At a time when higher education faces enormous challenges, including attracting and retaining good leaders, Dr. Alvin J. Schexnider – a retired university president – has given us much to think about in his recently published memoir, “Given Much Food for Thought.” Confessions of a Black Academic (McFarland & Company, Inc.).
Schexnider – the former chancellor of Winston-Salem State University and former executive vice president and interim president of Norfolk State University – draws on his diverse experience as a faculty member and administrator at a number of colleges and universities, including Southern University, Syracuse University, Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Thomas Nelson Community College.
Dr. Alvin J. Schexnider recently published his memoirs, Confessions of a Black Academic (McFarland & Company, Inc.).
“In an era when diversity and inclusion seem to be ushering in a new millennium, America’s HBCUs have led by example since their founding,” Schexnider writes, adding that HBCUs are “iconic institutions with a storied legacy that is unparalleled.”
Using personal and professional anecdotes, Schexnider, for example, recounts in detail his childhood in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where he faced the harsh reality of racism “from the time I was born until I was in college.”
In Lake Charles, a racially segregated city, young Alvin and his siblings were encouraged to strive for excellence.
“My childhood was pretty typical for a black boy growing up in the segregated South in the 1950s and 1960s,” Schexnider writes. “My parents put everything they could into their children.”
That love eventually led Schexnider to enroll at Grambling State University—one of Louisiana’s state HBCUs. In 1973, he earned a Ph.D. in political science from Northwestern University. What followed was an impressive academic career that took him to several institutions across the country as a professor and later as an administrator. Schexnider chronicles those career moves, including his appointment as chancellor of Winston-Salem State University, an HBCU in North Carolina, in 1996. During his time at the helm, he and his leadership team improved the six-year graduation rate from 39.4% to 47.8% and doubled the school’s endowment from $9.8 million to $18.8 million.
But despite these advances, “none of it satisfied the critics,” Schexnider complained in the 183-page book.
“In fact, my greatest nemesis, whom I fired for incompetence and who led the campaign to get me fired, said in the newspaper article that if the next chancellor shared Schexnider’s vision but lacked his sometimes distant demeanor, the healing would begin immediately.”
Brutally honest and graphic, Schexnider’s memoir is a reminder that running a university is tough, especially for a black man who was forthright and intent on change. These are the lessons younger leaders need to hear as they aspire to the presidency without fully understanding the challenges and obstacles they will also have to overcome in leading the institution.
“Reading Schexnider’s book teaches you about the intricacies of higher education – the good, the bad and the ugly,” wrote Dr. Marybeth Gasman in ForbesGasman, the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Endowed Chair in Education and a distinguished professor at Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Education, said Schexnider’s commentary on race in the academy was “extremely profound and insightful.”
Gasman is right.
Confessions of a Black Academic is not only a compelling and insightful autobiography, but also required reading for anyone seriously concerned about the future of higher education, leadership, and the ongoing role of racism in our society as a whole.
