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一
What Michelle Can Teach Us

Throughout this long, tense election, everyone has focused on the presidential candidates and how they'll change America. Rightly so. But selfishly, I'm more fascinated by Michelle Obama and what she might be able to do, not just for this country, but for me as an African-American woman. As the potential First Lady, she would have the world's attention. And that means that for the first time people will have a chance to get up close and personal with the type of African-American woman they so rarely see.

Usually, the lives of black women go largely unexamined. The prevailing theory seems to be that we're all hot-tempered single mothers who can't keep a man and, according to CNN's "Black in America," documentary, those of us who aren't street-walking crack addicts are on the verge of dying from AIDS. As writer Rebecca Walker put it on her Facebook page: "CNN should call me next time they really want to show diversity and meet real black women that nobody seems to talk about.''

Like Walker, I too know more than my share of black women who have little in common with the black female images I see in the media. My "sistafriends" are mostly college educated, in healthy, productive relationships and have a major aversion to sassy one-liners. They are teachers, doctors and business owners. Of course, there are those of us who never get the chance to pull it together. And we accept and embrace them—but their stories can't and shouldn't be the only ones told.
Yet pop culture continues to hold a very unevolved view of African-American women. Take HBO's new vampire saga "True Blood." Even in the world of make-believe, black women still can't escape the stereotype of being neck-swirling, eye-rolling, oversexed females raised by our never-married, alcoholic mothers. Where is Claire Huxtable when you need her?

These images have helped define the way all black women are viewed, including Michelle Obama. Before she ever gets the chance to commit to a cause, charity or foundation as First Lady, her most urgent and perhaps most complicated duty may be simply to be herself.

It won't be easy. Since her emergence on the national scene, Obama has been deemed radical, divisive and the adjective that no modern-day black woman can live without: angry. Thankfully, so far, she's endured these demeaning accusations with a smile and shrug—at least in public. But if she does end up in the White House, continuing to dial back her straightforward, vibrant personality isn't the answer. In the same way that Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Kennedy and Hillary Clinton each redefined what it meant to be First Lady, Michelle will forge her own path. Not only will she draw the usual criticisms, but she'll be open to some new ones too. I eagerly await the public reaction if Sasha and Malia ever sport cornrows or afro puffs on the South Lawn. And if Michelle decides to champion a program that benefits black youth, will her critics slam her fo

r being too parochial?

二
A Global Headhunt

When next year's crop of high-school graduates arrive at Oxford University in the fall of 2009, they'll be joined by a new face: Andrew Hamilton, the 55-year-old Yale provost who will become Oxford's vice chancellor—a position equivalent to university president in the United States, with responsibility for the day-to-day running of the august institution.

Hamilton, a distinguished chemist who took on a senior administrative post at Yale in 2003, isn't the only educator crossing the pond. Others include Louise Richardson, who was executive dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard before her appointment as principal of St. Andrews, Scotland's oldest university (and Prince William's alma mater). Schools in France, Egypt, Singapore and elsewhere have also recently made top-level hires from abroad.

As the trend suggests, higher education is big business these days, and like many businesses it's gone global. Until recently, few schools recruited across borders: "you really had to pick through the evidence to find examples," says Ken Kring, head of the education practice at Korn/Ferry International, the world's largest corporate recruiter. And the talent flow isn't quite universal. High-level personnel tend to head in one direction only: outward from the United States.
One reason is that American schools still tend not to look abroad. When the board of the University of Colorado searched for a new president to oversee its three campuses and 52,000 students, for example, it wanted a leader familiar with the state government, the source of a hefty chunk of the school's yearly budget. "We didn't do any sort of global consideration," says Patricia Hayes, the board's chair. They ultimately picked Bruce Benson, a 69-year-old Colorado businessman and well-connected political activist who is likely to excel at the main task of modern university presidents: fund-raising.

It turns out that Yankees have a virtual lock on that skill set. When the University of Pennsylvania needed a new dean for its prestigious Wharton business school, it invited Korn/Ferry to include candidates from outside the United States, especially from Europe and East Asia. But "there were fewer [global options] than we would have liked," says Kring. The school ended up picking an American.

"Fund-raising is a distinctively American thing," says John Isaacson of Isaacson, Miller, an executive-search firm that works mostly with universities and nonprofits. This strength is largely a product of experience and necessity, since U.S. schools rely heavily on philanthropy. At Harvard last year, philanthropy made up 40 percent of the total budget. (About 33 percent of that came from endowment payouts.) At Cambridge the comparable figure was 10 percent, and at the University of Melbourne it was just 6 percent. Many European universities, meanwhile, are still almost wholly dependent on government funding.

But stat

e support is falling rapidly in many countries. In Britain, for example, government contributions dropped from $14,000 per student in 1990 to $9,000 in 2006, according to Universities UK. This decline has made fund-raising an increasingly necessary ability among administrators, and has hiring committees clamoring for Americans (or at least professionals with experience in the United States).