Black Leadership Across Campuses (BLAC)

A joint project by CERCL and the Virginia Union University Center for the Study of HBCUs

While it has always been the case, recent events force recognition of the need for imaginative and creative transformations of higher education. In so doing, a central aim must be the fostering of leadership across campuses with the capacity, skills, and vision necessary to address the challenges of anti-black racism and other modes of injustice infecting our society. Long committed to the nurturing of citizens with the critical thinking skills and communication strategies to foster positive social change, we see a need to move beyond this effort on individual campuses and in ways that serve to dismantle the divide between historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and predominantly white institutions of higher education (PWIs).

Black Leadership Across Campuses (BLAC) is meant as an intervention related to this much needed work—serving as a pilot initiative we hope will eventually grow to include a national range of partners.

Mission Statement

Black Leadership Across Campuses (BLAC) seeks to develop and nurture strategies for fostering generations of academic leadership equipped to address issues of justice demanding attention, and to do this in ways that entail collaboration across HBCUs and PWIs.

Goals

Black Leadership Across Campuses (BLAC) supports its mission through careful and creative attention to, implementations of, the following goals:​

  1. Foster communications across campuses that highlight shared concerns, and that open opportunity for collaboration on key issues;
  2. Produce programming that enhances our understanding of justice-centered academic leadership;
  3. Produce materials that explore key issues and offer innovative insights;
  4. Develop a pipeline of new leaders with the critical thinking skills, effective communication strategies and organizational knowledge needed to advance justice minded institutions.