A university president I respect recently recommended that I revisit Derrick Bell’s book Confronting Authority: Reflections of an Ardent Protester. The timing could not have been more precise. The timing could not have been more fitting. The suggestion came just as I stepped back from the presidential track—after six intense, successful years as dean and provost, and many more spent navigating the complex game of higher education leadership—only to realize that mastery was beginning to feel like compromise. Bell’s book, written decades ago, speaks directly to that reckoning. It is not about strategy or self-help. It is about conscience, courage, and the quiet cost of integrity when the system you serve begins to test your soul.

The Courage to Walk Away

Bell wrote Confronting Authority to explain why he so often found himself in confrontation with institutions that professed justice but practiced exclusion. He described his repeated decisions to resign from positions of power when the price of staying became too high. Long before his more widely known protest at Harvard Law School, Bell had already made a career out of principled defiance. His reflections were not meant to glorify rebellion but to reveal the deep, uneasy faith that drives it.

He called himself an “ardent protester” because he understood that protest was not a single act but a vocation. It required both devotion and endurance. His tone in the book is calm, almost pastoral, as he explains that his protests were never acts of anger but of love for the institutions that failed to live up to their ideals. That paradox defines moral leadership. You challenge what you still hope can be redeemed. You walk away not out of bitterness but to preserve your belief that integrity still matters.

Reading Bell’s thoughts after stepping away from the executive academic leadership track feels like listening to someone narrate the quiet conflict I have been living. For almost 20 years I have led successfully, advancing diversity, stabilizing budgets, and managing complex politics. Yet behind the polished language of progress, but in recent years I felt the dissonance Bell described, the sense that genuine justice could not survive the bureaucratic filters of institutional comfort.

The Game Behind the Game

Bell understood the choreography of power. He wrote that institutions often respond to protest not by confronting injustice but by institutionalizing it. They form committees, create reports, and celebrate symbolic gestures while quietly and carefully avoiding structural change. He warned that bureaucracy is the most effective form of resistance because it appears rational and orderly. It replaces moral urgency with process.

In executive leadership, I have witnessed that pattern repeat itself endlessly. When difficult truths are raised, they are met not with debate but with delay. You are told that the timing is not right, the politics are bad, that the issue is too “complex,” that progress must come slowly, even by leaders who themselves come from historically marginalized communities. The message is unmistakable: confrontation is unprofessional, and professionalism requires silence. Bell saw through that performance of progress, and his essay challenged readers to do the same.

He wrote that authority depends on our cooperation. Systems survive not only through rules but through our willingness to comply with them. To confront authority, then, is to withdraw consent. It is to refuse the illusion that participation equals influence. As I read those lines, I recognized the quiet transactions that can define administrative life—the moments when you are required to edit truth, delay a decision, or soften a stance in the name of consensus. Each small concession may feel harmless until you look back and realize how much of yourself you have negotiated away. I never want to feel that way.

When Success Feels Like Surrender

For much of my career, I equated success with service. I believed that the higher I rose, the more change I could enact. Bell’s essay forced me to confront the limits of that logic. He argued that power without principle corrodes the very reform it claims to pursue. If you become too skilled at managing authority, you risk becoming its defender rather than its challenger.

He admitted that protest often feels futile. Institutions continue, CEOs, superintendents, presidents, and provosts change— and policy statements outlive their promises. Yet he insisted that protest is necessary precisely because it disrupts the quiet comfort that allows injustice to persist. That disruption does not always yield victory, but it prevents moral decay. Reading those words, I realized that staying in a role for the sake of influence is a form of surrender.

Leaving the presidential track was not a rejection of leadership but a return to purpose. It allowed me to breathe again, have the gift of time to reflect without calculating consequences that would be meted out to me, to remember why I entered education in the first place. Bell’s clarity helps me see that freedom begins where ambition ends. Success, if it demands silence and complicity to illiberal values, is not success at all.

Confronting Authority in Every Room

Bell’s reflections transcend academia. He recognized that every institution—corporate, political, educational—creates rituals to protect itself from accountability. They invite dialogue but publicly and privately punish dissent. They praise courage in theory but prefer compliance in practice. His essay challenges us to recognize how quickly inclusion becomes performance when those in power fear losing control and their paychecks.

I have seen that dynamic repeatedly. Leaders who once championed equity become risk-averse once they hold office. They defend the system they once criticized because now it defines their legitimacy. Bell understood that cycle and refused to participate in it. His willingness to confront authority, even when isolated, became a kind of moral template.

As I reread his words, I thought about the quiet forms of protest available to every leader of color navigating predominantly white institutions (PWIs). Sometimes protest is not a press conference or resignation letter. Sometimes it is the decision to stop pretending. It is the refusal to sanitize truth for the comfort of those who prefer their conscience untroubled.

