Dr. Donna J. Nicol

The Affirmative Action Trustee by Claudia Hampton
Winner of the 2024 Best Indie Book Award in History, Politics and Social Sciences
2025 PEN Open Book Award LongList

Black Woman on Board

Claudia Hampton, the California State University, and the Fight to Save Affirmative Action

Offers a rare view inside the university boardroom, uncovering the vital role Black women educational leaders have played in ensuring access and equity for all.

Black Woman on Board: Claudia Hampton, the California State University, and the Fight to Save Affirmative Action examines the leadership strategies that Black women educators have employed as influential power brokers in predominantly white colleges and universities in the United States. Author Donna J. Nicol tells the extraordinary story of Dr. Claudia H. Hampton, the California State University (CSU) system’s first Black woman trustee, who later became the board’s first woman chair, and her twenty-year fight (1974–94) to increase access within the CSU for historically marginalized and underrepresented groups. Amid a growing white backlash against changes brought on by the 1960s Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, Nicol argues that Hampton enacted “sly civility” to persuade fellow trustees, CSU system officials, and state lawmakers to enforce federal and state affirmative action mandates.

Black Woman on Board explores how Hampton methodically “played the game of boardsmanship,” using the soft power she cultivated amongst her peers to remove barriers that might have impeded the implementation and expansion of affirmative action policies and programs. In illuminating the ways that Hampton transformed the CSU as the “affirmative action trustee,” this remarkable book makes an important contribution to the history of higher education and to the historiography of Black women’s educational leadership in the post-Civil Rights era.

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Boydell and Brewer

Research Interests

  • History of African American Education (Specialization in 20th Century African American Higher Educational History)
  • Critical University Studies (Specialization in Conservative Philanthropy and the Corporatization of the Academy; Politics of Curriculum)
  • African American Women’s Educational Leadership and Teaching (Cultural-Identity Taxation; Identity and Pedagogy)

Members of the Chair at the Table Women in Academic Leadership Collective at the 4th Annual Working Symposium for Early-Mid Career Women of Color, Vanderbilt University. Dr. Nicol is a member of the collective which also hosts mentoring workshops for aspiring Black women academic leaders.  For more info: https://chairatthetable.net/

Current Research Projects

Race, Conservative Philanthropy and the Funding of the Academic Culture Wars (scholarly monograph)

Peer Reviewed Publications

  • Donna J. Nicol, (November 2021) “Chairing as Self-Care: Strategies for Combating the Cultural Identity Taxation Trap for Black Women Chairs (Special Issue on Black Women Department Chairs Discuss Academic Service, Leadership and Balance) Palimpsest: A Journal of Women, Gender and the Black International, Volume 10, Issue 2, 179-188.
  • Donna J. Nicol, “Conservative Philanthropy’s War on Ethnic and Gender Studies in U.S. Higher Education” (June 2020) HistPhil.org (History of Philanthropy).
  • Donna J. Nicol and Jennifer A. Yee. 2017. “Reclaiming Our Time: Women of Color Faculty and Radical Self-Care”, Feminist Teacher (Special Issue on Learning to Teach: Women of Color Reflect on Graduate School Pedagogical Praxis). 27, no. 2-3, 133-156.
  • Donna J. Nicol “Movement Conservatism and the Attack on Ethnic Studies”, 2013. Race, Ethnicity and Education. 16, no. 5, 653-672.
  • Donna J. Nicol. “Abolition” (2013). In Cortes, Carlos, E. and Golson, G. (eds). Encyclopedia of Multiracial America. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
  • Donna J. Nicol, “Teaching Agency and Analysis Using Racist and Sexist Imagery: Implications for Cultural Studies in the College Classroom”, 2012. Feminist Teacher, Vol. 22, no. 2, 89-107.
  • Donna J. Nicol and Jennifer A. Yee. “The Girls from Compton Go to College” (2012). In H. Skhott-Myhre and C. Richardson (eds.) Habitus of the ‘Hood, 159-188. London: Intellect Press.
  • Donna J. Nicol, “Women’s Studies” (2011). In Diner, Hasia (ed.) Encyclopedia of American Women’s History. New York: Facts on File.

Public Scholarship (Publications and Lectures)