Victor Ukpolo, Ph.D., a native of Nigeria, was officially appointed chancellor of Southern University at New Orleans on January 7, 2006 by the Southern University System’s Board of Supervisors.

UPDATE: Our original feature of Dr. Victor Ukpolo is presented below. It highlights many of his scholarly accomplishments. However, we have since learned that his dealings since becoming Chancellor of Southern University of New Orleans have been less than desirable. He has been called an “infultrator” among other things.

Specifically, we have learned that “The students, and faculty senate gave him a ‘Vote of No Confidence’. In addittion, he was involved in orchestrating the illegal enrollment of ghost students, firing of prominent staff who uncovered his illegal dealings, closing of 22 academic programs, mismanagement of financial funds etc. The Nigerian caboceer isn’t an assest to the community, and he is not leading the struggle in maintaining the legacy of SUNO. However, Dr. J. Bouie, Dr. Amedee, and Attorney Chambliss should be commended.”

Please review the articles below for more information:

http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2008/11/top_suno_officer_quits_amid_in.html

http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2008/09/case_tells_of_scheme_at_suno_t.html

http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2009/05/indicted_former_councilwoman_r.html

http://www.nola.com/education/index.ssf/2009/11/post_58.html

http://blog.nola.com/stephaniegrace/2009/06/stephanie_grace_former_us_rep.html

http://blog.nola.com/times-picayune/2007/10/protesters_call_for_reopening.html
(The students organized this protest, and Dr.Ukpolo refused to stand with us.)

What can be done about the future of SUNO? Let us know what you think?

Original Feature Below:

Education

Dr. Victor Ukpolo is a graduate of the University of Maryland in College Park, Md., and received master of arts and doctorate of philosophy degrees from The American University, Washington D.C. A native of Nigeria, Ukpolo started work in America as a dish washer and taxi driver to put himself through school.

Career

Dr. Ukpolo, formerly the Southern University System’s Vice President for Academic and Student Affairs, previously served as associate vice president for academic affairs at California State University in Los Angeles. He also served as associate vice chancellor for academic affairs/special assistant to the chancellor for academic research for the Tennessee Board of Regents. He started his career as an assistant professor of economics at Austin Peay State University, where he also held an administrative post as executive assistant to the President.

As an economist, Dr. Ukpolo serves as a member of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities’ Committee on Economic and Workforce Development.

At the Southern University of New Orleans

During his first semester as chancellor, an impressive 2,100 students returned to the University in Spring 2006—SUNO’s first post-Katrina semester—opposed to earlier projections of 1,200 to 1,500, holding classes on a temporary campus comprised of 45 modular trailer facilitates that were constructed by FEMA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. SUNO is one of the few hurricane-impacted institutions that continues to experience impressive student population growth. The Fall Semester 2006 featured a student population of 2,314, and the Fall Semester 2007 posted a student enrollment figure of 2,634, making SUNO the fastest growing four-year institution of higher learning in the region.

Reconstruction At Southern University of New Orleans in Katrina’s Aftermath

Dr. Victor Ukpolo

Dr. Ukpolo leads SUNO during a critical time in which all 11 buildings comprising the main campus remain uninhabitable post-Katrina. In the aftermath of the hurricane, he launched an aggressive marketing and reorganization campaign, which included the introduction of four innovative online programs to attract displaced students. By working through the legislative process, Dr. Ukpolo secured a definitive timeline from the Louisiana Office of Facilities, Planning & Control to reconstruct the main campus by Fall 2009 with 50% of the work being completed by 2008. The Health & Physical Education Building—the least damaged of the 11 buildings—was scheduled to open in Fall 2007.

The restructured campus was to include two brand new buildings: 1) a technology center to house e-learning, audio/visual and Internet technology departments, and 2) construction of a state-of-the-art student housing facility—the first such facility in SUNO’s history— an amenity that will greatly assist SUNO students’ dire need for affordable housing in the Greater New Orleans area and position SUNO to attract students from across the globe. Working with various local, state and federal legislators, Dr. Ukpolo secured a $44 million one-percent interest loan from the U.S. Department of Education’s HBCU Capital Financing Program to allow for the construction of the student housing facility.

The status of this reconstruction was not known at the time of writing this feature.

