Colloquium Presented by Dr. Eddie R. Cole

Dr. Eddie R. Cole, Assistant Professor at William and Mary School of Education, will present a colloquium titled: College Presidents and Racial Unrest in the Mid-Twentieth Century.  His approach in covering historical material and making connections to current, critical context have garnered respect and praise from academicians as well as intellectuals and activists beyond the academy. 
Dr. Cole’s work on college presidents, as well as his secondary focus on faculty teaching practices, has been featured by multiple popular press outlets, including The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The Huffington Post. He has received the 2018 Early Career Award from the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE). He was also named a 2017 Nancy Weiss Malkiel Scholar by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation recognizing him as an emerging faculty leader poised “to play a significant role in shaping American higher education.” Also notable is his selection as a 2015 National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Fellow, one of the most prestigious early-career research awards for scholars working in critical areas of education research. Dr. Cole has also received research fellowships and grants from Princeton University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has been a Dean’s Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Dr. Cole is currently utilizing archival materials of academic leaders from nearly 30 colleges and universities across the country to prepare a national historical analysis of how college presidents  positioned themselves within the national conversation about desegregation and civil rights. This study potentially provides a roadmap for understanding how academic leaders have negotiated social complexities. Ultimately, Dr. Cole aims for this work to provide new insights on the historical role of college presidents in the debate over social change.