Description: Shedding the Chrysalis: Black Women Leading in Higher Education features the voices of six experienced and emerging Black females in a variety of academic leadership roles. This book provides a Black feminist perspective, highlighting the need to address racial realism within higher education administration. These personal testimonies focus on a variety of levels in the academic hierarchy to emphasize the continuum across the lived experiences of these women, some of whom have served in multiple upper-level administrative roles. The contributors' positions range from postdoctoral research fellows to positions reporting to central administration at predominantly white institutions. Shedding the Chrysalis underscores what these women have learned from mentors, allies, and adversaries that can help us all--executive-level leaders, faculty and staff at all ranks, and those aspiring to leadership positions--to build and sustain a more stable terrain in academic leadership for a variety of minoritized groups.
Brief description: Olga M. Welch is professor and dean emerita in the School of Education at Duquesne University. She has published widely on executive mentoring, social justice, equity, and diversity, including an edited volume, Turnaround Leadership: Deans of Color as Change Agents. She was a member of the US Department of Health's African American Health Care Congress, the African American Pre-Natal Issues Task Force, and currently is an inaugural fellow for the Initiative on Race, Research, and Justice at Vanderbilt University. With Carolyn R. Hodges, she partners in Welch and Hodges, LLC, Higher Education Consultants and Leadership Training.