UMCP professor’s diversity, equity, and inclusion work has included examining the experiences of high-achieving Black students in higher education and underrepresented minorities in STEM.
Sharon Fries-Britt, PhD, hadn’t intended to become a professor, thinking that after she earned her doctorate she would continue her work as an administrator in higher education. But by taking that leap, she has continued her diversity, equity, and inclusion work through her research.
“The way I’ve carved out my career and life is that the thread of doing work in the field of race, diversity, and equity has been my longest strand,” said Fries-Britt, professor of higher education and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP) who will be the keynote speaker at the University of Maryland, Baltimore’s (UMB) Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Black History Month Celebration on Feb. 7. The event will be held in person for the first time since 2020.
Fries-Britt plans to tie in her experience as an academic as well as her research in her speech titled “Unraveling the Threads of Social Inequality: Continuing King’s Legacy of Consciousness Raising and Racial Equity in America.”
Fries-Britt’s research examines the experiences of high-achieving Black students, faculty, and staff in higher education and underrepresented minorities in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. She recently completed work on a National Science Foundation grant studying Black students in STEM fields who transferred from community colleges to four-year institutions.
“My research aligns with a lot of the focus of UMB’s campus, my work with high-achieving Black students and our investment in the next generation of talent in the nation,” she said. “We need their leadership because we’re under-resourced in the nation in terms of our human capital in some of the fields on UMB’s campus such as medicine and other science fields.”
She also is in the second year of working with the Gates Foundation to develop a post-secondary strategy on advancing equity.
“In my own work nationally, we’ve been talking about the fact that in higher ed we tend to focus on individual levels of learning. I want to talk about individual and organizational levels of learning. That’s necessary if we’re going to advance equity,” Fries-Britt said. “It isn’t enough for you and me to learn individually in our own space and lives, but our systems, our organizations, and various sectors of our society have to be engaged.”
She said UMB and other institutions of higher education can best support students and employees of color by examining and acting on data but also listening to real-world experiences.
“It is important to be willing to hold space for those experiences when they are not the shining wonderful ones and when they are,” she said.
She added that institutions also should identify systemic ways in which opportunities are being limited and ensure that they are providing access such as roles on committees.
“How can we provide not just opportunity for folks but opportunity for us to learn from folks, opportunity for us to get better ideas and better solutions, better ideas for our campus, because we know when we have diverse teams, when we have diverse communities together, we actually have better outcomes all the way around,” she said.
Fries-Britt considers herself — and many others — a benefactor of King’s work.
“I’m a product of King’s dream,” she said. “In my generation, there are a lot of us who are. I feel like a personal benefactor of King’s legacy, his work, his push to the nation to level the playing field, to see the excellence in the Black community, to provide the opportunity structure for us to have access to real equality of opportunity. And so I have always, at every stage of my life and work, understood that there’s a piece of me that works and seeks to do well in my life on behalf of paying back for that work.”
She said she has been inspired by King’s writings on racial consciousness as well as nonviolence.
“How do you move through a movement like that and not be angry, and how do you contain that?” she said. “As I’ve read his work over the years, consciousness-raising work resonates with me, because that seems to be a thread in all his work. We are still doing deep consciousness raising and trying to advance equity in America and higher education.”
King’s work also has inspired her to mentor students.
“I mentor other people in my life to continue to pass that torch and legacy on, to feel like I am doing my part to live the best life that I can and open space for other people to have access to not just advance the Black community but to advance the larger community of humanity,” she said.
Fries-Britt is co-author and co-editor of the 2022 book “Building Mentorship Networks to Support Black Women: A Guide to Succeeding in the Academy,” in which she co-wrote a chapter with her former doctoral student at UMCP that delves into their mentoring relationship. Fries-Britt is working on a follow-up that examines peer-to-peer mentoring, partially inspired by students’ experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Her students have gone on to positions in higher education, government, and nonprofits.
“One of the greatest signs of being a good mentor is when your students are off doing far more than you’ve ever done, and I feel like so many of them are off doing incredible work. I’m proud of them. They’re helping to shape public policy in higher education and helping to move the needle around these topics,” she said.
Her approach to mentoring is to understand her students as people.
“I am first most interested in trying to understand who it is I’m about to work with more deeply and giving them the space as much as possible to learn that it’s OK to share with me their dreams,” she said. “I also know what it was like as a first-generation student to figure out how to navigate the Academy and be truly open to express my concerns, my desires, my need to understand without being evaluated. I like to create a space of comfort around that and demystify the process of what it means to be in the Academy and be a rigorous scholar.”
She added, “I say to my students all the time: ‘We have these roles and titles. I’m a professor, you’re a student right now, but they are very short-lived. You’re a colleague.’ ”
She has taught many courses over the years but said the one she consistently teaches is the professional seminar in higher ed for master’s students.
“I love that course because it’s a chance to shape young people coming into the field and introduce the field to folks,” she said.
One of her mentors at UMCP, where she earned her PhD in higher education, led her to the unexpected path of becoming a professor when he suggested she take a position at her alma mater, which she said she prayed and meditated about before deciding to do so.
“I wanted to change the narrative in the Academy,” she said, calling the decision “a risk I was willing to take.”