Smith honored at Harvard’s Alumni of Color Conference

Smith honored at Harvard’s Alumni of Color Conference

BY B.J. ALMOND
Rice News Staff   
 
Rice Associate Provost Roland Smith Jr. has received a 2008 Harvard Graduate School of Education Alumni of Color Achievement Award.

ROLAND SMITH

The award was presented Feb. 28 at the sixth annual Alumni of Color Conference in Cambridge, Mass. Each year the conference brings together Harvard Graduate School of Education alumni, students, faculty and staff of all backgrounds who share a commitment to understanding racial issues in education.

“Dr. Smith was recognized for his work, which addresses issues of race and education in ways that offer new frames of thought and practice, and evidences a commitment to promote meaningful strategies to accept change and to improve educational opportunities for people of color,” said conference tri-chair Keith Catone.

Smith received an Ed.D. in 1988 from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he was elected to the Harvard Educational Review and served as a teaching fellow.

“We have made significant progress in the area of race and educational opportunity since the 1960s,” Smith said. “That progress, however, is fragile and is being undermined by the complacency, ignorance and bigotry that still hover in the shadows. To secure America’s future, we must work to develop new strategies to eliminate our educational divides and, in the process, create a new language to talk about race and ethnicity in ways that enrich us all.”

With the 40th anniversary of the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. less than a month away, Smith recalled where he was on that fateful day, April 4, 1968: in a jail cell with 227 other students who had been arrested for protesting the poor conditions of historically black colleges in Maryland. At the time, Smith was president of both the student body at Bowie State University and the campus chapter of the NAACP.  Since then, he has repeatedly championed the cause of minority students in education.

Smith came to Rice in 1996 after 23 years at the University of Notre Dame, where he served as executive assistant to the president, associate professor of sociology and founding director of the Center for Educational Opportunity in the Institute for Urban Studies.

At Rice, where Smith is also an adjunct professor of education and sociology, he mentors Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellows and others planning to pursue a Ph.D. His teaching and research interests include ethnographic research methods, sociology of education, cultural diversity of higher education, school-university collaborative relationships and urban studies. He serves on several Rice committees, including the Diversity Task Force.

Smith is president of the American Association of Blacks in Higher Education and a board member of the Texas Diversity Council. In Houston, he is board chair of the Education Foundation of Harris County and board president of the Center for Health and Faith Initiatives.

His numerous past achievements include serving as a member of the Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Holiday Commission established by the 98th U.S. Congress, as chair of the National Association of Presidential Assistants in Higher Education and as a member of the Indiana Advisory Board to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.

A native of Washington, D.C., Smith has a B.A. in anthropology and sociology from Bowie State University and a master’s in public affairs from Indiana University.