Johnnetta B. Cole's Role in Education
Dr. Johnnetta Betsch Cole is a prominent intellectual who has achieved much throughout her professional life. After graduating from Oberlin College in 1957 with a degree in sociology and from Northwestern in 1967 with a PhD in anthropology, she went on to lead a successful professional life with much focus on education. In perhaps her most renowned role, Cole served as the first Black, female president of Spelman College from 1987-1997 in the college’s 107 year history. The experiences she obtained during college and her scholarly work beyond have shaped her perspective and insights into the importance and function of education in the United States. Her roles in academia, including her time at Spelman College, were heavily intertwined with her values of diversity and making the world a better place. Cole’s African American feminist scholar perspective helps illuminate the interrelatedness of education with social justice, diversity, and the value of Black female intellectual contributions, which was reflected throughout her scholarly life.
Diversity is one experience that Cole gained at Oberlin, that set a foundation for her future focus in education. A letter written to the Oberlin College Alumni Association by Cole in 1997 for the newly admitted students of Oberlin, demonstrates the importance of diversity to Cole. In the letter, she explained, “I had spent all of my life in the segregated south, and it was at Oberlin that I developed my first interracial, interfaith and international friendships---some of which remain strong to this very day.”[i] This quote demonstrates how Cole’s time at Oberlin was integral in shaping her belief that diversity is a valuable part of education, and how the ties that Cole made during her time at Oberlin with people from many different perspectives and life experiences were significant to her after growing up in Jim Crow Florida, where diversity was lacking. As part of Oberlin’s effort to broaden students’ understanding of pluralism and multiculturalism in the 50s, Johnnetta B. Cole had been chosen as one of 38 Black students to come to Oberlin as part of an exchange program. According to one administrator, the purpose of this program was “to give the student an opportunity to acquire new viewpoints and new friends in a college other than his own.''[ii] Cole came to Oberlin from Fisk University at the age of 17 and decided to remain at Oberlin for the remainder of her undergraduate experience. According to Cole, “My insistence that the world is made better by multiple views was solidified by my college experience.”[iii] Although Oberlin was a more diverse environment than that of the south, Cole expressed in The Oberlin Review how Oberlin was not the pinnacle of diversity. She explained, “As much as I reveled in this diversity, there was a strong sense on my part that I did not have enough of my own folk around… why is it that we met Bach and Mozart [in the classroom] but not John Coltrane and Billie Holiday?”[iv] She also mentioned the lack of Black professors among the Oberlin faculty. Cole’s experience of diversity and growing awareness of where diversity was lacking during her time at Oberlin led her to continue to pay close attention to engagements with diversity and Black contributions within higher education.
After graduating Oberlin and obtaining her PhD from Northwestern, Cole joined the faculty of Washington State University, where she turned her views on diversity into action and demonstrated her beliefs of social justice within the realm of education. Cole’s commitment to change in higher education is strongly reflected in her letter to the Oberlin Alumni Association, in which she stated,“Being well educated should not only involve understanding the world better, but participating to make the world a better place.”[v] At Washington State, Cole saw the need for a space of Black intellectual engagement, and used her position as an opportunity to enact this change. While holding the position of professor, she became the cofounder and director of the Black studies program in 1969, which Cole described as an extension of her activism. In an interview with Erica Williams, Cole explained how pointless it was to stay silent when one wishes to enact change, and how her activism began with her first position in higher education at Washington State. “I'm going to jail with my students. We're marching up and down, demanding more presence of black students on our campus... I began as an activist professor. And I never gave that up.”[vi] Her role at Washington State is just one example of the work that she put into higher education to try to make it a more equitable environment for Black students. In the same interview, Cole remarked on how the academy contains violences and inequalities that discourage scholars, but expressed the view that, “since there's no particularly better place to go, you might as well just stay right where you are and see what you can do to make it a little bit better.”[vii] Cole’s time at Washington University demonstrated this determination to enact social change in academia through her commitment to forging a space for Black intellectual engagement. Her determination and commitment to these values are qualities that she passionately carried over to her presidency at Spelman College.
