Policy Analyst Professor
Resume:
Phillip M. Richards
Professor (Emeritus)
Department of English
Colgate University
Hamilton, New York 13346
*********@*******.***
Summary
Goal: Policy Analyst on Higher Education
Specialty: Racial Division’s Impact on the Structures and Reproduction of Knowledge in the Present-Day American University
I have always seen myself as a student of authors, texts, scholars, and the institutions within which this literary and scholarly process takes place. Thus, my concerns have always touched upon the central issues of educational policy: the methods by which teachers teach, students master texts, and how this process takes place in a tradition stretching from generation to generation, I have pursued literary studies with these overarching interests throughout my student years and post-graduate, professional life.
My decision to become a policy analyst flows from a broad intellectual and scholarly acquaintance with issues in the field. The orientation of my education and professional life prepared me for this new career. My graduate school interests revolved around the transmission of theological doctrine, the uncertain legitimacy of a new class of professionals, and the creation of a new ideological school. I brought these interests from my research into Jonathan Edwards and his theological disciples to the formation of a new class of black students and faculties in the sixties, seventies and eighties. After graduation from the University of Chicago, I continued to pursue these interests in early Black Anglo-Atlantic writers, the development of black literary studies, as well as in the institutional dynamics, and of Black canon formation. At present, I am concerned with the sociology of Black institutional life: the umbrella undertaking under which my present academic interests fall. I have become a social historian of the social, cultural and political world of black thinkers from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries to the present.
This historical study and writing have made me into a detail-oriented, student of human affairs. I am accustomed to placing them in their social, political, economic, and cultural context. I have learned to assimilate large amounts of both primary evidence, commentary, and historical background. Finally, I have learned to produce political, social, and cultural analyses that are comprehensive, objective, and persuasive. I have learned to do the work of being an analyst who must absorb legal dicta, social, and pollical evidence to inform and persuade his reader. I have acquired the skills of research, historical documentation, editing, social and political analysis, as well as writing that are crucial to the tasks of policy analysis.
The primary focus of my work in educational policy has been the impact of racial division on the structure of knowledge and the socialization process in the recently integrated selective academy. A racially bound two-tier system defines the crucial social, political, economic, cultural dynamics in many such schools. It has significant implications on the decisions of black and white students to enter these institutions and persist through the school, finishing their educations there. It has created distinct racial and class patterns of personal and academic socialization within the school. It has necessitated the development of particular social control methods appropriate for the volatile social, political, economic, and cultural atmosphere generated by its social and political dynamics.
I have observed this issue and commented on it both as it has transpired in the world of hands-on minority education – which a two-tier system of black and white education has de facto emerged in the elite as well as highly selective colleges and universities. I have similarly watched the development of a two-lane highway in scholarly fields in which I work, such as literary studies and, in particular, American studies.
As a Colgate professor, I responded in inHarper's Magazine, Commentary, Dissent, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education to this grim two-tier reality. I have gathered my observations on an ad hoc qualitative level. This reality now has cine to the attention of Anthony Jack and Heather MacDonald. They have failed to expose the two-tier racial phenomenon's deeper social, cultural roots, dynamics, and consequences. These add up to the reproduction of profoundly racial, social, and economic inequalities in some of the nation's elite schools. My work attracted the attention of legal scholars Professors Stuart Taylor, jr. and Richard Sander who used it in their study: Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students Its Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It.”
My work already participates in both explicit and implicit policy debates that exist in black higher education in America. Many books such as Lauren Rivera's Pedigree analyze the process by which Colgate students acquire employment in the elite managerial sectors of the corporate and professional world. My work defines the social dynamics of the educational and socialization processes of a new segregate site in the integrated world.
I have consistently published at a high level of mainstream intellectual and academic journals such as Harper’s Magazine, and The American Scholar. I seek a venue in which to continue to write white papers and policy statements and op-ed pieces. I have organized conferences and symposia with figures such as Nathan Glazer, Elijah Anderson, and Gary Orfield, bringing a wide variety of significant intellectuals and academics together to discuss issues in education and intellectual life to Colgate. I have published both monographs and in hosts of scholarly on the racial and ideological divides in the humanities. And I have established relationships with fellow thinkers, concerned with these matters. Most important to e have been successful efforts of a few Historically Black Colleges and Universities in preparing African American students for graduate and professional school. I have conducted such a survey under the auspices of the Ford Foundation to whom I have submitted a successful report. I hope to continue my work in this field.