Post-Katrina New Orleans Crime Prevention Summit

Recognizing the important role institutions of higher learning can play in making communities better, Dr. Ukpolo offered SUNO’s expertise in planning the historic, post-Katrina New Orleans Crime Prevention Summit. He was among several SUNO professors who made key scholarly presentations during this cornerstone event. As a result of the Crime Summit, Dr. Ukpolo keenly capitalized on yet another opportunity to improve New Orleans by forming a joint partnership with the Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff’s Office to provide educational opportunities for the agency’s employees and inmates under the supervision of Criminal Sheriff Marlin Gusman.

Funding the Future

Under his leadership, alumni giving and participation has increased to unprecedented levels through his regular “Chats with the Chancellor,” in which he travels to various cities to meet with alumni. Fundraising for SUNO is at an all-time high with major gifts donated to the institution by several major organizations and corporations. Looking toward future generations, Dr. Ukpolo established the Chancellor’s Emerging Leadership Program at Sophie B. Wright Charter School whereby eligible middle school students will earn an opportunity to attend SUNO on a full scholarship. Furthermore, an innovative dual enrollment program allows qualified high school students to earn college credits at SUNO.

Programs such as these demonstrate Dr. Ukpolo’s care, commitment and concern for many of SUNO’s students, who, like him, are the first in their families to attend college. His student-centered philosophy is designed to encourage students to neither make nor take any excuse in their quest towards pursuing their educational goals.

Awards

In 2010, Dr. Ukpolo was honored as a 2010 Role Model by Minority Access, Inc. at the organization’s Eleventh National Role Model Conference Awards Banquet in Las Vegas, Nevada. Minority Access, Inc. is a 501c(3) non-profit educational organization that supports individuals, academic institutions, federal, state, and local government agencies and various corporations to diversify campuses and work sites by improving the recruitment, retention and enhancement of minorities. The organization is based in Hyattsville, Maryland.

He also received the 2010 Quintessence Award from the African Writers Endowment, Inc. The Quintessence Award is given each year as part of “Quintessence Ball: A Celebration of African People in World History”. The award is presented to at least one continental African leader and at least one African American leader “for distinguished accomplishments in the person’s field of endeavor, and for outstanding contributions to the history and heritage of African people.” The Quintessence Ball brings together African people from Africa, North America, and the Caribbean.

In 2006, the Tall Drums television team did a documentary on Dr. Ukoplo and the recovery efforts at SUNO.

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Early Life

Watson was born near Tyler, Texas, on December 28, 1869, to Crystal and Frank Watson; he was named for the antebellum abolitionist John Brown.

Education

Educated near his home, Watson passed the county teacher examination in 1887 and taught for two years. He entered Bishop College at Marshall, Texas, in 1891 at the seventh grade level and completed his high school diploma in 1898. After teaching for two more years, Watson entered Colgate University at Hamilton, New York, in the fall of 1900. He transferred to Brown University at Providence, Rhode Island, the following year and graduated with a Bachelor of Philosophy degree in the class of 1904. Mentored by John Hope, an 1894 graduate of Brown University and the first black president of Morehouse College and Atlanta University, Watson served as professor of mathematics and science at Morehouse College from 1904 to 1908.

Marriage

On September 25, 1907, he married Hattie Louise Rutherford, a graduate of Spelman College, of Rome, Georgia. Hattie Rutherford Watson was the elder daughter of freedman Samuel W. Rutherford, founder of the National Benefit Life Insurance Company, and Mary Anne Lemon Rutherford. In the spring of 1939, after almost thirty-two years of marriage, the Watsons adopted an infant daughter, Marian Anderson Watson, naming her after the famed contralto.

Career

In 1908, Watson left Morehouse College and, for twelve years, served as a secretary of the Colored Men’s Department of the International Committee of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). The organization’s appointment of Watson to an executive position represented a significant opportunity for his advancement to more visible careers. Watson, a graduate of an Ivy League institution and former faculty at Morehouse College, was a likely candidate for an administrative position in black higher education in the era of segregation. He also briefly served as liquidating agent for the Atlanta State Savings Bank and as state agent for the Southern Fire Insurance Company. In 1923, he assumed the administration of Leland College (American Baptist Home Mission Society) at Baker, Louisiana.

