Importance of a college degree

OAKLAND, CALIF.

The year was 1994, and Kaiser Permanente was negotiating to build a new hospital on the Laney College football field Oakland. Brenda Knight had nothing to do with Laney College or with Kaiser Permanente, the large California health maintenance organization. But, as an official with the Babe Ruth Baseball League, she had everything to do with athletics.

"Raising African Americans in the inner city, you have to do enough with them or you could lose them to the streets," Knight recalls. "I had this big company wanting to take the only tool I had away. I knew a voice could make a difference."

As Knight turns 50 this month, to say that she has made a difference would be to minimize her extraordinary odyssey from baseball mom to the top echelons of higher education.

Within weeks of her birthday, Knight celebrates two other milestones: First, in mid-August, she will receive her bachelor's degree. Then a month later, she will be sworn in as chair of the Association of Community College Trustees (ACCT), a nationwide organization representing more than 1,200 colleges, 6,500 trustees and 11 million students. It's a swirl ascent that has many in Oakland touting her as a formidable candidate for public office.

But for now, Knight says, it's the students she has in mind. "I want to be able to influence young minds to pursue higher learning," she said before a recent board meeting, looking quite the power broker in a crisp lavender suit. Nothing, she says, pleases her more than the frequent reports she gets about inspiring young women to go back to school.

As the first African American woman to head the 26-member ACCT board, Knight will be in a position both to upgrade the services the organization provides to trustees as well to strengthen ACCT's message: the important role community colleges play in expanding opportunity.

There can be no better example of that than her own story.

Knight started college at Humboldt State University in Arcata, Calif., after high school, but returned home after a few semesters to become a wife and mother--though "not necessarily in that order," she quips.

In the early 1980s, with three young sons, Knight became the first woman to coach a team in Oakland's Babe Ruth league, an amateur baseball and softball program with chapters nationwide.

She had watched her brothers play the game as a child and, what she didn't know, she quickly learned from books and videos--well enough to become coach of the year, then league president in the late 1980s.

When Oakland won a national championship, she was invited to the White House. By 1994, she had become commissioner for the entire East Bay district.

That same year, the Kaiser proposal set Knight off on a new path. Determined to save the Laney field, she decided to run for the community college board seat for East Oakland, a diverse district with a high concentration of Black and Latino voters.

Her grass-roots campaign wasn't seen as a serious threat, and her opponent, a Chinese American man who was board president, seriously underestimated her chances.

"I didn't have money. But I had all the baseball kids. I had all the parents. We were accustomed to wearing T-shirts. So we just wore `Elect Brenda Knight' T-shirts," she recalls. Knight also had strong connections with city officials, the Oakland A's management and the local NAACP.

One of her mentors was Bill Patterson, former manager of recreation services for Oakland and a local NAACP official.

"Brenda was one of the brightest of all of the people I met," he recalls. "Because of all the things her children were involved with, she played leadership roles in everything from PTA to you-name-it."

She defeated her opponent, the board president, by a 2-1 margin, joining the Peralta Community College Board just in time to cast the deciding "no" vote against the Kaiser deal.

"I've Waded sports for education. It was a sneak attack, using sports; and now it's a direct attack," she says.

But Knight quickly learned being a community college trustee was serious business: Peralta is a diverse district comprising four colleges--Laney, Vista Community College, Merritt College and the College of Alameda--with a combined population of around 25,000 full- and part-time students.

In June, the Peralta board of trustees unanimously approved a resolution opposing Ward Connerly's Racial Privacy Initiative, which would bar state government, including public schools, from collecting racial information.

"Community colleges are about accessibility, affordability, accountability and flexibility. We are about moving forward, not backwards in civil rights protection. If we were not able to use racial data, it would be difficult for us to provide effective outreach and educational programs," Knight says.

She said that job has already been made more difficult because of Proposition 209. "It hurts us tremendously. It makes us have to get more creative," she says. "What community colleges are able to do is assist the minorities, the African Americans, the Latinos, by preparing them through the community college doors first and (getting) them better prepared to go to the UC system."

With the relatively low rates of minority transfers to UC from the state's community colleges, Knight acknowledges that there's still along way to go.

RISING TO THE CHALLENGE

Knight applied herself to becoming an effective trustee with the same rigor that she applied to coaching baseball. In addition to reading, that meant attending orientations and seminars sponsored by the California Community College Trustees, the statewide branch of ACCT.

She stood out early on, says David Viar, CEO of CCCT. "I was immediately impressed with the questions she asked, with her vivacious, outgoing manner and her interest in being a better trustee."

If there's one area in which Knight needed no training, it was public speaking. Honed as a Sunday school teacher in her Baptist church from the age of 12, her engaging and forthright speaking style is clearly one reason for her success as a leader.

In her professional work as a Medicare specialist, she managed to make the intricacies of the system so entertaining for doctors that her seminars were jam-packed. When she set up her own consulting firm doing similar work, she realized her dream of owning a Mercedes within a year.

"I've always had the girl of the gab," she says. "I like speaking before 500 and 1,000 and 7,000 and 10,000 people. Many times I don't have a clue about what I'm going to say. I look up some times and say, `Okay, send it on, Lord.'"

A frequent speaker at community events, she is often heard calling herself "the girl from the hood who done good." And at a recent Laney College graduation, Knight amused the crowd with the line: "Whether you graduate cum laude, magna cum laude, or thank-theLordy, today is your day."

It was one such speaking engagement--at her alma mater, Castlemont High School in Oakland--that convinced Knight to complete her college degree.

She was exhorting students to continue their educations when a student asked, "What (degree) do you have?" The question, Knight recalls, "pierced me to the core. I wanted to not just talk the talk but to walk the walk."

Using her remaining credits from Humboldt, Knight began enrolling in classes at all four of the Peralta colleges, completing her associate's degree two years ago.

By that point, she was already involved with ACCT and had been appointed treasurer. "I did not want to receive the gavel of a national organization before I had my degree. It really became important that I was degreed down, especially because of my African American and minority younger sisters. The message I wanted them to see was that education was important to me."

When she enrolled in a business management program at nearby St. Mary's College, she showed up for the first class in a bright red suit, says classmate Angela Muse, 31, who recalls feeling intimidated. "I was like, `Who is this lady?' Once I started talking to her, she was so down-to-earth, age had nothing to do with it.

"Just her level of confidence has helped me build my confidence as far as speaking publicly, the way I carry myself," Muse says. "I know it's important just from looking at her and seeing the responses she gets. She's like a buddy to me, and yet a mentor, too."

After an 18-month program, both will graduate this month.

On the Peralta board, where Knight is serving a second term as president, her leadership style also generally wins people over.

"There are times when we have 3-4 votes," says Vice President Darryl Moore. "But they are rare. Brenda works for consensus."

She does the same with the college community as well, holding regular conversations with union leaders, student leaders, college staff and the public to make sure their concerns are heard.