Minorities in Massachusetts find path to university presidential ranks difficult to tread

Diverse Issues in Higher Education
February 17, 2009
Kenneth J. Cooper

As the new vice chancellor for student affairs at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1971, Dr. Randolph W. Bromery had not given any thought to moving up to chancellor. But the president of the UMass system, Dr. Robert C. Wood, had contemplated the possibility. Then he made it happen.

When the chancellor of the state flagship university resigned that year, Wood asked Bromery to serve as interim chancellor and to apply for the permanent job, which the trustees gave him six months later. His elevation made Bromery the first African-American to lead a college in Massachusetts and only the second at a predominantly White campus, after Dr. Clifton R. Wharton Jr. at Michigan State University.

“I had no previous experience running a public college or university, especially one with 25,000 students,” recalls Bromery, 83. “It takes a person like Bob Wood to take that risk. A lot of people wouldn’t take that risk.”

Indisputably, Wood’s gamble worked out. For eight years, Bromery led UMass Amherst so capably that other colleges in the state kept summoning him to straighten out their management problems. He was acting president of Westfield State College in the 1980s, acting and then permanent president of Springfield College in the 1990s and then acting president of Roxbury Community College earlier this decade.

“He’s the godfather in Massachusetts,” says Dr. Charles Desmond, an African-American who chairs the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education.

After that groundbreaking start four decades ago, the history of college presidents of color in Massachusetts, a state known for its liberal politics and elite private colleges, has unfolded at about the same halting pace as it has in the rest of the country.

With the exception of Dr. Ruth J. Simmons, who was president of Smith College before becoming the first Black president of an Ivy League school at Brown University, no minority has led on a permanent basis any of the elite schools that give Massachusetts its reputation for quality higher education.

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