On June 1, 1928, the State Board of Education elected Watson as president of Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical, and Normal College at Pine Bluff (Jefferson County). The state legislature and two philanthropic agencies appropriated funds and bought a thirty-five-acre site for the institution two miles from the center of Pine Bluff. Construction began in early 1929, and students and faculty moved in before Christmas of the same year. The new physical plant consisted of eight new buildings valued at almost $600,000. Watson’s inauguration as president in the spring of 1930, at which John Hope delivered the commemorative address, enabled simultaneous dedication of the new campus site as well.

Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical, and Normal College at Pine Bluff NOW University of Arkansas Pine Bluff (UAPB)

Despite the postponement of Watson’s installation ceremony, he founded and co-edited with his wife, Hattie Rutherford Watson, the college newspaper, The Arkansawyer, and the same name also christened the new college catalogue. In 1929, he attended the annual conference of the Presidents of Negro Land-Grant Colleges, the state’s first participation in more than a decade. Watson’s other initiatives included both intercollegiate athletics and an intramural sports program, debate and dramatic clubs, and free night classes for the local community. The college was reorganized with four divisions: Arts and Sciences, Agriculture, Home Economics, and Education, including a training or practice school with both elementary and secondary grades.

Watson’s administration also coincided with the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal. The college participated in the distribution of the college and graduate student funds by the Negro Division of the National Youth Administration (NYA). AM&N was the site of NYA Camp Bethune for unemployed young black women in 1937 and for unemployed young black men in 1940. In 1938, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) funded a new library, two new dormitories, and eight brick faculty cottages.

AM&N College enrollment at the beginning of Watson’s tenure was thirty-six; the number of faculty and staff was thirty-two. At the time of United States’ entry into the World War II, the college enrolled almost 500 students, employed a faculty of sixty-six, and had a physical plant valued at nearly two million dollars.

Service

Watson maintained membership in several professional and private organizations, including the Association of Presidents of Negro Land-Grant Colleges, Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Sigma Pi Phi, the Monday Club of Atlanta, the Brown University Alumni Association, and St. Paul Baptist Church at Pine Bluff.

End of Life

Watson died at his home on the AM&N College campus on December 6, 1942. A memorial ceremony was held at AM&N College, followed by funeral services at Sale Hall Chapel on the campus of Morehouse College. He is buried in Atlanta. The WPA library completed in 1939, Childress Hall, was dedicated and renamed in his honor in 1958; the current library, completed in 1968, is the Watson Memorial Library.

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The preeminent African American intellectual of his generation, Alain Locke was the leading promoter and interpreter of the artistic and cultural contributions of African Americans to American life. More than anyone else, he familiarized white Americans with the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, while encouraging African American authors to set high artistic standards in their depiction of life. As a professor of philosophy, he expounded his theory of “cultural pluralism” that valued the uniqueness of different styles and values available within a democratic society.

Early Life

Locke was born into a prominent Philadelphia family in 1886. Six years later his father died, and his mother supported her son through teaching. Young Alain contracted rheumatic fever early in his childhood. The disease permanently damaged his heart and restricted his physical activities. In their place, he spent his time reading books and learning to play the piano and violin.

Education

Locke attended Central High School, graduating second in the class of 1902, and then studied at the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy, where he moved up to first in his class. Entering Harvard University, he studied under William James and some of the other leading American philosophers on the faculty. Locke completed Harvard’s four-year program in three, graduating magna cum laude in 1907, being elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and winning the school’s most prestigious award, the Bowdoin Prize, for an essay in English.

It was a remarkable achievement for anyone, not to mention an African American during this highly segregated era. While many white American scholars were seeking to prove the intellectual inferiority of African Americans to justify racial segregation, Locke became a symbol of achievement and a powerful argument for offering African Americans equal opportunity at white educational institutions.

First Black Rhodes Scholar

Continuing his intellectual accomplishments, Locke was named a Rhodes Scholar, the first African American chosen for this distinguished award, and sailed to England in 1907 to attend Oxford University. He studied philosophy, Greek, and Literae Humaniores, receiving a bachelor of literature degree in 1910. From Oxford he moved to Germany for advanced work in philosophy at the University of Berlin from 1910 to 1911.

