COLUMBIA — It’s a tense time for higher education in the United States, but that’s nothing new for Roslyn Clark Artis.
Benedict College’s president is used to turmoil.
She took over the historically Black school in 2017, as it was facing financial strain that drew sanctions from its accreditors. By the time her administration had repaired that situation — with program cuts and staffing changes that made her far from the most popular person on campus — the calendar had flipped to 2020.
That year’s onset of the COVID-19 pandemic brought a new crisis, as Artis worked to keep her school open and hold a rare in-person graduation ceremony when most schools were going virtual.
And then, not long after the pandemic had cleared, Donald Trump was elected president a second time, triggering massive changes in the landscape of academia.
It means Artis is back in her “comfort zone” of leading Benedict through yet another upheaval.
“If we’re never not in crisis, I suppose I’m going to get fired,” she quipped to The Post and Courier inside the school’s administration building.
It was named after her in 2024, around the same time the college’s board gave her a seven-year contract extension. Artis is utterly committed to the school, which she refers to as “her,” a nod to its abolitionist founder Bathsheba A. Benedict.
But before Artis became the first woman in that office, and before her name was on the side of a building, there was a time when she didn’t know what an HBCU was.
Born in West Virginia, she was one of just a few Black students in her schools growing up.
So it was somewhat of a shift when she got a scholarship to West Virginia State University, near Charleston, W.Va., the state’s only historically Black school.
“When I arrived there, there were all these people of color,” she recounted. “And I was confused, because I’d never been around that many people of color in one place.”
