Educator's Lecture Feb. 20 to Focus on Black Men Suceeding in College

Shaun Harper leads the National Black Male College Achievement Study

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Durham, NC -- Educator Shaun Harper will talk about how black men succeed in college during a speech at 4 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 20, at Duke University.

The speech, free and open the public in the Bryan Center’s Von Canon Rooms, is this year’s Samuel DuBois Cook Society Lecture. It honors the legacy of Duke’s first African-American professor who became a Duke trustee and president of Dillard University.

Harper, an assistant professor in the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, received the 2005 Emerging Scholar Award and the 2006 Annuit Coeptis Award for early career achievement, both from the American College Personnel Association.

He is currently working on the National Black Male College Achievement Study, which involves interviews with African-American men at 42 college campuses across the country. Harper said he is seeking to re-frame the discussion among educators about black men and college.

“The old frame focuses almost exclusively on why there are so few black male students in college, why they’re so disengaged once they arrive, and why black male students drop out of college at rates that are highest among both sexes and all racial and ethnic groups,” he said. “It is the ultimate deficit-framing of the problem -- ‘What’s wrong with these black men?’

“This new paradigm I’m advancing here is looking at those who have managed to navigate their ways to and through higher education, and determining what can be learned from them and their experiences that can be instructive for the others,” he said.

Duke’s vice president for student affairs, Larry Moneta, said Harper is highly respected in the field of higher education administration.

“His work on the status of black men is breakthrough and will influence teaching and mentoring of young men, of all races, for years to come,” Moneta said.