Throughout a career in education that began as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English at the Lycee de Manegouba in Nkongsamba, Cameroon, you have worked persistently and well to address issues of racial understanding and harmony. After your time in Africa and with your PhD in political science from Berkeley, you taught at the City University of New York before serving as the first chief executive of the Educational Policy Center. As president for seven years of the program called A Better Chance, you led its efforts to place talented students of color into secondary schools that could truly challenge them, so that ABC became known as the most successful talent search program in the country, with virtually all of its graduates proceeding to college. Recognizing early on the democratic power of new teaching technology, you helped to found and lead the World Institute for Computer Assisted Teaching. As a consultant, you have provided invaluable help to a variety of institutions, including your alma mater, in their efforts to recruit minority faculty and staff. As an associate of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, you educate media leaders on issues of diversity and of emerging information technologies. On leave from the institute this year, you serve as lecturer in the Laurence M. Lombard Chair on press and public policy and as a research fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where you also co-chair Harvard’s Task Force on Race and the Press. To this impressive record can be added your service on the boards of Williams, Wellesley, Deerfield Academy and The New York Public Library, and your book, Desegregating America’s Colleges, as signs of your influence on how our country’s education system addresses what is perhaps its most important challenge …that of race.
Megamenu Social