CURRICULUM VITAE
Phillip M. Richards
Professor Emeritus
Department of English
Colgate University
13 Oak Drive
Hamilton, NY 13346
315-***-**** (cell)
*********@*******.***
EDUCATION
Ph.D., English, University of Chicago, 1987. Dissertation: "The New Divinity: Puritanism as Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century New England"
M.A., English, University of Chicago, 1974
B.A., cum Laude with Honors in English, Yale University, 1972
ACADEMIC HONORS AND GRANTS
2014- Professor Emeritus, Colgate University
2013-14 Senior Faculty Leave
2014 Eckler Lecture in Literature and Drama, Mt. Union College, Mt. Union, Ohio
2013 Riggio Grant for Research in the Manuscript and Rare Book Library in Robert Woodruff Library at Emory University
2012 Senior Faculty Leave (two years leave for research)
2011 May Term, Visiting Professor, Department of English, University of Freiburg
2011 Named to Two-Year Arnold Sio Chair of Diversity and Community, Colgate University
2010 Summer Term, Visiting Professor, Department of English, University of Freiburg
2010 Awarded Fulbright Fellowship for Professorship, Department of English, the University of Freiburg (declined)
2009-10 Harry and Lynde Bradley Foundation Fellowship, renewed
2008-09 Harry and Lynde Bradley Foundation Fellowship for "The Ideology of Black Studies."
2006- Full Professor, Department of English, Colgate University
2003-04 Visiting Professor, Department of English, L’Université Stendhal, France
2001 Summer Co-Director, “Ideas and Actions in Early Abolitionism,” NEH Summer Seminar for High School Students, Colgate University
1997-98 Fellow, Institute on Race and Social Division, Boston University
1995 Awarded Lupton Grant, College of Arts and Sciences, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC
1993-94 Fellow, Ford Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellowship for Minorities
1993-94 Fellow, National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, NC
(Declined) 1993-94 Fellow, Society for the Humanities, Cornell University
1991-92 Fulbright Teaching-Research Fellowship, Gabon
Spring 1991 Picker Fellow, Colgate University
Summer 1989 Colgate University Research Council "Major Grant" recipient
Summer 1988 Afro-American Institute Grant
Spring 1988 Colgate University Research Council Discretionary Grant
TEACHING EXPERIENCE
May 2011 Visiting Full Professor, Department of English, Freiburg University
2006- Professor with Tenure, Colgate University
2003-04 Visiting Full Professor, Department of English, L’Université Stendhal, Grenoble III
1987-2006 Associate Professor with Tenure, Department of English Colgate University
1997-1998 Visiting Associate Professor, Department of English at Boston University
1994-95 Associate Professor, Department of English, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
1991-92 Fulbright Fellow, Department of English, L’Université Omar Bongo, Gabon, “Revolution: American Literature in Black and White from the Mid- Eighteenth Century to the Civil War.” Seminar for students (Liçence and Maîtrise level) at the USIA Cultural Center
1984-1987 Instructor in English, Department of English, Philosophy, and Languages, Arkansas State University, Jonesboro, Arkansas
1978-1979 Lecturer, Composition Department, the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, Chicago, Illinois
1979-1984 Lecturer, Department of English, Howard University, Washington, DC
PUBLICATIONS
BOOKS IN PRINT
Co-author, Best Books by and About Blacks (Detroit: Gale Publishing Group, 2000)
Black Heart: The Moral Life of Recent African American Letters (New York: Peter Lang, 2006)
Co-editor, Re-centering Culture and Knowledge in Conflict Resolution Practice. (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2008)
An Integrated Boyhood: Coming of Age in White Cleveland (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2012)
BOOK CHAPTERS
“Equiano and One Canon of African American Literature” in Teaching Olaudah Equiano’s Narrative: Pedagogical Strategies and New Perspectives (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2012).
