In 1953, Walter N. Ridley earned a doctorate from the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia. Dr. Ridley holds the distinction of being the first African American to earn a doctoral degree from a historically white university in the South.
A. Benjamin Spencer will be the next dean of the William and Mary Law School in Williamsburg, Virginia. When he takes office on July 1, Professor Spencer will be William & Mary’s first African-American dean. Since 2014 he has been on the law school faculty at the University of Virginia.
Nicole Thorne Jenkins is currently vice dean of the Gatton College of Business and Economics at the University of Kentucky, where she is also the Von Allmen Chaired Professor of Accountancy. She was previously on the faculty at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and Washington University in St. Louis.
John Merchant, an attorney who taught at both Fairfield University and Sacred Heart University, both in Connecticut, was the first Black graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law.
Dayna Bowen Matthew is currently the William L. Matheson and Robert M. Morgenthau Distinguished Professor of Law and the F. Palmer Weber Research Professor of Civil Liberties and Human Rights at the University of Virginia Law School. She will begin her new duties on July 1.
Mildred Robinson is the Henry L. and Grace Doherty Charitable Foundation Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law. Professor Robinson, who specializes in tax law, was the law school’s first African American female tenured professor.
Rita Dove, Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia, served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1993 to 1995 and won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1987. She is the only poet to receive the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts.
The study found that gentrified neighborhoods tended to show a reduction in public school enrollments in the 2000-to-2014 period. But neighborhoods that were gentrified by mostly Black or Hispanic college-educated families showed an increase in public school enrollments.
According to the report, when comparing applicants to the University of Virginia who had similar test scores on college entrance examinations and high school grade point averages, 74 percent of Black applicants were admitted compared to only 30 percent of White applicants.
Protestors have called on the University of Virginia to change the name of the Alderman Library. It is named after Edward Alderman, president of the university from 1905 to 1931. Alderman was a proponent of eugenics and White supremacy.
According to a new study by Dominique J. Baker, an assistant professor of education policy at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, White students who graduated from Texas state universities have a debt-to-income ratio of 68 percent, compared to 117 percent for Black students who graduated from state universities in Texas.
Recipients of the Berlin Prize are awarded a semester-long fellowship in Berlin where they will be provided with the time and resources to step back from their daily obligations to engage in academic and artistic projects they might not otherwise pursue.
Here is this week’s roundup of African Americans who have been appointed to new administrative positions at colleges and universities throughout the United States.
Recently, most of the nation’s highest-ranked colleges and universities informed applicants if they had been accepted for admission into the Class of 2023. Some revealed the racial/ethnic breakdown of their admitted students.
Following the revelation that Virginia Governor Ralph Northam had a photograph of a student in blackface and another student in a Ku Klux Klan costume on his 1984 yearbook page, the Eastern Virginia Medical School announced it would investigate how this could have happened.
Slaves, rented from local property owners, were used to construct many of the earliest campus buildings. Once the university opened, slaves were used for manual labor on campus. Some faculty members owned slaves.
Valerie Smith, who took office as the 15th president of highly rated Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania on July 1, 2015, has had her contract extended through 2025. Before becoming president of Swarthmore College, Dr. Smith was dean of the college and the Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature at Princeton University.
The new professorships will be awarded on a rotating basis to eligible faculty members for two or three-year terms. They will foster research and teaching innovation around various topics related to democracy and equity.
A recent study led by a scholar at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Virginia has found that African-American job candidates are more likely to receive lower starting salaries when evaluators believe they have been too aggressive in hiring negotiations.
Dr. Gaines comes to the University of Virginia from Cornell University where he was the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of Africana Studies and History. Previously he has taught at Princeton University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Michigan.
The University of Virginia and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh will collaborate with The HistoryMakers, to enhance the nation’s largest archive of videotaped oral histories of African-American leaders.
Here is this week’s roundup of African Americans who have been appointed to new administrative positions at colleges and universities throughout the United States.
On August 15, individuals who join the transcription effort will be asked to go to five locations in Charlottesville where they will transcribe some of Bond’s speeches. People interested in participating in the transcription effort will also be able to contribute to the project online.
Taking on new duties are Greg Hunley at Mississsippi University for Women, Janet Wormack at Houston Community College in Texas, Tommye Sutton at the University of Virginia, Sheriah Dixon at Syracuse University and Crystal L. Wheeler at Howard University.
Here is this week’s news of grants or gifts to historically Black colleges and universities or for programs of particular interest to African Americans in higher education.
Chris Lebron, an associate professor of philosophy, is the winner of the award that recognizes “ascending” scholars whose are “devoted to the humanities and whose work shows extraordinary promise to have a significant impact on contemporary culture.”
The three retirees are Rhonda Rogers at Virginia Tech, Karla Spurlock-Evans at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and Kent Merritt at the University of Virginia.
Taking on new duties are Gregory B. Fairchild of the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia and George Dor, professor of music and the holder of the McDonnell-Barksdale Chair of Ethnomusicology at the University of Mississippi.
In this role, the University of Virginia’s Professor Dove will select a poem from new or forthcoming collections that will be published in the New York Times Magazine each Sunday. These new duties will not affect her role at the University of Virginia.
Stephanie Adams is dean of the Frank Batten College of Engineering and Technology at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. She will serve one year as president-elect of the American Society for Engineering Education beginning in June and will become president of the organization in June 2019.
In 2013, the University of Virginia formed a commission that investigated the university’s historical relationship with slavery. Now the university has announced the formation of the President’s Commission on the University in the Age of Segregation.
From 2005 to 2016, Dr. Harmon served as president of Central College of Houston Community College, which today enrolls about 18,000 students.
Since 2012, the number of Black students in the entering class at the University of Virginia is up 41.5 percent. In 2012, Blacks and biracial students with African American heritage made up 7.1 percent of the first-year students. this year the figure is 9.1 percent.
The new center is being led by Derrick Alridge, a professor in the Curry School of Education at the university. Professor Alridge also is the director of “Teachers in the Movement,” an oral history project that explores the ideas and pedagogy of teachers during the civil rights movement.
The University of Virginia has named Carla Williams as director of athletics. She is the first African American woman to be named an athletics director at a Power 5 conference that make up the nation’s leading football programs.
The Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia was established in 1981. Now, 36 years later it has been granted departmental status allowing it to function autonomously to develop curriculum and hire faculty.
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