A PHENOMENOLOGICAL STUDY OF FIVE HBCU CHANCELLORS IN ONE SOUTHEASTERN STATE

Abstract

Founded out of necessity due to overt racism that kept Blacks out of higher education, HBCUs today find themselves in precarious positions to stay relevant in an academic field where PWIs compete for Black students. There is scant literature on the leadership styles that HBCU chancellors use to address challenges; therefore, this phenomenological study explored the experiences of being a chancellor of five publicly-funded HBCUs in one Southeastern state. Their leadership styles provided supplemental evidences of how they experienced being a chancellor, revealed leadership traits, and identified and addressed challenges. The leadership styles--transformational, transactional, and passive avoidant--are components of the Full Range Leadership Development model. Experiences were explored using triangulation methodology: the MLQ 5X questionnaire, interviews, and speeches. From these data, overlapping experiences emerged. Words and statements that best represented the experiences were extracted and organized by themes. The major themes included financial concerns, motivation, student centeredness, and finding external and internal supporters. The chancellors' scores on the MLQ 5X were averaged to determine their leadership styles and behaviors. Based on the scores, one chancellor used a combination of leadership styles. Another chancellor had high transformational scores with higher than average transactional and passive avoidant scores. Three chancellors had higher transformational scores. The findings showed that these chancellors shared similar experiences and used a variety of leadership styles in leading their institutions.