A chapter I have been working on, titled “Lifting as We Lead: Black Male Deans Mentoring Black Male Faculty,” is moving toward publication, and I wanted to share an early overview of its argument for readers who follow this area.
The chapter sits at an intersection I have been interested in for some time. Most of my scholarly work has focused on ethnic matching in educational settings, specifically at the student-teacher level, where the evidence base is substantial and the findings are relatively clear. The leadership version of the same question, whether identity-matched mentoring between a Black male dean and a Black male faculty member produces comparable benefits, has received far less attention in the literature. This chapter is an attempt to open that question up with some rigor.
The immediate context is the data on representation. Black men account for roughly three percent of faculty in U.S. higher education and only 1.8 percent of academic deans. That underrepresentation is severe enough that the small number of Black men who do reach senior leadership positions become, whether the institution has planned for it or not, the de facto mentors for any Black male faculty member in their college. The chapter takes that informal relationship seriously as an object of analysis, asking what it produces for the faculty member, what it costs the dean, and what the institution’s reliance on it reveals about how leadership development is organized in higher education.
The advantages are real and worth naming. A Black male faculty member mentored by a Black male dean spends less cognitive energy translating his experiences into terms a non-Black mentor can understand, and the resulting conversations tend to be more direct and more useful. Senior Black leaders also carry what Gasman and colleagues have called racialized organizational wisdom, which is the accumulated knowledge about how to navigate institutional politics, implicit bias in peer review, and the unwritten expectations of tenure and promotion. That knowledge is difficult to acquire without proximity to someone who has already moved through those systems. Sponsorship is the third piece, going beyond mentoring to include active advocacy for the faculty member’s work in closed-door discussions, public endorsement, and recommendation for high-profile opportunities. Research has identified sponsorship as among the strongest predictors of career progression in higher education, and it is an asset that has been distributed unequally across racial lines for a long time.
The chapter gives equal weight to the disadvantages, which I argue are almost always structural rather than interpersonal. Cultural taxation is the most visible. The few Black male deans available become default mentors for every minoritized faculty member in their college, which consumes time and energy their formal administrative roles already claim. There is also the problem of scrutiny, because identity-based mentoring tends to attract accusations of favoritism from colleagues, and the awareness of that possibility can cause both parties to interact with a caution that undermines the candor good mentoring requires. A quieter risk I spend some time on is institutional complacency. A single effective Black dean mentoring Black faculty can look, to the administration above her, like sufficient evidence of diversity commitment, and that appearance can substitute for the more expensive work of developing broader mentoring arrangements across the institution.
What the chapter argues, overall, is that identity-based mentoring at the leadership level is valuable and should be supported, yet it cannot carry the full weight of the institution’s responsibility for developing and retaining Black male faculty. What is needed is shared institutional responsibility. That means formal mentoring networks that distribute the labor, compensation arrangements that recognize mentoring as real work rather than invisible service, and deliberate investment in leadership pathways that do not depend on a small number of overcommitted individuals.
The theoretical ground under all of this combines my ethnic-matching work with critical race theory and community cultural wealth. Ethnic matching explains why the identity-based relationship works at the interpersonal level. Critical race theory locates the relationship inside the institutional context that makes the matching both necessary and costly. Community cultural wealth names the forms of capital that Black male deans bring into mentoring, including navigational, social, and resistance capital that has accumulated through years of operating inside systems that were not designed with them in mind.
I will share a link when the chapter is formally published. Until then, this preview captures the core of what it is after, for readers who would rather see the argument before the formal version arrives.
DEB