Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings is a proud member of “the Class of Shalala,” an informal name adopted by a group of Black women faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UWM) whose academic careers were boosted by the newly elected Congresswoman, who mentored women and minority faculty in higher education long before she ventured into politics.
More than an administrator, Dr. Donna Shalala helped women and minorities gain employment, tenure and advancement as far back as the 1980’s, when she was president of Hunter College. And some of those whose careers she influenced, like Ladson-Billings, say she will be a force for diversity and higher education as she represents Florida’s 27th congressional district.
Shalala – who was chancellor of UWM and later served as president of the University of Miami – ran as a Democrat and won 51.8 percent of the vote to defeat longtime Republican incumbent Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. And although at the age of 77, Shalala will be starting at the bottom tier of seniority as a junior legislator, she will be a force of nature on Capitol Hill, predicted scholars she mentored.
“They’d better get ready, because she will have done her homework,” said Ladson-Billings, president of the National Academy of Education and the former Kellner Family Distinguished Professor of Urban Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at UWM.
“She’s not somebody to be trifled with,” said Ladson-Billings, who also is a faculty affiliate in UWM’s departments of Educational Policy Studies, Leadership and Policy Analysis and Afro-American Studies. “She’s not lazy, she pays attention to detail, and she has a mind like a steel trap. And I think she’ll be a friend to higher education. She’s concerned about the rising costs of tuition and student loan debt and will be someone on the forefront of trying to address that.”
Shalala, who has a bachelor’s degree from Western College for Women and a Ph.D from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, served as federal secretary of health and human services in the Clinton administration and headed the Clinton Foundation from 2015 to 2017.
She was president of Hunter College in the 1980’s when Dr. Johnnetta B. Cole, president emerita of Spelman and Bennett colleges, met her. Cole said Shalala would become one of her principal mentors and a dear friend, joining Marian Wright Edelman, the president of the Children’s Defense Fund, in persuading Cole to vie for the Spelman presidency.
