Hikes delivers keynote address at Kalamazoo MLK Celebration

Zenobia L. Hikes, vice president for student affairs at Virginia Tech, delivered the keynote address for the Martin Luther King celebration in Kalamazoo, Mich., at an event sponsored by Western Michigan University, the city of Kalamazoo and the Northside Ministerial Alliance.

Coverage on the Kalamazoo celebration and Hike’s speech was reported by the Kalamazoo Gazette newspaper.

With more than 20 years of administrative and leadership experience in the areas of enrollment management and student support services, Hikes has written and presented papers on race-specific student recruitment and retention, first-generation college admissions, and leadership development. Her successful recruitment and retention model for African-American college students has been published in Instructing and Mentoring the African American College Student: Strategies for Success in Higher Education.

An advocate of ethical leadership and development, Hikes has provided expert commentary to several national media outlets, including CNN, NBC News, CBS News, Fox News, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution regarding the negative images of African-American women in hip hop music and its effect on society.

Founded in 1872 as a land-grant college, Virginia Tech is the most comprehensive university in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Today, Virginia Tech’s eight colleges are dedicated to putting knowledge to work through teaching, research, and engagement activities and to fulfilling its vision to be among the top research universities in the nation. At its 2,600-acre main campus located in Blacksburg and other campus centers in Northern Virginia, Southwest Virginia, Hampton Roads, Richmond, and Roanoke, Virginia Tech enrolls more than 27,000 undergraduate and graduate students from all 50 states and more than 100 countries in 180 academic degree programs.