The Washington Informer: Opinions/Editorials

For many, many years – since I first heard the words come out of Dan Scanlon’s mouth – I have confessed that I too, am a “middle-aged hack in the twilight of a mediocre career.” The remark usually spawns an uneasy chuckle from those who hear it.

And while that self-effacing admission may be true about me, I can claim some wildly successful friends, not the least of whom is Dr. Julianne Malveaux who became the 15th president of Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, N.C. Monday. My friend, by comparison, is a “middle-aged star in the morning of a sensational career.”

Julianne – I should say “Dr. Malveaux” – succeeds Dr. Johnnetta Cole, the former president of Spelman College who took over at Bennett in 2002. Last year, she announced that she would be leaving at the end of the current academic year. At the time Dr. Cole took over, the college was on probation for fiscal instability. That sanction was ended after just one year of her tenure.

Cole took the school “out of intensive care,” Dr. Malveaux told me after her appointment was official. “I hope to take it out of the hospital.”

A number of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have been in critical condition recently. Hampton University and even the legendary Fisk University are among those which needed life support in the last few years to survive a rough period.

I’m hoping that Bennett too (indeed all HBCUs) will weather the storm and be all about azaleas and caps and gowns every spring coupled with larger and larger incoming freshman classes every fall. If I could wave a magic wand, that would be so, and Americans and the people of the world would spend more on education than on weapons, and more Black males would get college scholarships than get full-time, expenses-paid admission to the country’s penitentiaries.

And of those who attend, I wish more would be like my mother, Nola Mae Canteberry, who graduated from Jackson College (now Jackson State) in 1940, and my daughter and son, who both graduated from Brown University and then went on to earn master’s degrees, than myself, an activist with many memories acquired advancing “the Movement” but with no degree. If I could wave a magic wand…

Malveaux really went all out to get this job. She was one of 71 applicants, three finalists. When she went for her first interview she told me that folks who are used to seeing her on BET, CNN or elsewhere might not have recognized her. She wore matching earrings and no Kente cloth at all. Very uncharacteristic for my friend, the “free spirit.”

Bennett does have a Department of Journalism and Media Studies. That’s right up her alley. An economist with a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), she came to national prominence as a journalist and commentator. As a former writer at the San Francisco Sun-Reporter, a Black newspaper, talk show host at Washington’s WPFW-FM and panelist on Howard University Television’s “Evening Exchange,” her roots are deep in the Black press. A native of San Francisco, she earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Boston College.

“These have been the platforms on which I’ve built my career – economics and journalism,” she told Richard Prince, author of the online column “Journal-isms.” “I was born with a pen in my hand,” she said, but she promised to spend her first 100 days on the new job listening and learning.

She’s got all the hoods, capes, robes and academic paraphernalia in order to hold her own in that arena, but she told me that she is so serious about doing well in this new position that she will probably have a “funeral” for a few choice words from the vernacular which she occasionally used to use in order to shock and spice up conversations.

“This institution has played a pivotal role in civil rights history,” Malveaux said in a statement released by the college, “and Bennett Belles are women who have thoroughly inspired me. I have been blessed to develop a national platform as an activist and advocate for economic justice, access to education and rights of African American women, and it is from this platform that I am delighted to begin my time as Bennett College president.”

Bennett was founded in 1873, and is related to the United Methodist Church. It was originally a co-educational institution, but, in 1926, was reorganized as a college for women.

Bennett College has another real “belle” as its leader now, and the appointment of my friend Julianne makes me want to pay attention to what’s going on down there and stick around a while longer, no matter how “old” I might feel, so I can see what the end is going to be.

Askia Muhammad is editor of National Scene News Bureau, which provides editorial, audio and photographic content for broadcast and print clients, including The Final Call, National Public Radio, Soundprint, WPFW-FM and the Informer. His e-mail address is askia99@verizon.net.