Cole’s ten years as the first Black, female president of Spelman College earned her the name “Sister President” and was perhaps the role for which she has obtained the most renown. Under her leadership, the historically Black, women’s college was extremely successful, and Cole tripled the college’s endowment by raising over 13 trillion dollars. Besides significantly improving the financial situation, Cole also carried over her values of diversity into her position at Spelman, and she spoke on how diversity fits in with community in an article, which stated, “[Cole] believes that black women have in common ‘a distinctive shared experience imposed by racism,’ yet she celebrates ‘black women’s incredible diversity. If you have seen one black woman,’ she added, “you have not seen the black woman.’” She further explained how Spelman College was economically diverse and represented “the full diverse color range of black America.”[viii] In addition to this, Cole expressed in an interview with The Black Scholar two important ways that she believed Spelman could become more diverse in order to provide more dynamic classrooms and life experiences. One of these was having a more diverse age range, including more mature women, and the other was inviting in more international Black students.[ix] Besides her time at Oberlin, an important experience that may have solidified Cole’s desire for diverse, international perspectives at Spelman, was her anthropological field work. Before her career in education, Cole participated in research in West Africa and the Caribbean, and her cross cultural, anthropological perspective and engagement of the African Diaspora most likely helped inform her values of diversity during her presidency.[x] As a college for Black women, Spelman College was a place of Black women’s intellectualism, and Cole discussed how Spelman was unique in this way due to the absence of racism and sexism in the classroom and the freedom for students to engage in intellectual processes without having to prove their intellect on the basis of being Black women. Cole’s desire to promote Black women’s education and intellectual contributions was her primary reason for accepting the role of president. She stated, “I didn’t want to be the president of a college...but this was a place that dared to say it educated African American women well.”[xi] Cole’s work to promote diverse and equitable education at Spelman College reflected her strong values and left a lasting legacy.
Johnnetta B. Cole’s roles in institutions of higher education are significant and weaved together by the direct connection between social justice, diversity, and Black women’s education. Her values and academic contributions were informed by her African American feminist scholar perspective and unique life experiences. One foundation for understanding her scholarly contributions and the work that she did to improve academic institutions is established through the letter that Cole wrote for Oberlin College’s incoming students, which demonstrates her values regarding education and action. A further reflection of Cole’s views on the purpose of education and how it ties into social change can be seen in the commencement address that she delivered at Gettysburg College in 2017:
As an ole saying puts it: ‘If you think education is expensive, think about the cost of ignorance’… Cesar Chavez, the legendary leader of Chicano farm workers, once said this: ‘The end of all knowledge should be service to others’... Each of us must do what we can to make our world better, more peaceful and more just (cite commencement address).[xii]
These insights make it explicit that Cole believes that education plays an important role in making the world a better place, which she demonstrated by foregrounding social justice, diversity, and Black women’s intellectualism during her scholarly career in education.
[i] Cole, Johnnetta B. Letter from Johnnetta B. Cole to Midge Wood Brittingham, Executive Director, Oberlin College Alumni Association, February 3, 1997. Oberlin College Archives.
[ii] Baumann, Roland M. Constructing Black Education At Oberlin College: A Documentary History. Ohio University Press, 2010, Athens OH, pp. 133.
[iii] Meredith, Peter. “Sister President.” Oberlin Alumni Magazine, Fall 2002, Oberlin College Archives.
[iv] Tryzelaar, Anneke. “Cole to Address Grads.” The Oberlin Review, ed. 23, sec. 25, 26 May 1995, Oberlin College Archives. http://obis.oberlin.edu/record=b1749264~S4.
[v] Cole, 1997.
[vi] Williams, Erica L. “The Practical Ethics of Johnnetta Betsch Cole: The Life of a Black Feminist Anthropologist.” Feminist Anthropology, vol. 1, no. 1, 6 April 2020, pp. 118-128. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1002/fea2.12006.
[vii] Williams, 2020.
[viii] Collins, Glen. “From Oberlin to Spelman Helm.” The Plain Dealer, 26 July 1987, Oberlin College Archives. https://scalar.oberlincollegelibrary.org/suffrage/media/from-oberlin-to-spelman-helm.
[ix] Cole, Johnnetta B. "The Black Scholar Interviews: Dr. Johnnetta B. Cole." The Black Scholar, vol. 19, no. 6, 1988, pp. 62. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41067596.
[x] Collins, 1987.
[xi] Meredith, 2002.
[xii] Cole, Johnnetta B. “Full Text: Johnnetta Betsch Cole Delivers Address at Commencement 2017.” The Gettysburgian, 1 July 2017. https://gettysburgian.com/2017/05/full-text-johnnetta-betsch-cole-delivers-address-at-commencement-2017/.