Howard Community College President Daria Willis sat in her sunlit office, snapping together gray and orange Lego bricks from a tray on her desk. Nearby was an instruction manual as thick as any course catalogue.

Willis says she finds respite in the step-by-step construction between meetings and calls. For much of her nearly three years on the job, Willis has contended with mounting complaints about her leadership.

“If I can put this massive thing together,” she said, gesturing to a nearly finished “Star Wars” Millennium Falcon spaceship, “maybe I can piece together this institution, too.”

But on campus and across the suburban, education-obsessed county, some believe she’s disassembling it. Detractors claim that near-constant hirings and firings and what they describe as a toxic culture have negatively affected staff and student services.

In July 2022, an anonymous website sprang up, and it has become a growing ledger of grievances from employees, students and local residents. Hundreds of posts include accusations that Willis retaliated against those who questioned her, fired people without reason and engaged in a broader pattern of staff mistreatment.

By this fall, the website gained momentum — and the attention of HCC’s leadership. In early September, Willis shared a post by the college spokesman that blasted the website for “leveling racist, sexist lies against our board of trustees and our president.” The Board of Trustees later also denounced the website’s claims, saying they were meant to defame and bully Willis, who is Black.

Two days after the board released that statement, it announced that three of its seven trustees had resigned. More than 250 employees have left since Willis’ tenure began in January 2022, outpacing the number of departures during the prior three years, which includes the high-turnover pandemic.

Interviews with about two dozen current and former HCC employees and students offer a glimpse into what many of them described as an institution on the edge.

“She’s lost sight of some very important things, like the value of your people,” said Phil Vilardo, a 30-year faculty union member who said he initially supported Willis. “You can’t treat everyone like your enemy.”

None of the HCC trustees responded to requests for comment.

“The Board of Trustees and Dr. Willis are extremely proud of the work they have accomplished together in just three years,” said Jarrett Carter Sr., the college’s vice president of external affairs, communication and advancement. “By every measure, this is a successful administration and an era of progress for the college. And the best is yet to come.”

The bad blood first came to a head during a contentious November 2022 “Dragon Dialogue” — the Q&A sessions with faculty that Willis had introduced, named for the college mascot. Willis reportedly pointed to the room’s exit signs and delivered a stark message: If they didn’t like her decisions, they could leave.

Carter said most employees “understood her words to be a call to action on behalf of our community.”

Amid the controversy, Willis has overseen notable initiatives on campus. She has proved a prodigious fundraiser, leading a campaign that secured $42 million in less than a year for the college’s Workforce Development & Trades Center. And she has added seven-week courses, which have boosted graduation rates at community colleges nationwide.

At the September groundbreaking ceremony for the workforce development center, Howard County Executive Calvin Ball lauded Willis’ work ethic and leadership in getting the project underway.

Cathy Bell, a county resident and former McDonald’s franchisee, said Willis’ energy and spirit motivated her and her husband to donate $1 million for the building. “She is so confident, she is so assured, she is so her. She is so Howard County,” Bell said at the ceremony.

Gov. Wes Moore, who spoke at HCC’s spring 2023 commencement, praised Willis at a ribbon-cutting ceremony last week for the college’s newest cyber initiative, a virtual simulator that mimics real-world cyberattacks.

Willis is “not just the most stylish president, but someone who is also one of the best leaders that I know,” Moore said.

Big president on campus

Howard Community College sits on 120 acres in the heart of Columbia. The college opened in October 1970, but has a modern feel, with new glassy buildings and manicured lawns. It serves more than 13,000 students and employs more than 2,500 people.

HCC has long been recognized for its educational excellence and has notched “Great Colleges to Work For” designations year after year. In 2019, it snagged the prestigious Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award for “performance excellence.”

The college’s previous president, Kathleen Hetherington, had led HCC for 14 years. Her retirement cleared the way for the hiring of Willis, the community college’s first Black president.

Before coming to HCC, Willis served as president of Everett Community College in Washington state, from 2019 to 2021. Earlier, she was the provost and senior vice president of academic affairs at Onondaga Community College in Syracuse, New York, for about three years, and she has held various leadership positions at colleges in the Houston area.

Willis turned 40 last month — she marked the occasion with a video montage in an all-black leather outfit — and has a millennial’s approach to social media and a candor rare in higher academia. She religiously sports her signature pearl necklace and earrings in TikTok and Instagram reels. “They’re my superpower,” she said in one video. She often pairs them with sneakers and a pantsuit.

“The students here think I’m cool,” she told The Banner.

Her presence dominates the campus. If it’s not Willis herself on promotional banners and advertisements, it’s her Lego creations, which have multiplied throughout the president’s suite. At the front desk, her models command the central trophy case, nudging the college’s accolades to the corner.

Carter said Willis’ Lego builds are “a personal showcase of her campus-wide commitment to mental wellness and meeting students and employees where they dream.”

Her online critics have taken notice — of her flurry of social media posts, of the Willis-focused college promotional material, of the Lego projects — and they don’t like it.

