African-born Female Professionals in American Higher Education

This book documents the experiences of African-born female professionals (faculty and administrators) at colleges and universities in the United States. The study explores the factors that motivate African-born women to immigrate to and extend their stay in the United States beyond completion of their education; factors they perceive as constraint on their quest for self-empowerment and identity as foreign students, college instructors, and/or administrotors, and parents; and factors that have enabled them to adapt to their host culture and achieve their educational and professional goals even though they had to contend with multiple challanges associated with living in the U.S. as Black women. Eight women currently or previously serving as faculty or administrors were interviewed for this study. Participants were originally from Benin, Camerun, Congo, Ghana, Mali, Nigeria, and Tanzania. Six of them were faculty and three were administrators. Ten themes emerged from the study: family-centered cultural orientation, multicultal perspectives, coping with transition and culture shock, preservation of cultural heritage, and American higher education culture.