Vice President for Academic Affairs
Delaware Technical Community College
What inspires you?
The students who attend Delaware Technical Community College, where I serve as the Vice
President for Academic Affairs, inspire me everyday. Although my interactions with students are
more limited in my current role compared to when I was a faculty member, I am still able to
connect with them through events and activities, like our Presidential Student Leadership
Academy, one of my favorite responsibilities during the academic year. Each year, I meet and
help lead a group of students, who represent all of our students. They have diverse
backgrounds, life experiences, goals, and dreams, and in many cases have overcome significant
adversity and are now thriving as college students. I admire their belief that education is a path
to improve or enhance their lives and the lives of their families, a belief I also share. I am
inspired and awestruck by the grit, determination, and perseverance our students demonstrate
every day. They inspire me to be the best I can be in my role.
What makes a great leader?
Many qualities and skills can be attributed to great leaders and expanders whom I admire and
aspire to be like, but perhaps my top three traits are authenticity, empathy, and inspiring others.
I think authenticity is difficult, especially for women because of societal or personal
expectations that convey we have to look a certain way or be a certain way in leadership.
However, I have learned over the years that the best version of me is when I fully show up as my
authentic self. When I finally learned to let my guard down with others, became confident in
who I am, and realized it was okay for me to be different from other leaders/mentors I admired
and gave myself permission to do things my way, I began showing up more authentically in my
professional and personal life.
In my current role, my primary priority is increasing student success while not losing sight of the
needs of faculty and staff who support those efforts. This work requires empathy because it is
not easy, and at any given time, there are challenges, emotions, and frustrations to be worked
through with others. I find myself having to toggle between vision and strategic direction and
assuaging concerns at the operational level. This balancing requires a great deal of empathy to
understand all stakeholders’ needs and perspectives.
Finally, a great visionary leader is able to inspire others, bringing them into the fold to
accomplish the goals. After conducting collegewide collaborative forums and workshops that
drove the focus of our Achieving the Dream action plan–increasing student success and overall
degree completion–we communicated the vision to the College community and began the
process with faculty and staff to redesign our college placement policies and our developmental
education program, among other initiatives. By creating and communicating the vision, and
inspiring others to believe in the vision, we have made progress toward our goals, and in fact,
earned the Achieving the Dream Leader College award because of the good work we have done
in these areas.
Tell us about a time you felt truly proud of your work. What did you accomplish?
In my 25 plus years working with Delaware Tech, I have been a faculty member, a coordinator
for a department, a chairperson, a grant director, a vice president, and the list continues when I
think about committee work, internal and external, and beyond. It is hard to say when I was
most proud of my work because in each of these roles I have been proud to represent the
College and do the very best in the job I was hired to do at the time. In the classroom, I excelled
as a teacher, planning my lessons, being creative, attending to students, and doing what I could
to ensure their success. In my roles as instructional coordinator and department chair, I worked
hard to build course schedules that met the students’ and College’s needs, support faculty while
balancing my accountability to administration and the strategic vision, and making necessary
improvements to courses to advance student success. In my grant work, managing millions of
federal dollars, and collegewide projects, I was able, with the help of the entire grant team, to
align curricula and practices, outfit programs/campuses with new equipment, and arrange for
students to be trained for jobs with industry-recognized credentials. And finally, over the last
nine years, in my current role, I have been proud of many priorities that have been
accomplished by the wonderful team I work with. Perhaps one accomplishment that rises to the
top of the list is our placement policies redesign and our math and English redesigns that have
allowed more students to enter Delaware Tech college-ready and our developmental /remedial
students to take college-level math and English at the same time they are taking their support
(developmental) courses which help them to stay on track in terms of completing their degrees.
Tell us about your most difficult challenge and how you overcame it.
In my 25 plus years with the College, I have had some challenges but nothing like the
life-changing COVID-19 pandemic years. As the chief academic officer, not only did I lead many
aspects of our transition to distance learning, I also managed other large, innovative initiatives,
like our Achieving the Dream work, that we introduced and scaled up during this time. During
this time, there were personnel concerns, the workday hours grew, and the checklists
multiplied. While the work was challenging, I also had two teenagers who were learning
remotely and managing the negative social aspects of the pandemic. Moreover, in 2020, I began
my doctoral program. To say these years were the most difficult of my career is an
understatement (and I know so many can relate and probably agree).
I do not think this was a situation anyone could overcome; instead, it was a situation I chose to
push through and manage. Of course, I was surrounded by supportive, caring, talented people
who made the work more manageable or who offered me the break I needed personally. I am a
determined individual and stalwart in my belief that our students should have the best
instructional and student experiences we can offer, so that certainly kept me going. And I
wanted to be a constant for my colleagues, my team, and the faculty and staff who were pushed
to their limits in many ways. In large part, I would say my overall saving grace was my faith and
knowing that “This too shall pass” as my wise grandmother would say.
BIO
Dr. Justina Thomas has served as the Vice President for Academic Affairs at Delaware Technical
Community College since 2015, providing collegewide oversight for instruction, student affairs,
workforce development and community education, the office of research and analytics,
financial aid, international education, dual enrollment, collegewide grants, articulation,
accreditation, institutional effectiveness and planning, and the Center for Creative and
Instructional Technology. She serves as the College’s representative on a number of education,
government, and community boards, such as the Vision Coalition of Delaware Leadership Team,
the P-20 Council, and the Delaware Workforce Development Board.
She began her career at Delaware Tech in 1997 and served as a full-time instructor, instructional
coordinator, department chair, Teaching Resource Center coordinator, and principal investigator
and project director for the two of the College’s U.S. Department of Labor Federal Trade
Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training grants. She holds a Doctor of
Education in Higher Education Leadership from Wilmington University, a Master of Instruction
from the University of Delaware, and a Bachelor of Arts in English and Secondary Education
from Salisbury University. She is a graduate of the College’s 2006 Leadership Development
Program and recipient of the College’s Excellence in Student Success Award and Excellence in
Teaching Award.
Delaware ACE Women’s Network 