Deciding to Change Higher Education

My undergraduate years changed the way I thought about higher education.

I had arrived at college expecting something close to the world I had seen on A Different World. What I found was more complicated. I found some community, some friendship, and creativity. I also encountered bureaucracy, institutional dysfunction, and moments when the rhetoric of supporting students seemed disconnected from students' actual experiences.

Instead of making me abandon higher education, those contradictions eventually made me want to change it.

At some point during my undergraduate years, I decided that I wanted to become a college president—specifically, that I wanted to lead an HBCU.

I wanted to build the kind of institution I had needed.

I also began thinking seriously about law. Watching universities confront legal and governance problems convinced me that understanding law could make me a better institutional leader.

That decision gave me an unexpected freedom: if law and higher education were part of my future, I could study what genuinely interested me as an undergraduate.

Languages interested me.

So I studied them.

My path through college was not clean. I experienced depression, financial hardship, parenthood, institutional conflict, and periods when finishing seemed far from guaranteed.

But I did finish.

The student who had once failed every class at Brooklyn Tech graduated from Florida A&M University with honors.

And then I set my sights on law school.