The Georgia Board of Regents selected Portia Holmes Shields to lead Albany State University in 1996. She was the first female president of the historically Black university. I was a junior and vice president of the ASU Student Government Association at that time. I recall the presidential search process being rigorous and legit.
Alumni of my alma mater told an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter in an article published Saturday that they do not believe the current process to select ASU’s next president appropriately mirrors the search that led to the historic Shields appointment nearly three decades ago. They also highlighted procedural differences between the ASU search and recent processes at public predominantly white institutions in the state.
Reportedly, alumni are calling foul on four aspects of the presidential search. First is an alleged plan to elevate the current interim president to the permanent role without a robust process. This might be a rumor. I know there is (or at least was) a formal, official process because a recruiter from AGB Search notified me last September that I had been nominated for the role and shared this position overview. I did not apply because I have no interest in being a president. It therefore seems that a lack of transparency might be the issue. Or maybe the recruitment process did not yield a sufficient candidate pool, hence retaining the interim might feel less risky to the regents. Whatever the explanation, skeptics of the search believe the process is either rigged or otherwise predetermined.
A lack of Black representation and meaningful degree of alumni participation in the process is a second area of concern. Nearly half of the members listed on the search committee roster are current and former regents. A state senator and the University System of Georgia’s chief operating officer also are on the committee. Noteworthy is that just one of the system’s 19 regents, T. Dallas Smith, who currently chairs the board, is Black. There are therefore concerns about having so many people involved in the process who have so little experience with HBCUs picking a president who will be an appreciator of and good steward of ASU’s sacred mission. Savannah State University, another of USG’s three HBCUs, is also searching for a president.
The current ASU interim president’s lack of higher education leadership experience is the third and perhaps most significant critique. Lawrence M. Drake II was a Coca-Cola executive for 21 years. Prior to assuming the ASU interim presidency last July, he spent just over a year as interim president of Bethune-Cookman University, where he had served nearly two years as dean of the College of Business and Entrepreneurship.
Shields came to ASU from Howard University, an HBCU, where she had served as School of Education dean and in other leadership roles for many years. When she was announced as the candidate of choice, there was no debate on campus (at least not publicly) about whether Shields was qualified to lead the university. It is clear that current alumni want that same outcome this time.
Even though an academic leadership trajectory that resembles Shields’s continues to be quite common, it is not the only route to the campus CEO position. For instance, I nominated Walter Kimbrough to be ASU’s vice president for student affairs two years after I graduated; Shields wisely hired him. He served the institution extraordinarily well and then went on to become a highly successful president of two HBCUs for 18 years. Kimbrough is now Talladega College’s interim president.
And there is Javaune Adams-Gaston, president of Norfolk State University, a public HBCU in Virginia. Adams-Gaston was senior vice president for student life at the Ohio State University prior to becoming NSU’s president. These are just two of numerous examples of longtime higher education administrators who did not take academic leadership pathways to HBCU presidencies.
On the one hand, it is incontestably important for a president to have deep familiarity with higher education given the distinctive particularities of student access and success, campus cultures, faculty governance, curriculum, fundraising, specific federal regulations, and alumni engagement. But on the other hand, appointing someone president who has extensive experience in business or government could be appropriate for some institutional contexts. That the majority of Drake’s leadership experience has been in the corporate sector does not appear to be the biggest issue for ASU alumni. Uneven presidential selection standards across USG’s 26 campuses and the corresponding appearance of racial inequity are seemingly most troubling.
Not many other industries would consider hiring CEOs who have little or no sector experience. Evidently, the Georgia regents have that same expectation for most public colleges and universities in the state. ASU alumni are highlighting recent presidential appointments at predominantly white institutions within the same system: Candidates who emerged from those searches had comparatively more higher education leadership experience than does Drake.
There is at least one more concern about making Drake the permanent president. If appointed, he will be the third consecutive external interim president to be named to the permanent role, according to the Journal-Constitution. “Why are the regents incapable of attracting a president for ASU via a national search?” and “Why must they first audition ASU’s presidents before appointing them?” would be two reasonable questions if a third interim whom USG brought from the outside gets the job. It could appear that a racialized desire to control a Black president of a university with an 82 percent Black undergraduate student body is a plausible answer to the second question.
It is clear to me that ASU alumni want a proper, transparent presidential search process with a spectacular slate of candidates who have the leadership backgrounds and credentials that would clearly qualify them for presidencies at most PWIs in the state. Anything short of this would be inconsistent with presidential searches throughout USG, thereby creating another racial inequity that unfairly disadvantages Georgia’s public HBCUs. Again, it could be that the regents have followed this process with the utmost integrity—but in the absence of transparency, alumni and others are left to presume that Drake will be undeservingly appointed and ultimately controlled.
