[A closer look] Black leaders underrepresented in UC system

Thirty-five years after the appointment of the first black
president of a major U.S. university, none of the University of
California campuses have yet had a black chancellor. And with Ward
Connerly’s recent departure from the UC Board of Regents
after a 12-year tenure, Tom Sayles and Odessa Johnson will be the
only black regents on the board of 18.

Many U.S. universities and colleges have named black leaders,
including the University of Maryland, MIT and Emory College. But at
the UC, one of the nation’s most highly regarded
institutions, black administrators continue to be underrepresented
in high leadership positions.

Some UCs have appointed black leaders to important
administrative positions. Charles Wilson, UCLA’s former vice
chancellor of academic programs, served from 1970 to 1981 before he
left the university to pursue a business career, said John
Sandbrook, special assistant to the executive dean. And when Norvel
Smith was appointed in 1973 as UC Berkeley’s vice chancellor
of student affairs, he joined Wilson as the highest-ranking black
officials in the UC system at that time.

Clifton Wharton became the first black leader of a major,
predominantly white university when he was named president of
Michigan State University in 1970. And more recently, when newly
appointed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice became provost of
Stanford University in 1993, she was the first black person to hold
the position, as well as the youngest and the first woman.

Still, said Franklin Gilliam, UCLA professor of political
science and vice chancellor of community partnerships, “there
aren’t any African American chancellors (at the UC). There
are very few vice chancellors, very few deans, very few department
chairs.”

Gilliam stressed the value of connections in the process of
become a candidate for a chancellorship. He suspected a significant
deterrent at the UC to the appointment of blacks to administrative
positions ““ specifically that of chancellor ““ is the
candidate search process itself.

“African Americans are oftentimes not in the networks that
search committees would look to to develop a pool of
candidates,” he said.

Or, he said, the search pools that black would-be candidates are
in are not networks that search committees tend to consider.

On UC Santa Cruz’s Web site, the UC Office of the
President describes the process of appointing a new chancellor to a
UC campus as beginning with the formation of a committee to advise
the UC president. The president submits five to 15 candidates to
the committee, which evaluates those names and may suggest others,
then conducts interviews. The committee makes its choice, then the
president makes a formal recommendation to the regents.

But before the start of the procedure conducted by UCOP, those
candidates’ names must be found, which is the job of
headhunting and networking services. This is the part of the
process from which qualified black hopefuls are often left out,
Gilliam said.

“Headhunting firms get names of people from other
people,” he said. “If nobody knows you exist, you
can’t get in that pool.”

Another valuable step in the path to appointment to a position
of leadership at a university is mentorship, which Gilliam
acknowledges is difficult for blacks because there are so few black
university administrators to mentor possible candidates.

“It’s not that non-African Americans can’t
mentor African Americans,” he said. “(But) the
occupants of those positions tend to be homogenous,” he said,
which hinders the advancement of blacks to positions of power. A
cycle is thus created in which a lack of black officials employed
in the upper echelons of university administration leads to a
smaller group of qualified, prepared black applicants for those
positions, he said.