Aisha Francis was named president and CEO of Boston’s Benjamin Franklin Cummings Institute of Technology in 2021, becoming the first woman to hold that position since the institution’s founding in 1908. That distinction is one of the reasons Francis is among the Boston Globe’s 50 Tech Power Players for 2023.
Francis’ path from doctorate in English to head of Franklin Cummings Tech, as the school is familiarly known, is like an outcome of if/then code. “The life I have now was very much seeded during my time at Vanderbilt,” Francis says. “I went into my graduate studies with my eyes wide open.” Realizing the scarcity of tenure track positions, she sought a path that was “both optimistic and realistic” and that could lead to nontraditional academic roles. One of those, a grant-writing job, took her to Boston in 2005, where she now lives with her husband, son and daughter.
Franklin Cummings Tech serves largely first-generation college students from the greater Boston area. Most of the students identify as men of color, though increasing numbers of women are applying. “Our mission is to deliver technical and trade education that leads to economic advancement,” Francis says. Teaching students to gather and process information—or “learn how to learn,” as Francis puts it—is a key goal of the curriculum, preparing them for the continuous updating of training and credentials necessary in a tech career.
Francis grew up in Nashville, spending time on the campuses of Fisk University, where she earned her undergraduate degree summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, Tennessee State University and Meharry Medical College. Many of her family had graduated from HBCUs, so she understood the value of a post-secondary education.
Though she had a multigenerational connection to Vanderbilt—her grandmother was a child psychiatric nurse, her grandfather worked at the Veterans Administration Hospital on campus and a cousin earned a doctorate at VU in the 1980s—she doesn’t remember coming to campus often until cross-registering for a Caribbean Literature class as an undergraduate. Later, she connected with various campus-based communities as a graduate student.
“What I gained from the mentorship of my dissertation adviser, Dr. Sheila Smith-McKoy, and from spending time pursuing focused education and research in the English department is the ability to synthesize disparate information and to present that information in a way that makes folks take notice,” Francis says. “That is a skill set that I draw on every day, and it has served me well.”
Her frequent op-eds certainly attract notice, including a 2020 Elle piece co-written with Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts in support of the CROWN Act. Francis’ background in English also manifests itself in her downtime.
“I always have three or four books in rotation,” she says. This tech leader prefers physical books and is in two book clubs. “I love reading in community, I love talking about books with folks,” she says. “It’s a wonderful way to find common cause with other people.”
—MiChelle Jones