Europe at that time was the acknowledged center of Western civilization, and Locke’s years there proved vital to his intellectual development. His exposure to modern literature, music, art, and dance, along with his meeting many Africans and other nonwhites from around the world, created new perspectives for viewing American society and culture. Racial discrimination, he realized, was a global problem.

Books By and About Alain Locke:

Became an Educator

Returning to the United States in early 1912, Locke was faced with an unusual dilemma. Given his academic training and intellectual experiences, he was more qualified than many white college professors. But because of his race, he was unable to teach at a white college. Yet this same level of achievement set him vastly apart from his fellow African Americans.

Being unusually introspective and perceptive, Locke recognized these limitations. To better familiarize himself with the everyday segregated world of America, he took a six-month tour of the southern states. Witnessing widespread prejudice and discrimination, he decided that only by setting high standards and demonstrating similar accomplishments as whites could African Americans gain respect and equality. By teaching at the college level and promoting African and African American culture, he would further this goal.

Alain Locke

That September, Locke was appointed an assistant professor of English at Howard University, an African American college, in Washington, DC. He set about to establish Howard as the country’s preeminent African American university, a training ground for African American intellectuals, and a center for African American culture and research on racial problems. But the school’s board of trustees twice refused to approve his teaching courses on comparative race relations or African American studies, maintaining that the Howard was a nonracial institution.

Frustrated, Locke turned his attention back to philosophy. In 1916, he received a one-year appointment as an Austin Teaching Fellow at Harvard and began his dissertation under the idealist philosopher, Josiah Royce. Two years later he received his doctorate degree and returned to Howard as a full professor of philosophy. He would chair this department until his retirement in 1953.

Stressed Blacks’ Contribution to Egypt

Locke became one of the leading members of the Howard faculty as well as a major inspiration to the student body and the growing national African American self-awareness movement of the 1920s. In 1924, he took a sabbatical leave to work with the French Oriental Archaeological Society in Egypt and the Sudan. His experiences there, including his presence at the reopening of Tutankhamen’s tomb, reinforced his belief in the strong historic and cultural roots of African civilization. Lecturing widely upon his return to the United States, Locke stressed the contribution of Africans to Egypt’s multiracial society, the world’s first advanced civilization, a contribution not widely acknowledged by white scholars.

Locke’s return to Howard coincided with a power struggle between the predominantly black student body and faculty, who desired a more African American-oriented institution, against the university’s white president and board of trustees who sought to maintain its traditional nonracial status. Along with several other professors, Locke was dismissed in 1925, ostensibly as a cost-cutting measure. That September, he expressed his views in a Survey Graphic magazine article, “Negro Education Bids for Par,” stating that African American education,

“to the extent that it is separate, ought to be free to develop its own racial interests and special aims for both positive and compensatory reasons.”

A storm of protest by the student body, alumni, national African American press, and fellow academics compelled the board to eventually reinstate him with full pay. But Locke did not return to teach on campus until 1928 with the installation of Howard’s first African American president, Mordecai W. Johnson, who shared his goals of creating a predominantly African American university.

Alain Locke

These years of temporary release from his academic duties proved to be among Locke’s most productive periods. A major contributor to Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life and Survey Graphic, he edited a special issue of the latter publication devoted to the Harlem Renaissance, the flourishing of African American art, literature, and music in New York City during the 1920s. Expanding it into a book and shifting the focus from Harlem to overall African American cultural life, Locke authored The New Negro: An Interpretation in 1925. It was an outstanding anthology of the leading African American fiction, poetry, drama, and essays by himself and others describing the changing state of race relations in the United States.

The New Negro became the symbol of a new era, documenting the social and cultural innovations of the younger African American generation. It contributed to a growing race consciousness, self confidence, and sophistication of an increasingly urbanized African American population. In his foreword, Locke asserted that African American life was “not only establishing new contacts and founding new centers, it is finding a new soul.” He compared this movement with similar efforts taking place around the globe in Russia, India, China, Palestine, and many other countries.

Because of his efforts, white critics began to take African American writing seriously, and African American writers saw themselves for the first time as part of a broad but unified literary movement. Most Harlem Renaissance artists sought not only to develop their work into high art, but also to use it as a means to better race relations and American society.

