Diversity Deferred in AACC Presidential Choice

After a nine-month search for the person who will lead community colleges in the new millennium, the American Association of Community Colleges here announced last month that Dr. George R. Boggs had been tapped to fill the organization's top spot.
Boggs, 55, has been a leader in the two-year college world for nearly three decades, the last 15 years of which he spent as president of Palomar College in California. He is credited with bringing that school out of a financial crisis, as well as helping to make it a pioneer in distance education. He is well-known and respected among his colleagues as a quiet and effective leader, a prolific and thoughtful writer and a respected proponent of community colleges nationally.
He also is White.
When the current president, Dr. David R. Pierce, announced last fall that he was stepping down from his nine-year stint, several community college experts predicted the association would select a minority to serve as its next leader.
All of the association's leaders in its eight-decade history have been White men — despite the fact that the nation's 1,250 two-year colleges today enroll 45 percent of African American students and 55 percent of Hispanic and American Indian students in higher education. Even members of the association's board privately muttered that the two-year college world is ready for a woman or minority to take the helm.
Several higher education experts pointed out that there are a number of nationally recognized Black community college leaders who would have done quite well in the position. Many wonder why the two-year college association, which many say should represent the very paragon of open access and inclusion that its member institutions profess, didn't choose a person of color as its next president.
With only six Blacks, one Hispanic and one Asian/Pacific American among the heads of the 42 associations that comprise the Washington higher education secretariat, does this latest selection say anything about the people who represent postsecondary issues in the nation's capital and their commitment to diversity?