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The typical pipeline to the presidency is faculty member to department chair to administrator to college president. However, the numbers show that Asian Americans by and large are not making that leap from faculty member to administrator. To be sure, as the ACE study shows, racial and ethnic minorities only make up 10 percent of college presidents when minority-serving institutions are excluded. But the situation for Asian Americans is particularly of concern.
Dr. Les Wong, president of Northern Michigan University, noted during that same session that he knows every Asian president of a U.S. university because there are so few, 0.9 percent according to ACE, even though they represent approximately 6 percent of tenured faculty. I’m sure Wong would like to see a time when he can’t name them all, so he’s encouraging college presidents to serve as mentors.
In “Forming a Pipeline to the Presidency,” contributing editor Lydia Lum interviews Wong and others about efforts to prepare and encourage Asian faculty and administrators to think about the presidency. Wong, who serves as a mentor, says Asians are typically very loyal to their jobs as long as they are treated well, but he tries to communicate to his colleagues that they have to be loyal to themselves and think about their futures. “This is hard to drill into their heads,” Wong says in the article. “I tell them, ‘Trust me. Your non-Asian colleagues are thinking about their futures.”
Speaking of futures, many colleges and universities are seeing an “early study abroad” trend in which an increasing number of South Korean students leave their native country as teenagers and move to an English-speaking country in hopes of attending an American university.
