Dr. Eboni M. Zamani-Gallaher is a renowned community college leadership scholar. She has eight books to her credit as an author or editor, which include Rethinking LGBTQIA Students and Collegiate Contexts: Identity, Policies, and Campus Climate and Working with Students in Community Colleges: Contemporary Strategies for Bridging Theory, Research, and Practice. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Council for the Study of Community Colleges Senior Scholar Award, and she was honored by the National Institute for the Study of Transfer Students with the Transfer Catalyst Award.
Dr. Eboni M. Zamani-GallaherPhoto by Ayinde Rochon
Zamani-Gallaher’s steadfast focus on access and success for the most underprivileged students and her passionate advocacy for diversity, equity, and inclusion issues in the community college space have earned her one more accolade — Zamani-Gallaher is the 2022 recipient of the Diverse Champions Award.
Currently, Zamani-Gallaher serves as professor of higher education and community college leadership and director of the Office for Community College Research and Leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Zamani-Gallaher also currently serves as executive director of the Council for the Study of Community Colleges.
Despite her esteemed place in the academy, it is clear when speaking with her and with those who know her well that Zamani-Gallaher’s heart is never far from her humble beginnings growing up on the South Side of Chicago. She says her parents went to college but did not complete a degree, not having “the resources or the support to be completers, and so, they fell within that … kind of neglected majority of some college and no degree, like so many. But I had a college-going culture in my home.”
Zamani-Gallaher credits her mother, Mary Ella House, with getting her started on her educational journey in particular — Zamani-Gallaher says her mother was known in the neighborhood as “Miss English” because of the expansive English vocabulary she used. That in turn prompted Zamani-Gallaher to expand her own vocabulary in her childhood days.
Zamani-Gallaher says she was teased as a child due to her own expansive vocabulary. Others would tell her, “People don’t talk like that.” Her response was simply, “‘it’s how I talk.’ But that’s also because my first teacher was my mother, and my mother was a lover of words. And so, in many regards, I feel like she was a scholar in her own right, in terms of how she crystallized arguments, how she synthesized things ….”
Zamani-Gallaher credits her mother with exposing her to the arts, including classical music, jazz, and plays. “While we didn’t have a whole lot, she really tried to open up the world for me. So the model was … you’re not just being made to be ready for this neighborhood, or the city or the state, it’s you’re being made to get ready for the world … ready to compete.”
