Dr. Khalilah L. Brown-Dean

At Quinnipiac University, she is the associate provost for faculty affairs. She is a political science professor. She hosts a radio show and podcast for CPR. She gets honored — a lot — most recently by Diverse Magazine as one of its 25 most influential women in higher education.

But how does she do it all? Her commitment to her community and passion for political science and identity politics all began in her hometown of Lynchburg, Virginia.

A Shining Voice In Her Community

Brown-Dean is a Southern girl, having grown up in the Bible Belt of the South, where socially conservative Protestant Christianity plays a prominent role in society.

By: David Matos

Lynchburg is also the birthplace of Jerry Falwell Sr., an American Baptist pastor, televangelist and conservative activist, and Liberty University, the world’s largest evangelical university known for starting the moral majority movement, which sought to infuse religion into politics.

Brown-Dean never entirely fit into the status quo of the ideologies of her hometown but it did teach her the importance of advocating for innovation and the community as a whole.

“In some ways, I totally did not fit in that space at all,” Brown-Dean said. “And in other ways, everything that I am is because of where I came from.

“It taught me what it means to be an outsider. It taught me what it meant to build community with intention. And it taught me about the responsibility that we have wherever we find ourselves in life, the responsibilities that we have to the community and to give back.”

Brown-Dean gave her first public speech at eight years old when the city council wanted to put a fire station in the middle of her neighborhood.

Because her family taught her that she was responsible to her community, she wanted to speak on behalf of the kids because adding the fire station would mean that they would take away their playground, raising the question, “What about us?”

“I come from a family that is very community-engaged since birth,” Brown-Dean said. “We were taught that you have an obligation to community and, however, you define community, if community is family, it’s your neighborhood; however, you define community, there’s a connection there.”

Brown-Dean explained that two words she would use to describe herself are “committed” and “unapologetic.”

She said that commitment had followed her through every aspect of her journey, not just her professional life. She’s unapologetic because, during much of her life, people often told her that she wasn’t good enough, didn’t fit in or wasn’t what people expected.

“I’m a very passionate person,” Brown-Dean said. “I’m driven by purpose … I’ve always shown up in spaces where people didn’t think I belonged. And I’m at the point of being unapologetic of not apologizing for or feeling less than because of someone else’s limited view of what’s possible. It’s a long time to get there. It’s not easy to be there. But I think it goes back to the commitment because I think the calling on my life, the purpose of my life, is bigger than naysayers.”

Brown-Dean said her family has collectively been great role models in her commitment to education and community.

Her grandfather, for example, dropped out of school in sixth grade to help care for his family. Although he didn’t have a formal education, he worked hard every day so his children, grandchildren and great-grandkids would have access to education.

“What do I have to complain about?” Brown-Dean said. “I didn’t have to go into the field and work all day. I didn’t get pulled out of school to care for a family. So my family, collectively, keeps me grounded. When things seem overwhelming, they remind me what matters.”

Aside from Brown-Dean’s family, poet and author Maya Angelou is a significant inspiration for her, and his poetry got her through some of the most challenging moments. Growing up, Brown-Dean often read Angelou’s poems while competing in public speaking and pageants for scholarship money.

“I was able to pay for and go to college because of her work,” Brown-Dean said.

Her guidance counselor once told Brown-Dean that she wasn’t college material.

“I believed her, I felt like she must know what she’s talking about,” BrownDean said. “I’m a first-generation kid; if she’s telling me this, why try? And I realized not only was she wrong, but it was dangerously wrong. It was the impact of telling kids that they don’t have worth and they don’t have a future.”

However, that didn’t stop her from pushing forward and exceeding expectations in her journey as a professional and community leader.

“But I carry that as a reminder of what’s possible,” Brown-Dean said. “I carry it as a reminder of how students like you who I can have in a class or read something they wrote and get inspired by them. And think about what we are created for the people in our labs now but for those yet to come.”

A Shift In Plans

Brown-Dean graduated from the University of Virginia with a bachelor of arts in government in 1998, where she spent her first three years as an undergrad preparing for law school. However, it wasn’t until three days before the start of her senior year that she decided that wasn’t want to do it.

While Brown-Dean was studying at Virginia, she did a community service drive to get more people registered to vote.