The Cost of Refusal

Bell wrote honestly about the loneliness of protest. He admitted that those who stand apart often lose more than they gain. They lose status, allies, and the illusion of belonging. Yet he believed that integrity requires that loss. The cost of refusal, he argued, is far less than the cost of compliance.

His words resonated deeply with me because every leader eventually faces that choice. There is always a moment when you realize that doing the right thing will come with a price. You weigh it against the security of your role and the stability of your life. Bell’s essay insists that moral clarity must win that equation, even when the outcome hurts.

He wrote that “to confront authority is to act on faith.” Faith, for Bell, was not blind optimism but trust in the enduring value of truth. You may not see the impact of your protest, but you leave a record that courage was still possible. That idea resonates with me as I step away from administrative authority. The work of protest, like education itself, plants seeds that others may one day water.

Freedom After the Title

Bell’s essay invites us to rethink what authority really means. True authority, he suggests, comes not from position or a title but from integrity. Titles expire, offices change, people pass away, but moral witness endures. The only thing that doesn’t change is change. For many leaders, the hardest lesson is learning to let the title fall away without losing the purpose that once justified it.

As I step back from the presidency pipeline, I am learning to separate identity from leading. For years my introductions began with titles—dean, provost, director. Now I am simply returning to being a teacher, writer, and advocate. It’s more glamorous and more honest. Bell’s reflections remind me that leadership without constraint is often more powerful than leadership constrained by hierarchy. He wrote with the calm conviction of someone who had already lost what most people fear losing. That loss made him free. returning to tenured full professor I am reclaiming that freedom—the ability to speak plainly, to challenge without fear of repercussion, to engage ideas without filtering them through institutional politics. It feels amazing!

What Derrick Bell Still Teaches Us

Bell’s Reflection of an Ardent Protester is a meditation on integrity in public life. It teaches that conscience is not situational. It does not depend on position or timing. It is either present or it is not. Bell’s life was proof that authority can be confronted effectively with grace, and that refusal can be a form of faithfulness.

He challenges the modern myth that protest and professionalism cannot coexist. In truth, the best leaders are those who can hold tension without surrendering principle. They know that progress requires conflict and that comfort is rarely compatible with justice. A leader’s conviction becomes the community’s anchor when times grow difficult, because those who lead with integrity will not fold under pressure. Bell’s reflections remind me that leadership is not about maintaining order but about ensuring that order serves humanity.

As I close this chapter of my career, I no longer see my decision to step away from executive leadership as a retreat. It is a transformation. The path ahead still involves leadership, but of a different kind, through a return to deep editing, writing, mentorship, and public scholarship. I want, like Derrick Bell, to model what it means to confront authority with both courage and care. My inbox once filled with presidential opportunities; now it fills with invitations to serve, to mentor, to write, and to speak.It feels right—grounded, purposeful, and informed by deeper lessons of leadership, fully cognizant of corrosive power and how to defeat it.

Leaving Executive Leadership

Bell is remembered and honored because he never confused power with purpose. He never bargained away his principles for the illusion of influence. Across the country, we have watched academic leaders fall—those who silenced protest, who arrested students, who yielded to political pressure with claims of nuetrality in the hope of buying more time. They always discover that appeasement has no end, that submission earns neither trust nor forgiveness. Their names will fade as quickly as their compromises. Bell will never be forgotten. His legacy endures because his message endures. He showed that integrity is the only authority that lasts. He taught that leadership without moral courage is management, not transformation. His life reminds us that protest is not the enemy of progress but its engine.

We often wonder why people of color remain so rare in executive leadership. The answer is not a mystery. We are cut from a different cloth, one woven by ancestors who survived and resisted, who asked us to live with integrity even when systems were designed to silence it. I was the first provost of color at Western Michigan University, and there was a reason for that—many of those reasons are reflected in what I have written here. Leadership for people of color comes with invisible costs. The higher we rise, the more we are asked to temper our convictions, to translate our truth into language that comforts power, to be symbols rather than agents of change. The system rewards compliance and punishes courage. But our ancestors did not fight so that we could sit silently at tables where justice is optional. They fought so that we could stand when standing costs something.

---

Julian Vasquez Heilig is an award-winning civil rights leader, scholar, and public intellectual whose academic leadership career has spanned two decades in higher education. He has served as provost and vice president for academic affairs at Western Michigan University, dean of the College of Education at the University of Kentucky, and held faculty and leadership roles at the University of Texas at Austin, and California State University Sacramento. As the first provost of color at WMU, he led major institutional transformation initiatives while championing equity, shared governance, and inclusive excellence. A national voice on education policy, leadership, and social justice, he has testified before state legislatures, advised political campaigns, and keynoted across the world. His LinkedIn account and his newsletter, Without Fear or Favor, have become influential platforms for education and policy commentary. In 2025, he has reached more than 1.5 million readers on LinkedIn. He is the founding editor of the acclaimed blog Cloaking Inequity.

For more the Uppity Minority series click here.