Bennett College for Women is a liberal arts, Historically Black College (HBCU) with an enrollment of just 750 students in Greensboro, N.C. One of the things that we market is our intimacy, student-centeredness, and family-like atmosphere. Everyone knows your name, we tell students, and everyone wants to get to know you. Students expect access to faculty, staff, alumnae, and, yes, to trustees.
Part of the interest is professional. Our accomplished board includes corporate, nonprofit, and religious leaders, as well as distinguished alumnae. In practicing the leadership skills that we foster, as well as in the interest of career development, students can gain from the relationships they develop with board members. Trustees, too, can gain from some contact with students. Indeed, many trustees serve on Bennett’s board because they care passionately about the higher-education prospects for young African-American women and because they are determined to make a difference in young lives.
Our trustees, however, are technically the president’s bosses. In terms of constituency management, it’s not clear how much contact a president wants students to have with trustees. A student proposal to develop a Junior Board of Trustees, whose members would shadow actual trustees, sparked some campus conversation about the appropriate relationship between students and trustees.
Trustees and students have always had ways to interact. The president of the Student Government Association is a non-voting member of the board. When trustees attend campus events, as local trustees often do, they are likely assigned student escorts. When trustees dine at the president’s home while special guests are present, efforts are made to include students in such events and seat them next to trustees. However, many students, and some trustees, have expressed a desire for more contact.
Chair Yvonne Johnson, ’64, a Greensboro native and former mayor, asked for more opportunities to meet with students informally. Johnson has had students as interns in her office, fondly recalls her student days, and is committed to the quality of student life. At her suggestion, the trustees initiated several informal gatherings with students this past spring.
A group of about 30 student leaders lunched with three local trustees, including Johnson. Another trustee met with a group of 10 students at my home. And two local trustees attended a “dorm chat” one evening that drew about 20 students for casual conversation. From these conversations, I was reminded that our students need to be heard. Too often, as women of color, they have been marginalized and ignored. They have chosen Bennett College because they want intimacy, an intimacy based on transparent exchange, not simple contact. From this president’s perspective, however, the challenge is not in the exchange between students and trustees, but what trustees choose to do with information gleaned from the exchange.
In a previous Trusteeship column (January/ February, 2011), Edwin H. Welch, president of the University of Charleston, wrote, “Higher education boards are responsible for the outcomes of their institutions. They are called upon to oversee academic quality, financial health, student services, and fund raising.” There is often the temptation, especially when students offer impassioned comments, to veer from oversight to attempts at management or even micromanagement. The challenge for trustees is to filter what they hear from students and use it as anecdotal, not statistical information. Further, if I have the opportunity to spend an hour with a trustee, I’d frankly rather use it for a fund-raising call than a student meeting.
At Bennett, we extol our family-like atmosphere. But even in a family, there is role differentiation, and intimacy can become intrusive. Trustees are happy to listen to students and other constituencies, yet they must also be clear that they have other crucial institution-supporting duties. Further, when trustees clearly indicate to students that administration is the role of the president and her cabinet, then trustee-student meetings can be most rich and productive.
For more on this topic, listen to a podcast with Julianne Malveaux.
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