She recalls one gentleman from the neighborhood avoiding her table because he couldn’t vote, which was a groundbreaking idea for her then.

“I was naive,” Brown-Dean said. “I was like, ‘Oh come, it’s your civic duty as an American,’ and he kept saying, ‘I can’t vote.’ And again, naive and thinking, ‘Of course, you can. You’re 18; you can vote.’ Finally, he was so frustrated with me. He said, ‘I can’t vote because I have a felony,’ and just walked away. I was a government and politics major and had never heard of this. It didn’t make sense to me.”

From this experience, Brown-Dean learned about felon disenfranchisement, which meant that based on the state you lived in, you couldn’t vote if you had a felony, you couldn’t vote.

At the time in Virginia, if your check bounced, it counted as a felony, and you would lose the right for the rest of your life. For example, as a student, if you bought a certain number of textbooks with a check but the student didn’t have enough money in your bank account, and the check bounced, it would count as a felony, losing your right to vote indefinitely.

“In Virginia, it meant if you had a felony, you would lose the right for the rest of your life,” Brown-Dean said. “That’s what you did when you were 18. I’m not making any judgments, but I did some things at 18 that I don’t do now. Right? So the rest of your life didn’t matter what you did, didn’t matter. If you went to school and got a good job, it didn’t matter. For the rest of your life, the state of Virginia told you, you weren’t a full citizen.”

From this experience with the gentleman at the community service drive, she decided not to go to law school but instead get her Ph.D. in political science at Ohio

State University, graduating in 2003.

She became passionate about shifting access to democracy, including voting rights, civic engagement and punishment, which shaped her career as an educator and community leader.

“This experience with this gentleman who I didn’t know, never saw again, stuck with me and I would bring it up like my classes on American politics or my classes on public opinion,” Brown-Dean said.

“Because the message was Black and brown people just don’t care about democracy. They don’t care about politics. And so they don’t vote. It’s because they don’t care. And it overlooks the fact that people have fought and died in this country for the ability to do that.”

From College Grad To Educator

This year marks Brown-Dean’s 20th year as a professor in political science and 12th year working at Quinnipiac. BrownDean said becoming a full professor has been a fantastic accomplishment in her career because only 4% of full professors are Black women, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Brown-Dean is only the fourth Black professor in Quinnipiac’s history to be a full professor.

“Being a part of Quinnipiac, for me, has also been an amazing opportunity to stretch and to grow, to learn,” Brown-Dean said. “A lot of my work, whether I was a professor here or now working as associate provost, has also been about connecting Quinnipiac to the broader communities … helping to create those connections because the same way I think in my life that we have an obligation to give to others, I think as an institution of higher learning as a community of learners, we have that obligation as well.”

In 2019, Brown-Dean published her book “Identity Politics in the United States.”

In this pioneering book, she provides an engaging discussion of forms of politicized identity concerning citizenship and democracy in the U.S., such as issues on race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and religion, making sense of the current political divisions in the U.S. In addition, the book allows the reader to understand the problems within the realm of identity politics, leading a pathway to a potential solution.

“At my core, I’m an educator,” BrownDean said. “But being an educator doesn’t mean that I think I have all the information or all the answers. My belief is, we’re all here to learn. And we’re all here to teach.

I’m a political nerd. I’m fascinated by all of it … what I argue in the book is that the very founding of this country is about identity … I wanted to sort of deconstruct public debate. Still, I also wanted us to think about a path forward. We can complain, we can disagree, but then what? And so I wanted that historical context, the current political space, policy space, to think about what meaningful democracy looks like.”

Leaving A Meaningful Legacy

Brown-Dean hopes that her legacy is that she created opportunities and affirmed other people in the community. Her ambition lies not in her future job opportunities or the titles she earns but in how she made people feel and helped create something more significant than any of us with her commitment to the community.

“When I come to the end of my journey,” Brown-Dean said. “Whenever that comes, however, it comes. I want to be able to look back and say, ‘I made the most of every opportunity I had’ and ‘I learned from people that I was around and helped people feel connected and engaged and I helped us to understand not just to see each other, but understand and appreciate each other.’ That’s the connection for me, the people who poured into me and those I helped and supported.”