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SHAUN
R. HARPER, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is the leading national expert on Black male students in higher education. He has published six books and more than 50 journal articles, book chapters, and other academic publications, mostly pertaining to Black undergraduate men. He has also presented more than 100 research papers and workshops at national education conferences since 2002. Shaun’s scholarly contributions include three chapters in the acclaimed edited volume, African American Men in College (Jossey-Bass, 2006). His newest single-authored book, Exceeding Expectations: Black Male Achievers and Insights into College Success, is being published by Harvard University Press.
Shaun received the 2008 Association for the Study of Higher Education’s Early Career Award. Also, the National Association of Academic Advisors for Athletics presented him its 2008 Outstanding Contribution to Research Award. In September 2007, Dr. Harper was featured on the cover of Diverse Issues in Higher Education for his National Black Male College Achievement Study, the largest-ever research study on Black male undergraduates. He is presently engaged in data analysis for a second landmark research project: The National Study of Black Male Student Equity in Public Postsecondary Education, a statistical examination of Black male college opportunity and outcomes across all 596 public colleges and universities in the United States. Dr. Harper has received more than $900,000 in grants from the Lumina Foundation for Education, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and other sources to fund his research on Black men.
This professor’s impact on Black male college achievement extends beyond publishing, securing research grants, and winning awards. He advises Black Men United, an undergraduate student organization at Penn. Shaun also devotes a generous fraction of his time to mentoring Black male students at Penn and elsewhere, as well as young professionals who work at higher education institutions across the nation. He is Director of the Grad Prep Academy, an initiative that brings undergraduates from colleges and universities across the country to Penn, enroll them in a three-month GRE prep course, and connect them with current Black male Ph.D. students who mentor them through the process of applying to doctoral programs in the field of education.
An additional noteworthy feature of Professor Harper's work is its policy relevance. The policy report he wrote for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in 2006 received extensive coverage in The Chronicle of Higher Education and other media outlets, and has since become one of the most widely-cited publications on Black male students in higher education. Over the past year he has served as a panelist for the Congressional Black Caucus Annual Legislative Conference and several other policy briefings on Capitol Hill. Moreover, Shaun serves on the advisory board for the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, a Washington-based organization that conducts and disseminates research and policy analyses. Results from his National Study of Black Male Student Equity in Public Postsecondary Education will be released in the form of a policy report in 2010.
No scholar has had a greater impact on the study of Black male students in American higher education than Dr. Harper. More impressive are the meaningful ways in which his research informs policy, practice, and the actual lives of the people he writes about. Professor Harper’s work can be downloaded from his website: www.works.bepress.com/sharper <http://www.works.bepress.com/sharper> . He is a Spring 1998 initiate and Past Polemarch of the Delta Xi Chapter at Albany State University. His Ph.D. in Higher Education Administration is from Indiana University.
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