On paper, there’s every indication that this woman was destined to be leading a university. A good chunk of Dr. Marie Foster Gnage’s career in higher education was filled with migrations from one position to the next, each elevating her to the next career rung at institutions from Mississippi to New Jersey.
Fresh out of graduate school, she started out on the faculty side as an instructor at Alcorn State University before moving to Florida A&M University in Tallahassee and up to an assistant professor of English. Then she decided to give community college administration a try, first becoming a department chair at Central Florida Community College in Ocala, Fla. Landing that position, which also allowed her to teach, kept her moving on the administration track. She enjoyed the work and the new challenges each position brought, but even then, there was no real plan for where any of them would lead.
In her second year as an administrator, Gnage was selected as an American Council on Education fellow, an opportunity that allowed her to shadow the president of Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C. and get immersed in learning institutional culture, policies and decision-making processes. But even after spending a year in this competitive higher education leadership development program aimed at aspiring presidents, Gnage wasn’t sure it’s what she wanted to become.
She says, “I wasn’t convinced that I wanted to be a president, but I never stopped looking for what that next role was that I needed if I did decide someday that I wanted to be a president.”
Following the ACE fellowship, she slipped into a deanship. Still more senior posts followed for Gnage — vice president for instruction and assistant vice chancellor for education services — about the time she started thinking seriously and being intentional about becoming a university president. Her plan included moving from a district office where she was working and back onto a university campus. She spent three years at Raritan Valley Community College in North Branch, N.J. as senior vice president for academic affairs. Then she finally became President Gnage in July 2004, leading West Virginia University, Parkersburg where she is the sixth CEO of the predominantly White four-year institution and the first female and first African-American to hold the post.
But despite career successes like Gnage’s, female presidents in higher education remain in the minority, even as more women occupy that office today than ever before, say recent findings from ACE’s demographic study on the presidency. The share of women presidents increased from 21 percent in 2001 to 26 percent in 2011. This “is notable,” say the study’s authors, given that only 10 percent of chief executives in higher education were women just twenty years ago. But gains at some types of institutions have been significant: women now lead a substantially greater share of doctorate-granting institutions, rising from 13 percent in 2001 to 22 percent in 2011. And among presidents hired since January 2009, the percentage of women presidents “was even more striking.” Nearly one-third of all presidents hired between that date and 2011 were women, a significantly greater share than in past years.
Since 2007, Charlene M. Dukes, president of the predominantly Black Prince George’s County Community College (PGCC) in Prince George’s County, Md., has been leading where ACE says growth among women presidents is also climbing: in two-year institutions. At community colleges, women often hold the executive position in associate-degree-granting institutions compared to those that grant higher degrees — 33 percent of those women are presidents and chancellors in community colleges and only 22 to 23 percent in bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral-granting institutions.
