During her 16-year tenure as the longest serving chancellor in the history of the San Diego Community College District, Dr. Constance Carroll has taken her leadership to a new level. She is known in her community as “the people’s chancellor,” and her track record supports that moniker.
Earlier this year, Carroll announced plans to retire in 2021. Within weeks of her announcement, COVID-19 began sweeping the nation, prompting stay-at-home orders as illness and death tolls rose. This was just the latest of numerous challenges that Carroll and her team have faced over the years.
One member of that team, Dr. Pamela Luster, president of San Diego Mesa College, says “the people’s chancellor” is an apt description of Carroll because of her “unwavering commitment to those most vulnerable in our communities. Even though she has attained great stature in our work, she still works tirelessly to support non-profits, public-private partnerships, community organizations along with our district to assure access to opportunity.” Carroll was Mesa’s president for 11 years before becoming chancellor.
As leader of the San Diego Community College District, Carroll has authority over City College, Mesa College, 
Carroll says her career choices and interest in equity and diversity were largely inspired by her mother’s experiences seeking a graduate degree in segregated Maryland in the 1950s. Dr. Rebecca Evans Carroll was not allowed to enroll in graduate school at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD) but the state permitted qualified Black students to attend any other institution of their choice in the country — at Maryland’s expense. Rebecca Carroll was accepted at the University of Chicago, where she graduated summa cum laude with a master’s degree in human development and education.
Undaunted by the past discrimination, her mother “kept her sights fixed on the University of Maryland because she was determined to bring that to closure,” Carroll says of her mother’s decision to return to the university in the 1960s to pursue her doctorate in education. In 1966, she became the first African American woman to receive a doctoral degree from UMD.
Chancellor Carroll stresses the “terrible irony” of her mother’s experience. “The University of Maryland chose to pay tuition, room, board, books and travel expenses for Black students to go elsewhere, so that they [UMD] would not have to accept those students.” As a result, she explained that her mother was able to attend one of the leading universities in the country. Carroll said a number of Black students chose institutions all over the country. “One of her friends went to the University of Hawaii — they went everywhere — places they never would have been able to afford had it not been for the payment by the State of Maryland.”
