Inner Workings of the Institution
A Review of
Peril and Promise: College Leadership in Turbulent Times
Beverly Daniel Tatum
Hardcover: Basic Books, 2025
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Reviewed by John Hawthorne
Peril and Promise is not just a very timely book. It’s a book that I wish we’d had two or three years ago. As I read it, I wondered how much it would have helped state legislators, members of Congress, and the Trump administration if they could have benefitted from Beverly Daniel Tatum’s careful explanation of American higher education. In this book, she explores the importance of grasping the value of diversity and how the 2023 Supreme Court decision on affirmative action has impacted that. She offers insights on campus protests and speaks directly to the concerns of campus protests in the wake of the War in Gaza. Along the way, she provides a primer on faculty-administrative relations, the demographic challenges of a declining birthrate, the nature of free speech, and the challenges of college finance.
Tatum brings a unique perspective. A faculty member in psychology specializing in race, she became dean at Mount Holyoke, a women’s college in Massachusetts. From there, she served for thirteen years as president of Spelman, the preeminent HBCU women’s college located in Atlanta. After her initial retirement, she was asked to spend a year as interim president back at Mount Holyoke.
As it happens, Beverly Tatum and I are the same age and our careers run roughly parallel. Where her journey took her to single-sex liberal arts institutions, mine took me to Christian liberal arts institutions where I served as faculty member, senior administrator, and then faculty member again before my retirement. As much as the media and popular imagination center on elite private colleges or big football powerhouses, institutions like those we served paint a far more common picture of higher education.
She opens the book with a chapter drawn from her work as a psychology professor, exploring the significance of the ABCs: Affirming Identity, Building Community, and Cultivating Leadership. In contrast to the claims made about DEI being “politically correct” or improperly opening doors that shouldn’t be opened for underrepresented groups, she affirms the educational value of students feeling like they truly belong.
“The goals of my ABCs and the intent of DEI programs are similar – to create an environment where everyone can thrive and perform at their best. Why would anyone not want historically marginalized groups to find the support they need to achieve their personal best – unless the goal is to maintain the status quo of a society that has routinely benefited some groups over others?”
She recounts speaking at a commencement at New College of Florida a few short years before it was remade by Governor Desantis and conservative trustees. She contrasts the “war on woke” with the values present in her earlier work on intergroup dialogue and understanding. In a later chapter, she unpacks the arguments made by Students for Fair Admissions in their case against Harvard and North Carolina. She observes that in our post-affirmative action environment, there are still guarantees for the other form of special treatment: athletes, legacy admits, and children of major donors. In the meantime, the current administration is exploring admissions statistics which she describes as “demanding new quota-like counting of students”.
In exploring the campus protests surrounding the War in Gaza, she sympathizes with those presidents called before House Committees asking bad faith questions to score political points. While observing that many students were (and are) legitimately concerned about the bloodshed, particular definitions of antisemitism carried the day instead of a more nuanced approach befitting an educational institution. As she says, the solution to discomfiting speech is more speech.
As president she wasn’t afraid of conflict or protest. In a particularly compelling chapter, she describes an incident at Spelman shortly after Covid. As mask requirements were lifted, a group of immunocompromised students moved into the hallways of the administration building and stayed there for 25 days. While they didn’t occupy offices, President Tatum opted not to cross their protest, working from her home and holding meetings in the student center. She was able to maintain trust and avoid escalation and a satisfactory resolution was found. This stands in contrast to what happened at Columbia or UCLA, where force was used to make the students the enemy.
The book also provides a glimpse under the hood of any higher education institution. She explains the nature of tuition pricing and discounting, about fundraising and careful budgeting. She notes that the number of good ideas worthy of funding far exceed the budget available (a situation I lived through far too many times). Maintaining enrollment in the face of managing increased health insurance and utility costs while still trying to provide faculty and staff with adequate compensation is an ongoing balancing act.
She writes passionately about the need to keep students safe with appropriate mental health support and how the president responds when the worst-case scenario comes to pass. She describes the nature of shared governance as the president works with the board, the faculty, and the staff. She notes that there is always tension between deliberation on the one hand and the need for action on the other. It’s easy to get the balance wrong and she demonstrates what to do if that occurs.
Tatum approaches innovation in higher education through her commitment to institutional mission. A telling example involved the breakup of their athletic conference. Finding a new conference was daunting and would require major investment when funds were relatively scarce. Instead of moving forward, she encouraged Spelman to spend the same amount of money they were currently spending on a wellness initiative for the entire student body. Rather than supporting a small percentage of students, they remodeled facilities to create a new culture for all Spelman women.
At the end of the book, she asks a question about the college presidency. “Who in their right mind would want that job?” She answers her own question, “It is a fair question. It is undoubtedly a very challenging time to be a college president. There are understandable reasons why there is so much turnover at the top, the length of presidential service is getting steadily shorter and shorter. But each day there are indeed reasons for joy.”
One doesn’t need to be an aspiring college administrator to enjoy this book, although it might encourage some to think in that direction. But anyone who wants to understand what higher education is really like, as opposed to claims on social media or cable news, would benefit from reading Peril and Promise. Truly, there’s far more of the latter than the former.
John Hawthorne
John Hawthorne is a retired sociology professor and administrator who spent four decades in Christian higher education at five different institutions. He is the author of the recently releasedThe Fearless Christian Universitypublished by Eerdmans. He lives in the Denver suburbs.
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