Khalil Gibran Muhammad was appointed professor of history, race, and public policy at the Kennedy School at Harvard University. He will also serve as the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He will take on these new roles on July 1.
Currently, Dr. Muhammad is the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library. He also serves as a visiting professor at the City University of New York. He is the author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Harvard University Press, 2010). Dr. Muhammad is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and holds a Ph.D. in American history from Rutgers University in New Jersey.
Desmond Jagmohan was named an assistant professor of politics at Princeton University in New Jersey. He will begin teaching as a full-time faculty member at Princeton in the fall of 2016. He currently serves as a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton.
A native of Guyana, Dr. Jagmohan came to the United States at the age of 16 and finished high school in Chicago. He served in the Army and then enrolled at Northeastern Illinois University and graduated summa cum laude in 2005. He went on to earn a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
People need to realize that simply because Harvard University offers a lofty position to one native born Black scholar, does not imply it will continue its disparate treatment towards Black students and Black faculty. Harvard University is a bastion of neoliberalism, conservatism along with White, Black(i.e., the African Diaspora), Latino, and Asian (i.e., the Asian Diaspora) elitism. As a result, it can very easily maintain its fragmented intellectual hegemony without any serious intellectual challenge.
Lets see if Dr. Muhammad will contextually or verbally address the continued mistreatment of Black students and Black faculty at Harvard University. That said, based upon his behavior while leading the Schomburg Center, Harvard University has nothing to worry about. For those who dissent, the question that should be asked in why Dr. Muhammad is not taking his scholarship to an HBCU where it’s needed most as compared to some other institution called Harvard University. There’s nothing more disheartening to see scores of Black PhDs in all fields situated at HWCUs enriching these institutions when they are fully aware that HBCUs are in dire need. I view this type of behavior as intellectual and communal treason.
congratulations to dr. muhammad!
Congratulations Dr. Jagmohan.
Amber