Gasman is the director of the Penn Center for Minority Serving
Institutions.
From HBCU Digest:
Dozens of HBCU presidents over the last few years have been
fired, but only a handful of them of earned the defense of University of
Pennsylvania professor Marybeth Gasman in the pages of national news. Today,
outgoing Morehouse College President John Silvanus Wilson became the latest to
earn the Ivy League endorsement…
She did something similar for former Florida A&M
University President Elmira Mangum last September, accusing its board of sexism
and interference…
Of these three examples, some startling trends reveal themselves
about the nature of these dismissals and the endorsement of Dr. Gasman, who in
spite of her self-heralded decades of research experience and visits to 101 of
105 campuses, and even her experience as an HBCU board member, still doesn’t
seem to grasp the persistence of her white privilege in assessing HBCU issues,
or basic concepts of the politics, governance, and the nature of board
leadership in higher education.
All three of her charges of board incompetence have come
against institutions with predominantly black, autonomous boards. Several HBCU
presidents, even those serving under boards of visitors, have all been
dismissed by state system boards largely made up of middle-aged white guys; all
without a word from Dr. Gasman…
Did they deserve to be fired? In some cases yes and in some
cases no. But Dr. Gasman’s silence in all of these cases signals that she is
prone to selective support for some presidents and some interpretations of why
they are fired, and not others. This makes her the most unreliable resource for
any campus trying to make sense of why the culture at large is suffering from
these issues on a variety of campuses…
What separates some failures from others? What makes some
mistakes or some leadership issues which draw a vote to terminate or for
non-renewal, worthy of silence and others worthy of a UPENN push? Personal
relationships could be one possibility. The other? That when white folks fire black folks, it’s
for good reason. But when we do it, it is because we are not familiar with how
boards should operate.
If we’re talking trends in HBCU administration, and Gasman
is free to discuss how frequently black boards get it wrong in hiring and
firing presidents, then she should be among the first to examine the same trend
among system boards doing the same dirt. But she doesn’t, and when you add that
to her habit of telling all black colleges not to take money from organizations
and people whom she deems as unfit to help black people, you begin to see why
most in the HBCU community dismiss her voice, research and platform outright…
Read the full editorial here.