In July 1969, Fierce became the first director of the Urban Center for Black Studies at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. The center with offices in downtown Poughkeepsie, two miles from the pristine campus of the liberal arts college, had a community focus.
Dr. Derby, a noted photographer of the civil rights era, went on to teach African-American studies and anthropology at the University of Illinois, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the College of Charleston in South Carolina.
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.
Today, about 3 percent of all Ph.D.s in economics are awarded to African Americans. Black economists made up only 1.2 percent of faculty in the 20 top-ranked economics departments in the United States. Leonard Wantchekon is taking steps to boost the number of Black doctoral students in the field.
Dr. Petters has been serving as Benjamin Powell Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He is the former dean of academic affairs for the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences at Duke. He will begin his new duties on September 1.
Gwendolyn Lytle was a member of the music department faculty at Pomona College in Claremont, California, for 35 years. Earlier, she taught at the University of California, Riverside.
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.
After serving on the faculty at the California College of the Arts for nearly a quarter century, Professor Opal Palmer Adisa is returning to her native Jamaica to serve as the director of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies.
Yale is keeping the name of slavery proponent John Calhoun for one of its residential colleges but a new college will be named for Pauli Murray, the civil rights pioneer who earned a doctorate at Yale Law School in 1965.