George Mason University is an institution founded in the name of a slaveholder, one that has not shied away from reckoning publicly with the history that name carries.In recent years, the university community has made a deliberate effort to confront and reconcile this history, including the creation of a memorial to the enslaved children George Mason owned — an initiative championed by Dr. LaNitra Berger, an associate professor of history and art history and director of Mason’s African and African American Studies program (AAAS).
In 2020, the university hired its first Black president, Dr. Gregory Washington, who was recently extended through June 2031.
“It was an awakening for the university,” Berger said in an interview with The EDU Ledger. “For the rectors to hire a Black president at that time signaled that Mason was continuing to ascend to higher heights.”
Progress Under Scrutiny
But even with the visible progress, Berger is quick to remind students who celebrate Mason as the one of the state’s most diverse universities that it is still a public institution in Virginia, a state with its own complicated relationship with race. Washington himself has become a national figure in the fight over higher education and the Trump administration, drawing intense scrutiny as he has pushed back against federal pressure.
But inside Mason’s largest college, some Black faculty members — including Berger — say they have encountered a very different institution: one in which race and power still shape who is heard, who advances and who is allowed to remain securely in place.
At the center of their concerns is Dr. Ann Ardis, the dean of Mason’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences. Faculty members and others familiar with the college describe a pattern of administrative decisions involving Black women that they say has left them scrutinized, sidelined or stripped of authority. At the same time, Ardis has pursued changes to the African and African American Studies program that faculty members say would diminish the program’s independence and influence, even as students and faculty continue to support it.
Administrative Interference
