Four African Americans Who Have Announced Their Retirements From University Posts

Tommie “Tonea” Stewart, dean of the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Alabama State University, retired from her position on June 1, 2019. In addition to her duties as dean, she has also served as a tenured professor and chair of the theater department. She has won numerous awards throughout her career including the New York World Festival Gold Medal Award for her narration of the National Public Radio International Series, “Remembering Slavery.” Additionally, President Barak Obama recognized her as a “Champion of Change.”

Dr. Stewart holds a bachelor’s degree in speech and theatre from Jackson State University in Mississippi and a master’s degree in theatre arts from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She earned a Ph.D. in theatre arts from Florida State University making her the first African American woman to receive a doctorate from the university’s College of Theatre Arts.

Adolph Reed Jr., professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, is retiring from teaching after 40 years in the academic world. Professor Reed has served on the faculty at Penn for the past 15 years. Earlier he taught at The New School, The University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern University, and Yale University. He is the author of Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene (New Press, 2000) and co-author of Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought (Routledge, 2009).

Dr. Reed is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in political science from Atlanta University.

Walter Fluker, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Ethical Leadership in the School of Theology at Boston University, announced that he will retire at the end of the 2019-2020 academic year. He has been at the university since 2010. Professor Fluker is the author of Ethical Leadership: The Quest for Character, Civility, and Community (Fortress Press, 2009), and The Ground Has Shifted: The Future of the Black Church in Post-Racial America (New York University Press, 2016).

Professor Fluker is a graduate of Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and holds a divinity degree from Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois.

Alfreda Horton, coordinator of the Office of Student Oriented Services at the University of Southern Mississippi, retired from the university on May 23, 2019. She had been with the university’s staff since 1989, working in the Division of Student Affairs.

Horton is a graduate of the University of Southern Mississippi.