“While our dear leader is showing off her new clothes on Twitter and playing with Legos on LinkedIn, the needs of the faculty and students are being ignored,” wrote one commenter, using a term for former North Korea leader Kim Jung-Il.

Rising tensions and turnover

Willis arrived with bold pledges to complete ambitious campus building projects, boost diversity initiatives and streamline cross-departmental communication, changes staff had been seeking after the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. To many, she felt like exactly the spark HCC needed.

But her methods soon unsettled longtime faculty members.

Guy Bunyard, a 30-year union faculty member, said the inclusion of faculty and staff in hiring and other big decisions has dissipated under Willis. Bunyard and other union faculty members claimed that Willis routinely ignored hiring recommendations, department organization preferences and suggestions for student resources from staff.

For Bunyard and others, the shift was unmistakable. The open-door culture they had known under previous presidents was gone, replaced with an administration that they say seemed uninterested in feedback.

Soon, employees began sharing stories about colleagues escorted off campus by security.

“This culture of fear — fear of retaliation, fear of speaking up — didn’t exist, at least in my experience, before she got here,” said Rachel Adams, a faculty union member who has worked at the college since 2016.

In large part because of the tension and turnover, full-time staff and faculty decided to unionize last summer. When employees went to present their certified paperwork to the president’s office, three union members who attended said, they were initially locked out of campus offices.

“We had to send a member of the public safety team into HR to talk to HR and convince somebody to come out and then accept our letter,” Adams said. “I think that was really kind of a turning point for a lot of us where we thought, ‘Oh, OK, we really don’t feel welcomed here.”

Staffing data included in HCC’s board meetings and minutes, reviewed by The Banner, underscores the volume of departures.

Between 2019 and 2021, as higher education institutions nationwide grappled with pandemic-related turnover and the “Great Resignation” that followed, 213 employees left HCC. Since January 2022, when Willis arrived, 251 employees have left.

Turnover in the upper administration has been especially pronounced, with 19 departures during her tenure, including employees who stayed only a few months. The separations span firings, resignations and retirements across both periods.

“There’s a lot of institutional knowledge that is not there anymore, and we’re suffering from it because the VPs and the associate VPs are all brand new,” Bunyard said. “And they have no idea how the college functions.”

The turnover is affecting essential operations on campus, more than a dozen current and former employees and students interviewed by The Banner said, with payroll and student services feeling the strain most acutely. Some faculty reported delays in receiving paychecks, while students said they face increasing barriers in accessing course counseling and other services.

Carter disputed claims of high turnover, noting that while the number of staff departures rose during Willis’ tenure, the turnover rate has decreased, in part driven by an uptick in hiring. He also linked the rise in departures in 2022 and 2023 to the lingering effects of the Great Resignation.

At the same time, the college’s upper ranks have swelled under Willis, from four vice presidents and six associate vice presidents before she began to seven vice presidents and 10 associate vice presidents.

Using a hiring clause rarely employed by previous presidents, according to faculty union members, Willis personally appointed several of her vice presidents and associate vice presidents, bypassing the internal committees that had long played a role in selecting administrators.

Carter defended the appointments, saying only two senior leaders were hired without a campus-wide search, in accordance with school policy.

HCC is spending over $2 million more over the last two years on administrative salaries. One executive, Tyria Stone, who serves as vice president of campus services and chief financial officer, earns $260,000 — just $30,000 shy of the salary for the superintendent of the county’s public school district.

Willis’ salary is $325,000 annually.

Carter said HCC expanded its administrative staff to align with the cabinet sizes of other community colleges in Maryland. The move, he said, was aimed at providing additional support as the college navigated increases in enrollment, fundraising and program development.

‘Be careful of your staff’

The first comment on the anonymous message board, HowardCC.fyi, appeared in July 2022.

“The college is in a death spiral,” it read. “Change is welcome but there is no rhyme or reason to current changes...and no recognition from the President of the skills and potential contributions of talented college staff/faculty.”

Many on the message board — which has drawn more than 187,000 views — speculate that the three HCC board members who resigned did so because of the controversy surrounding Willis. It is still unclear, however, why they left. None of the members, M. Shafeeq Ahmed, Sean Keller and Christopher Marasco, responded to requests for comment.

The county’s state senators, who recommend trustees for appointment, expressed concern. “We were surprised by their recent resignations because the sudden loss of their experience and institutional knowledge to support the Board’s ongoing work is unfortunate,” said Sens. Clarence Lam, Katie Fry Hester and Guy Guzzone, in a statement.

Some of Willis’ own picks have departed under chaotic circumstances.

Last fall, Willis brought on Joy Milfort as vice president of campus services and chief financial officer. Milfort, who has two decades of finance experience from Harvard, The George Washington University, and American University, said she was eager to join HCC’s executive team — especially alongside another Black woman in leadership.

By then the message board had been buzzing for more than a year. When Willis confided that she believed some accusations against her were rooted in racial and gender bias, Milfort said she empathized, recalling her own experiences.

Shortly after starting, Milfort said, Willis offered unsolicited advice: “Be careful of your staff. They are going to try to sabotage you.”