“Phillis Wheatley: The Consensual Blackness of Early Black Writing” in New Essays on Phillis Wheatley, Eric Lamore and John Shields, eds. (Knoxville: the University of Tennessee Press, 2011)
“Realism and Victorian Protestantism” in African American Literature, A Companion to American Literature and Culture, Paul Lauter, ed. (Cambridge: Blackwell Press, 2010)
“The Language of Culture and the New Practice of Conflict Resolution in Re-centering Culture and Knowledge in Conflict Resolution Practice,” Mary Trujillo, S. Y. Bowland, Linda James Meyers, Phillip M. Richards, and Beth Roy, eds. (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2008)
“Anglo-Atlantic Continuities of Civic and Religious Thought in the Institutional World of Early Black Writing,” in Beyond Douglass: New Perspectives in Early African-American Literature (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2008)
“The ‘Joseph Story’ as Slave Narrative: On Genesis and Exodus as Prototypes for Early Black Anglophone Writing,” in African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures ed. Vincent L. Wimbush (New York: Continuum, 2000)
“Henry Louis Gates, Sterling Brown, and the Professional Languages of African-American Literary Criticism” in Reconstructing History: The Emergence of a New Historical Society, Elizabeth Fox- Genovese and Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1999)
ARTICLES
“Recent Black Women’s Poetry and the African American Tradition of Poetry,” Callaloo (A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Literature) (Winter 2014), 38, Issue 1
“Marable’s Myth of the Folk,” Journal of African American History (Fall 2013), 98, Issue 4
Jay Wright, “Romantic, post-Romantic, and Symbolist,” American Poetry Review (July/August 2015), 44, Issue 4
Review-Essay, “Phillis Wheatley and Her Scholarly World at Present”, Early American Literature. Vol. 48, No. 2. 493-499.
“Sterling Brown, Past and Present” Massachusetts Review Vol. 53, No. 1, 68-89
Review, “Magdalena J. Zaborowska, James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile,” Journal of African American History (2009)
Review, “John C. Shields, Phillis Wheatley’s Poetics of Liberation: Backgrounds and Contexts,” Eighteenth-Century Studies (Summer 2010), 43, 4
“Coming of Age at Alexander Hamilton Junior High School,” Cleveland Magazine (October 2006)
“Black and Blue at Yale – A Memoir,” Commentary (April 2006)
“Prestigious colleges ignore the inadequate intellectual achievement of black students,” The
Chronicle of Higher Education (September 2002)
“Robert Hayden: An Appreciation,” Massachusetts Review (Winter 1999-2000), 40, 4
“Juneteenth and Ralph Ellison’s Impact on American Literature,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (Autumn 1999)
“A Stranger in the Village,” Dissent (Summer 1998) (reprinted in Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, fall 1998)
“Moll Flanders in LA,” Times Literary Supplement, August 28, 1998. Issue 4978
“Growing Up in University Circle,” The Case Western Reserve Alumni Magazine, August 1996
“Model Minorities,” The Massachusetts Review (Spring 1996)
“Farrakhan’s Middle-Class Revival Comes to Howard,” Dissent, spring 1996, pp. 79 – 84.
“Coming of Age in Michigan,” Carolina Quarterly, Winter 1995
“Leaving the Folk,” Harper’s Magazine, October 1995
“Phillis Wheatley, Americanization, the Sublime, and the Romance of America,” Style (Summer 1993), 27, 2
“Sula and the Discourse of the Folk Tradition,” Cultural Studies (May 1995)
“Phillis Wheatley and Literary Americanization,” American Quarterly (June 1992), 44, 2
“Nationalist Themes in the Preaching of Jupiter Hammon,” Early American Literature (1988), 25, 2
WORK IN PROGRESS
“Phillis Wheatley: the American Age of Sensibility” Palgrave/Macmillan
WORK UNDER CONSIDERATION
“The Ideological Origins of African American Literature: From Puritanism to Romanticism” Revised Manuscript Submitted to, delivered to, and accepted by the University of Tennessee Press
“The Romantic Symbolist Discourse in Some Twentieth-Century Black Poets” Submitted to and under consideration by Palgrave/MacMillan
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