Serving Urban Populations … A Continent Away
Bronx Community College works to expand educational, employment opportunities for Black South Africans
By Ben Hammer
Bronx Community College President Carolyn Williams has prepared most of her professional career for what she calls a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” — developing a junior college system in post-apartheid South Africa that mirrors what exists in the United States. For 10 years now, Williams and BCC’s National Center for Educational Alliances (NCEA) has been working to transform South Africa’s amalgam of primary schools, technical and training schools, and universities into a more interconnected network that will widen employment opportunities across the country, especially within the Black community.
While BCC’s work is focused on improving South Africa’s educational system, Williams says her institution benefits academically by applying and testing its theories of educational reform in another country.
“One of the things that we have found so amazing is the similarity in serving urban populations,” Williams says. “As we share what we do and our best practices, we tend to come out with a model that is even stronger than the model we went over with.”
Williams, who was named president of Bronx Community College in 1996, was not there long before the Ford Foundation asked the NCEA to take the work it had been doing on the transfer of U.S. community college degrees into four-year college programs, also known as articulation, and expand it into South Africa.
Although Williams studied the transfer of junior college degrees into four-year college programs while working on a Ford Foundation grant at Highland Park Community College in Detroit in the early 1980s, she knew little about South Africa before the “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” arose. However, soon she was leading an effort to help reform the country’s educational system. Specifically, the Ford Foundation asked BCC to assist in developing educational partnerships in five regions in South Africa.
