Black College Presidents Address Great Resignation at NASPA Conference

Dr. David WilsonDiscussing their take on leadership and how to combat the great resignation, a panel of four Black presidents of colleges and universities closed this year’s conference from the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA).

NASPA is a membership organization for student affairs professionals.

“I think there is a real opportunity now for us to think about what it means to be in community,” said panelist Dr. Lori White, president of DePauw University, when reflecting on students and staff returning to campus this year after the pandemic's onset. “Can we honor and be empathetic to what we have lost in the pandemic?”

Fellow panelist Dr. David Wilson, president of Morgan State University, a public historically Black university, noted that many students lost that sense of community when the pandemic started and campuses closed.

“In any given year at Morgan since I’ve been there, I would know almost half of my students by their first name — and now I don’t,” said Wilson. “That’s because over half of my students are on campus for the first time. We have to really, really make an effort to bring that campus culture back.”

But students aren’t the only ones struggling to re-adapt. Student affairs professionals, those who often work the most closely with students, have also increasingly been strained.

A new report from NASPA found eighty-four percent of student affairs professionals said that stress and crisis management duties in their jobs lead to burnout. Almost nine in 10 said that salaries and compensation packages are not competitive enough in light of the experience and education required for their roles.