Marcelle Haddix is distinguished dean’s professor of literacy, race, and justice in the Reading and Language Arts Department in the Syracuse University School of Education. She has developed a reputation for effectively leading diverse groups with a variety of views, competing interests, and difficult issues.
For instance, she was the elected chair of the University Senate, a guiding body of about 150 elected members. Upheaval and uncertainty around race, social justice, the Covid-19 pandemic, and other issues arose during her term. It put her in the middle of difficult debates among colleagues, her employer, and students.
When her two-year term as chair of the Senate ended in April, SU’s News Service reported that Chancellor Kent Syverud said: “Our University is often blessed to have the right person in the right role at the right time. This is true even when the work turns out to be more onerous and different than anybody planned. And I really think that this is the case for what Professor Haddix has done for all of us the last two years. I just want to acknowledge that this is her last meeting, presiding over a full meeting of the Senate. I’m just so grateful to you for your leadership. It’s what this University needed.”
Besides being elected to chair the University Senate, Haddix is a nationally recognized scholar in literacy education and just finished a five-year term as president of the National Literacy Research Association. She also just finished a term as an inaugural co-director of SU’s Lender Center for Social Justice, succeeded by James Rolling. She is a co-founder of Cafe Sankofa Cooperative, 2323 South Salina St., and of the Sankofa Reproductive Health & Healing Center. One Syracuse program near and dear to her personal and professional goals is Writing Our Lives. Haddix founded Writing Our Lives shortly after her family moved to Syracuse in 2008. The program supports creativity and writing among middle-school and high-school students.
I don’t think everyone knows what a University Senate is, so I have a silly question: What’s the University Senate?
I don’t think it’s a silly question. (Laughter) Because, you’re right, people don’t have a good sense.
We have a University Senate, as opposed to a faculty senate. The University Senate is made up of faculty, students, staff, and administration members. Faculty members are elected by their colleagues in each of the various schools and colleges. Shared governance in higher education is important, and it’s fraught with all kinds of critical and complicated issues. Who makes the decisions? Who decides?
Let’s just take this pandemic and Covid. Who makes decisions about teaching in person? Should someone dictate that they have to go into the classroom and how do they do it and what are the protocols?
As a University Senate, we try to enact a model of shared governance. That’s the ideal. The Senate brings together diverse perspectives and roles and positions to guide the work of the university. I would say that in good faith our university leaders, from the chancellor on down, value faculty and student goals and interests.
So the Senate is where all of those voices and people converge. We have 17 standing committees and a number of ad hoc committees. The chair is elected by their colleagues to basically guide the agenda for what the Senate will do.
What’s your advice to be an effective leader?
I think, one, listening. And it’s not listening for what you want to hear, but being able to hear what people have to say.
If you’re an effective listener and you really are opening yourself up, it humbles you because you hear the accolades and the compliments and the positive feedback, but you’re also able to hear the critical feedback, the hard situations.
Second, I think wellness and taking care of self is important. I think what people have commented to me about my leadership, particularly of the Senate, was that I brought a certain calm. People can come to you with a situation really stressed, really dramatic, really charged about it. You can take on that energy, but I don’t think that’s productive.
My thing has always been to try to maintain a calm. For me, that starts with my own wellness, my own self-care. I’m a certified yoga teacher, and I teach yoga classes. I have a very strong ritual in the morning. I start my day with walking, with reading, with sitting out on my porch, gardening. There are certain things that I do to center myself and ground myself, so that I’m able to receive all the various energies that are going to come my way in the myriad roles that I have occupied over the years.
If you’re not grounded and you’re not centered, your leadership is just going to be all over the place.
I led the National Literacy Research Association during a time of a lot of challenges. I had to meet people where they are. A leader creates space for people to show up as they are. That’s what real inclusion is.
How do you create an organization where people can show up as they are? It goes back to the point around listening. A leader is able to do that. I know as a leader that I have certain strengths, and I have things that I can do very well. But I’m also ready to say when there are things that I know I can’t do. As a leader, I rely on a community approach, so that we’re collaborative, that we’re working together.
That’s one of the other things that is important. I’ve been afforded all of these opportunities over the years, and it’s important that I support other people in their journey to be in leadership roles.
If a door was open for me, I need to keep it open behind me for others to come in.
I don’t want to be the only Black woman leader. I’m on various boards and organizations here in Syracuse. If I’m the only Black person sitting at that table, that’s not a space for me. I feel like we need to be thinking about how we change so that we’re thinking about race, we’re thinking about gender, we’re thinking about location, all the various identity markers that people bring. Cause I don’t want to be the only one.