Milfort said Willis soon asked her to dismiss a member of her finance team. When Milfort asked about the reason, she said, Willis replied that she didn’t like him. Milfort said she refused to carry out the termination. Weeks later, Milfort said, the two clashed again, this time over Willis’ decision to overhaul the college’s benefits plan. Willis stopped speaking to her, Milfort said.

In early November 2023, campus inboxes lit up with an email from Willis: “The college has recently become aware of alleged financial discrepancies within the institution.” Effective immediately, the message read, Milfort’s responsibilities would be reassigned to two other employees. Weeks later, a follow-up email from Willis announced Milfort’s resignation.

The news was a shock to Milfort. She said she had received no termination letter, no formal conversation with human resources, and had not resigned.

The experience carried extra injury because Milfort and Willis had commiserated about the disproportionate impact that negative accusations have on women of color.

“She never thought about how her allegations of financial malfeasance would implicate me as a Black woman trying to get future jobs as a CFO,” Milfort said.

Carter said the college does not comment on personnel issues, but added that Willis’ administration has never made a public accusation against any current or former employee.

Two other former administrators under Willis who still work in higher education and requested anonymity for fear of retaliation described similar encounters with Willis: They questioned a decision. Willis stopped speaking to them. Soon, a security guard appeared at their door.

Hardships made her tough

High staff turnover across campus, current and former employees say, has affected basic administrative functions.

Payroll has become a source of frustration, particularly for adjunct instructors.

As her department’s adjunct coordinator, Adams said she has never fielded so many payroll concerns. She said changes to pay structure came with minimal communication to staff. “I’m getting a lot of questions,” she said. “‘Where’s my contract? Why can’t I see it? I was supposed to get paid today. What’s happening?’”

Carter said the college communicated all pay structure changes to the adjunct faculty and to Teaching and Learning division leadership.

Other financial snafus have cropped up. More than 130 staff members in the Health, Sciences, and Technology department were mistakenly overpaid in September — a misstep the college corrected by deducting from subsequent paychecks, emails reviewed by The Banner show.

Annual student surveys also reflect growing frustration. Student satisfaction ratings for advising, disability and tutoring services declined from 2023 to 2024.

A current HCC student, enrolled since 2020, said they chose the school for its disability accommodations. Before Willis, they said, walk-in advising took 30 minutes; now, it can take up to four hours.

“I really got the vibe that they could not care if I passed or failed, or if I got my meeting or not. And this is such a shift from what I’ve been used to,” said the student, who asked not to be identified due to concerns about their coming graduation.

Carter described the drop in student satisfaction as a minor decline that the college had anticipated following recent moves to streamline and consolidate student services into a single system.

Some employees have been raising concerns beyond the message board.

“Things may look good on the outside, but under the surface that couldn’t be further from the truth,” read one anonymous letter to the Maryland Higher Education Commission.

Experienced, dedicated staff were “leaving in droves,” often without jobs lined up — ”and it is absolutely because of the climate Dr. Willis engenders,” read the May 2023 letter, obtained by The Banner through a public records request.

As dissatisfaction with her leadership grew, Willis appeared on a higher education podcast called Weekly Wisdom.

The interviewer asked what advice she’d give her past self if she could start fresh at HCC. Willis replied, “Trust no one.”

She said that applies to the warm welcomes, the colleagues inviting her to lunch, and especially to dealings with the “root guard,” as she put it — the employees enmeshed in the college’s fabric, sometimes for decades.

At a charity event last month to honor young, single mothers, Willis recounted how she was a college freshman when she learned she was pregnant, broke into academia amid a divorce while raising her young daughter, and rose to become the first Black president of two community colleges in predominantly white counties.

Hardships, she told the crowd, had made her tough and taught her to rely on herself.

“God knows what he’s doing,” she said.

Being at the charity event “gives me just enough energy to walk back on that campus tomorrow and say, ‘Kick rocks with open-toed shoes,’” she said.

The crowd cheered. Her contract had recently been extended to June 2028. She assured the audience she wasn’t going anywhere.

“Unless you pay me out,” she said to applause.

In her interview with The Banner, Willis reiterated her commitment to HCC.

“My kids are happy. They settled into this community,” Willis said. “This is our fifth state. I’ve seen how these moves affected them.”

Willis said she and her staff have been fruitfully collaborating. In particular, she takes pride in the college’s implementation of seven-week courses this fall semester in addition to the traditional 15-week courses.

“It’s been really amazing to see the faculty and the staff kind of wrap their arms around it,” Willis said. “We had a little disagreement about it in the beginning, and I think primarily because I moved quickly.”

She acknowledged there is room to grow, especially when it comes to student retention.

Her ultimate goal, she said, is to make HCC a steady foundation for students, especially in uncertain times.

“I’m a historian,” she said, piecing together the Lego Millennium Falcon at her desk. Her doctorate in history taught her to study the rise and fall of leaders, the forces that shape them and the resistance they inevitably face.

“I’ve studied what happens when people try to do good — and how others push back against it,” she said. “That’s why this is the hardest moment of my career.”