Alfred Tatum Appointed Provost at Metropolitan State University of Denver

Alfred W. Tatum was appointed provost and vice president of academic affairs at Metropolitan State University of Denver in Colorado. Dr. Tatum will take office on March 16.

The university enrolls more than 19,000 undergraduate students and nearly 1,000 graduate students according to the latest data issued by the U.S. Department of Education. African Americans make up 6 percent of the undergraduate student body.

“I became attracted to MSU Denver because of its unbending commitment to equity, diversity, inclusion, and uncompromising focus on excellence,” Dr. Tatum said. “I have a great deal of kinship with that mission.”

Dr. Tatum was dean of the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 2013-20. He also served as a department chair, reading-clinic director, Ph.D. program coordinator, director of graduate studies, and professor. He joined the faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2007 after teaching at Northern Illinois University, the University of Maryland, and Buffalo State College.

Professor Tatum, who holds a bachelor’s degree from Northern Illinois Univerity and a doctorate from the University of Illinois at Chicago, is the author of Teaching Reading to Black Adolescent Males: Closing the Achievement Gap (Stenhouse Publishers, 2005), Reading For Their Life: (Re)building the Textual Lineages of African American Adolescent Males (Heinemann, 2009) and Fearless Voices: Engaging the Next Generation of African American Male Writers (Scholastic Teaching Resources, 2013).