First African-American woman to lead Oberlin College overcomes gender and racial barriers
- Thanks to the person who inspired her to dream big when she was seven, she is now the president of a leading liberal arts college in the US
For Carmen Twillie Ambar, 15th president of Oberlin College in Ohio and the first African-American woman to lead the institution, her image of success came to her when she was seven years old.
Growing up in Arkansas in the US Deep South, an area that has planted difficult hurdles for African-Americans since her childhood, the 49-year-old school president was well aware of the barricades that stood between her and what she wanted to become. However, thanks to one person, she wasn’t ready to give up.
“My mum grew up in a small town and she, this little black girl in the South during segregation – [a time] when there were barriers for black people, especially black women – somehow decided to believe that she could get a doctorate at the university,” Ambar says, adding that her parents had three mouths to feed at the time. “It was a very important image for me because she was doing something that was really unheard of for black women.”
Ambar’s mother, a dance choreographer who went on to become the chair of the arts and theatre department at a university, became a living example of how “a life of the mind” and motherhood can coexist in the same human being.
As people often live by the paradigms they know, it is worth mentioning that Ambar herself was, too, mothering triplets when she came on board as the leader of the private liberal arts college in 2017.
“I think if you don’t see someone do it, you can think it’s easier than it is. [That’s why] sometimes it’s important to not only see the person be successful, but to also see the challenges , so you can realise that when it’s challenging for you – that’s okay, you can still do it,” she says.
