great example.

We're coming close to the end.

But Dr Tina, what role has your faith played in your life journey as it relates to what you've been able to attain?

- So I think I've been able to face the many, many challenges that have been in front of me because of my faith.

I grew up in the African-American Episcopal Church.

And if it had not been for the combination of, you know, faith and religion as well as social activism, I wouldn't be where I am today.

That combination is and will always be critical.

And so I draw on the reality that faith allows me to transform and overcome some of the social obstacles that exist.

And every day when I suit up for work, I know that there are social obstacles that I will face.

But most importantly, I stand on the shoulders of those who come before me.

And so I use that reality to help others.

- That's amazing.

And so I'm going to have to end with you, Dr John.

What about you?

What does your faith play?

We got about one minute.

- OK. Well, I really agree with that in terms of how it affects my own life.

But I'll take it one step further.

My grandfather, a long time Reverend Bishop of a black church, he used to say, you're going to be a preacher, you're going to be a pastor when you grow up.

And so I feel like I let him down.

But then when I really think about it, the work that we do is pastoral in nature.

So not only does my faith kind of buoy me in the hard times, but actually the work that we're doing is caring for other people, getting them to think about others, getting them to think about things that are bigger than ourselves as humans.

So to me, the faith part of my work and part of my life, it all comes together in the jobs that I've chosen to do.

- So you're preaching in your own way.

You're preaching with your life.

You know, I'd like to thank you all for joining me today for this very important Courageous Conversation.

You know, there are many people in the Lehigh Valley doing courageous work to engage and enhance the lives of others, and we would like to put them in the spotlight.

If you would like us to highlight courageous work of someone in your community, let us know by going to PBS39.org/courageous.

Make sure you stick around for Counter Culture with one of my favorite people, Grover Silcox.

His show is coming up right after this program.

I'm Phillip Davis, and on behalf of everyone here at PBS39, thanks for watching.