Some people don’t want to share the limelight or they always want to be in a position where they’re the only ones who are seen. That’s not a leader.
I have felt most comfortable being in the background, doing the work, and letting others be in the limelight.
What qualities do you see in leaders that you admire?
They are principled and honest.
I look for people who are transparent and value transparency.
They seem approachable and accessible.
I admire people that aren’t afraid to roll up their sleeves. They’re working with people, not just dictating or delegating.
For example, I think about our community garden at Cafe Sankofa Cooperative. It’s beautiful. If you’ve started a garden, you know there was the digging out, keeping the weeds out, building the beds, all of that. That’s work.
Sometimes people want to come when the garden is flourishing and not be there when you’re in the weeds and the mud and the thick of it.
So, when I look at the leaders that I admire, those are people that you see at the times that aren’t so glamorous. They’re not just looking for the photo op when it’s time to accept the awards and the accolades.
Leaders I admire have substance.
In a medical field, we think about people who have bedside manner. It describes how they communicate and relate with other people. Good leaders take the time to know people, to work with them, to find out about their family, their background, to care.
Effective leaders are caring. They have empathy. They look out for people. They step in thinking about people’s health and wellness. Do you need to rest? Do you need to step back from this? Do you need to reset? Any meeting or any event, whether it’s a Writing Our Lives workshop, to a class that I’m teaching, to a meeting that I’m running, I think about people’s human needs. I look for this in leaders.
Those are qualities that I see in leaders that I admire and that I aspire to enact in my own leadership.
Let me flip my question: What attributes do you see in poor leaders?
I think the people that want it to be all about them. You are profiling me, but I feel like there’s a whole host of people that are coming into roles and spaces with me. I always say I stand on the shoulders of many great women and people who came before me. I am not the first one, and I will not be the last, and I am not the only.
Poor leaders try to assert: This is my accomplishment, me and me alone.
That to me is in poor taste. It negates any historical precedent. Especially if you say that your leadership is embedded with justice and equity aims, you can never just be you alone. It has to be in solidarity with others and in partnership.
What’s your advice to lead disparate groups of people, especially when you don’t have formal institutional authority?
Leaders who are most effective have taken the time to build and establish relationships and establish rapport.
There has to be some trust. People have to know that you are committed to the goals personally, that there’s a personal investment. If I’m just doing this work, because it gives me a title and it doesn’t affect me personally, or I haven’t taken this issue on as if it’s also mine, then I think I would question that person. Why are you doing this work? What’s your commitment to it?
When I talk about transparency, I think people need to see and know why you’re committed to this issue, why you’re involved with this work. When I think about leaders, I always ask: What’s driving them? Why are they here?
Tell me about a time when your leadership was tested and how you handled it.
I think one of the hardest was during my leadership of the Literacy Research Association.
The organization was shifting. It’s a nonprofit, and there were questions around what you can publicly advocate for or say that you’re about. We’re a leading literacy research organization in the world, but who are we? What is our identity?
My leadership was bringing some of those questions to the fore. We were changing in terms of becoming a more racially diverse organization with a younger group of scholars wanting to do work that is justice oriented. How do you define that and how do you understand that?
When an organization is changing from kind of the old guard to the new, that transition period can be tough. I was viewed as a younger scholar, I guess, though I don’t consider myself to be young. But I was younger than some of the other leaders. There was a feeling that I hadn’t proven myself.
Change often does not happen without some struggle and sacrifices. Sometimes in the work that you do, you’re not going to see the outcome or the change while you’re in it, but you see what you’re cultivating to manifest maybe years later.
We certainly are seeing those changes now. But it is hard, because while you are in it, you have the naysayers and people challenging you. Then Covid happened and the racial unrest that we experienced as a nation happened. Now everyone wants to make a statement. We can say we’re this, and we can do this kind of work, but just a few years ago the organization wasn’t ready.
When you’re a leader that has goals and ideas and vision that the organization is not ready for, that disconnect can be challenging to work through.
The weekly “Conversation on Leadership” features Q&A interviews about leadership, success, and innovation. The conversations are condensed and edited. To suggest a leader for a Conversation, contact Stan Linhorst at StanLinhorst@gmail.com. Last week featured Matt Godard, CEO and founder of Café Kubal. He advised: “You have to lead with other people’s wellbeing in mind. Leaders eat last.”
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