Betty J. Overton-Adkins, KNFP-9 Vice President for Academic Affairs, Spring Arbor University, Michigan.
This article was originally published in the July 2005 issue of the KFLA Newsletter.
Four years ago, Betty Overton-Adkins left her position of 10 years as Director of Higher Education Programs at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to become Vice President for Academic Affairs at Spring Arbor University, a Christian college of 3,500 students. Now, back in academia, Betty finds herself continuing to work on the same handful of issues that have driven much of her career.
"Although I am not currently employed at a minority serving institution, I am looking at opportunities and challenges for these institutions to maximize the work they do for their students and communities and to lift up new leaders for these institutions," Betty explains.
She is in the second year serving as evaluator for the Minority Serving Institutions Leadership Fellows Program. "We can already see increased effectiveness in the leaders who are participating," she says. "The program is like a one-year Kellogg Fellowship Program. We bring together leaders from historically black colleges, tribal colleges, and Hispanic-serving colleges. They really learn from each other and become supporters and allies." Comments Betty, "The work is familiar. Because of the Fellowship program and my work at Kellogg, I have a sense of what we need to be looking for relative to helping people develop both as effective administrators and as leaders."
On her own campus, Betty can begin to see the results of seeds she planted soon after her arrival. For instance, "Our faculty, administration, and board adopted a diversity statement that is informing all we do to enhance student and faculty diversity and access. Our numbers of students of color have increased, and when we had our NCATE [National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education] visit, the visiting team praised what we are doing in this area," she says.
Betty also is looking at issues of how administrators respond to diversity through a survey that she and a colleague developed for the Coalition of Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU). Along with successes, Betty admits, "There has also been a lot of treading water. I'm finding how hard it is to get a campus to move, even when most people recognize what we should be doing to transform ourselves and engage with our students and communities."
In her community, Betty works on issues of access and diversity through the Access to Democracy Project in Jackson County, and through a recent partnership with the school district that submitted a grant for a college preparation program, GEAR UP. In the process of planning for the proposal, the group uncovered that the schools were not offering pre-algebra to 6th and 7th graders resulting in very low test scores on the Michigan Educational Assessment Program math tests. As a result, says Betty, "I persuaded our math department and our school district to plan for some faculty development this summer to prepare to implement pre-algebra instruction in the fall. Even if we don't get the grant funding, we have already impacted our community," she notes. "It is being able to do things like this that gives me joy as an administrator."