Written by Jamal Watson, Ph.D.
They came without prepared remarks, without rehearsed talking points, and in many cases without any prior knowledge of who would be sitting beside them. That was entirely by design.
On Tuesday, May 19, the Higher Education Leadership Foundation (H.E.L.F.) opened its third national convening, “Ideation, Innovation, Collaboration: Creating the Blueprint — An Empirical Exploration of HBCU Leadership,” on the campus of Virginia State University. The three-day gathering, running through May 21, brings together a deliberately small and carefully curated room: sitting presidents, emeritus presidents, trustees, governance consultants, search firm executives, and higher education scholars, all summoned to wrestle with some of the most consequential and least comfortably discussed questions in Black higher education.
“We really believe in the organic nature of the honest inquiry and the sincere output of that,” said H.E.L.F. founder and Wiley University president Dr. Herman Felton Jr., who opened the convening with an extended reflection on the foundation’s origins, its evolution, and the urgent necessity of this moment. " We are here to interrogate — with data, with scholarship, with practitioner truth — what the HBCU presidency actually demands at this moment.”
The Baton and the Race
The convening’s first panel, moderated by Dr. Charlie Nelms — chancellor emeritus of North Carolina Central University— framed the entire two days around a single, deceptively simple metaphor: the passing of the baton.
Nelms arrived at the panel holding an actual baton, borrowed from the track coach at Indiana University Bloomington. “The fastest runner isn’t always the person who wins the race,” he said. “Victory often depends on precision. Timing. Trust. Preparation.”
Seated with him were three panelists whose combined experience offered a rare triangulation of perspective: Dr. Henry Tisdale, president emeritus of Claflin University, who served 25 years at the helm of the Orangeburg, S.C. institution and oversaw one of the most widely studied presidential transitions in recent HBCU history; Dr. Dr. Dwaun J. Warmack, Tisdale’s successor at Claflin and current sitting president; and Claflin Trustee Artis G. Hampshire-Cowan, a governance leader whose work with the Association of Governing Boards (AGB) placed her at the intersection of the Claflin search and succession as both consultant and, ultimately, board member.
Tisdale’s account of preparing for transition was methodical and, by his own admission, began roughly eight years before he actually stepped down. From there, Tisdale engaged an outside consultant to train the board on succession, since only one trustee had ever been through a presidential search at Claflin. He moved to an emergency succession plan, then a full institutional succession plan that was reported on annually. And crucially, he asked every senior cabinet member to stay through the transition — not for him, but for the university.
“I was very honest,” Tisdale said. “I said, I have no idea what Dr. Warmack’s plans are. I’m not promising you a job for the future. I’m simply saying, do what you think is the right thing to do for Claflin University.”
Following a Legend
Warmack, who initially declined the Claflin presidency five times before his wife convinced him to take a closer look, described receiving the baton from Tisdale as one of the more uncommon gifts in HBCU leadership: a predecessor who genuinely disappeared.
“He said to me, ‘You won’t see me for the first five years.’” Warmack recalled. “I’m thrown back a little bit. I’m like, what do you mean? He said, ‘Because I don’t want people to see me as the president. I want them to see you.’ And he didn’t.”
Among Warmack’s first acts: asking the board to name the new molecular sciences building after Tisdale. At his second commencement, he awarded Tisdale an honorary doctorate from his own alma mater. “My ego’s not tied to it,” Warmack said. “That’s just not how I feel as a leader.”
Warmack also noted that Claflin’s board operates under term limits — 12-year maximums — and employs a detailed matrix for board recruitment that maps institutional needs against prospective trustee skills across more than 20 identified categories. “It’s not a happenstance process,” he said. “It’s a complex matrix.”
“Sometimes leaders come in and think they have to dismantle everything that happened before them to create their identity. That is so far from the truth.”
— Dr. Dwaun Warmack, President, Claflin University
What the Search Actually Reveals
The convening’s second panel trained its attention on the presidential search process itself — who gets selected, who gets overlooked, and what the very first conversation between a search firm and a board reveals about the eventual outcome.
Christine Pendleton, a senior partner at a higher education leadership advisory firm, was direct: that initial conversation tells experienced practitioners almost everything. “Do they know the difference between governance and management? Do they have an understanding of how an institution functions?” she asked. “Most time, they do not.”
Her fellow panelists have observed boards in which bylaws exist but no one knows what they say, trustees who have served for 40 years without renewal of perspective, and committees where urgency — “we want the president to start June first” when the conversation is happening in March — signals trouble long before the first candidate name is surfaced.
Her co-panelist, Dr. Dakota Dolan, a search executive who spoke with equal frankness, put it more bluntly still:
“Sometimes you realize, okay, is this going to be a real search or a compromise search?” That question, he suggested, can often be answered before the job description is even finalized.
Scholar Dr. Felicia Commodore brought empirical grounding to what the practitioners observed from experience. In research examining board trustees at three AME-affiliated HBCUs, she found that while trustees articulated objective criteria for presidential selection, their personal values — including cultural markers such as church affiliation, community ties, and social networks — quietly drove their evaluations. “Those two things matched,” she said. “And so though they knew they were supposed to be objective... ultimately, their personal values played a big role.”
Felton, who moderated the panel, flagged a persistent and largely undiscussed inequity: women arriving as first-time presidents at HBCUs face a qualitatively different and heavier lift.
The Unreadied President
No theme ran more persistently through the convening’s first day than what H.E.L.F. has taken to calling the “unreadied president” — a term the foundation has been pressing into the sector’s vocabulary for years, and one Felton tied explicitly to the social media era’s transformation of presidential aspiration into brand performance.
The research suggests the consequences are real and measurable. The average HBCU presidency now runs about three years.
“In every single instance, 100 percent, at least in my opinion, there were two things that derailed the presidency,” said Roman, who has tracked HBCU presidential transitions in a personal spreadsheet since 2013. “Hubris and deception. Every single time, without fail.”
Commodore pointed to a parallel failure mode: presidents who have studied only the success stories. “They don’t see the derailment coming because they didn’t study it,” she said. She also cited the underestimated weight of organizational trauma — the damage that institutions carry after a difficult or scandal-ridden departure, which an incoming president ignores at considerable peril.
“If you ignore that, you can do all the wonderful things, but the people don’t trust you,” she added.
What Comes Next
H.E.L.F.’s convening continues through Thursday, May 21, with sessions dedicated to governance reform, board-president contracting, the first-year presidency, and what the foundation is calling a “toolkit” — a set of concrete, evidence-based resources aimed at equipping presidents, trustees, and institutions before a crisis makes the questions unavoidable.
For many in the room, the gathering represented something rarer than a conference and more urgent than a workshop: a space where the sector’s most consequential actors could, for once, speak plainly to one another about what is actually happening and what it will take to change.
“This room is small on purpose,” Felton told the assembled group at the outset. “This room is balanced on purpose. No single voice dominates, and no necessary voice is missing. If you’re sitting here, you were chosen. Honor that by being fully present.”