With the success of The New Negro, Locke became the leading authority on contemporary African American culture and used his position to promote the careers of young artists and authors like Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes. He encouraged them to seek out subjects in African American life and to set high artistic standards for themselves. Writing in a Black World essay entitled “Alain Locke: Cultural and Social Mentor,” Richard A. Long stated, it is “no exaggeration to say that the Harlem Renaissance as we know it is marked strongly by the presence of Alain Locke, and would have been something rather different without him and the role of mentor which he filled with modesty and elegance.”

More can be read about Alain Locke here, courtesy of africawithin.com.

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Dr. Janice Ellen Hale is professor of early childhood education at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. She is also founder of Visions for Children, a research/demonstration early childhood education program that is designed to facilitate the intellectual development of African American preschool children.

Author

Dr. Hale has written numerous articles in her field and has written three books. Her first book originally appeared in the fall of 1982. It was issued in a revised edition by The Johns Hopkins University press in 1986. The title of her first book is Black Children: Their roots, culture and learning styles. She is examining the influence of culture on the learning styles of African American children.

Dr. Hale’s second book was released in the fall of 1994. The title of her second book is Unbank the Fire: Visions for the education of African American children. In this book, she traces the historical factors that influence unequal educational outcomes for African American children. She further develops her theory of a culturally appropriate pedagogy that can close that achievement gap. Unbank the Fire was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Dr. Hale’s third book was released in the winter of 2001. The title is Learning While Black: Creating educational excellence for African American children. In this book, Dr. Hale outlines her model for school reform for African American children. She also unveils a plan for the whole village to united in creating the Beloved Community to support the achievement of children. Learning While Black was also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Research & Teaching

Dr. Hale received two grants to travel to West Africa and study the racial attitudes of African preschool children. She also participated in a study tour to study African life and culture. She was a recipient of a grant from the Spencer Foundation to support the study of Black children’s learning styles which was the foundation for her present work. Supported by the grant, she traveled to Geneva, Switzerland to attend a seminar on applications of the work of Jean Piaget for African American children.

She received funding for the research associated with from the Council for Economic Opportunities and the Cleveland foundation for seven years.

She has served as a speaker and consultant to numerous colleges, professional organizations and early childhood education programs across the United States and Jamaica.

Dr. Hale served as assistant and associate professor of early childhood education at Clark College in Atlanta. Georgia, from 1974-1980. While on a leave of absence from Clark, she worked as a research fellow and visiting lecturer in the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition at the University of California, San Diego. She continued her research from 1979-1981 as a Research Associate on the faculty of the Department of Psychology at Yale University in New Haven. Connecticut. She was also a visiting professor in Afro-American Studies at Yale. Dr. Hale also taught in the Department of Psychology at the University of Connecticut and in early childhood education at Jackson State University in Mississippi and Cleveland State University in Ohio.

Awards & Accomplishments

Dr. Hale has been the recipient of numerous honors such as having been named Distinguished Alumna of the School of Education at Georgia State University in 1982; by Ebony Magazine as one of 50 future leaders in its August 1978 issue on the New Generation, and recognized for outstanding contributions to education by the Detroit Chapter of the National Coalition of 100 Black Women in 1994.

Dr. Hale has served as a member of the Governing Board of the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) (1988-1992) and a consulting editor of Young Children (1985-1992). She has also served as a consultant to the Children’s Television Workshop program Sesame Street and Mister Roger’s Neighborhood.

Origin

Janice Hale was born in Fort Wayne. Indiana, and grew up in Columbus. Ohio. She is the daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Phale D. Hale. Her father is the pastor emeritus of Union Grove Baptist Church, a former Ohio state legislator and former chairman of The Ohio Civil Rights Commission. Her mother is an educator in the field of early childhood education.

Education

Janice Hale was educated in the public schools of Columbus. Ohio. She received the B.A. degree from Spelman College in sociology and elementary education. She received the Masters of Religious Education degree from the Interdenominational Theological Center with a major in Christian Education. She received the Ph.D. degree from Georgia State University in early childhood education.

Information obtain from Dr. Hale’s faculty web page.

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