Tom's Newsmaker guest today is Dr. Freeman Hrabowski III, who has served as the president of University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) for 30 years. He will retire from that position at the end of June.
He will be succeeded by a scholar and Dean from Duke University, Dr. Valerie Sheares Ashby.
Dr. Hrabowski is UMBC’s fifth president, and by far, the most impactful. For years, he has been regularly included on the lists of the world’s most influential people and top leaders. He has been an unparalleled visionary as an educator, and a joyful and tireless champion of diversity and equity in academia and in society at large.
He transformed UMBC’s modest, somewhat sleepy Catonsville campus into an academic powerhouse, which is now recognized as one of only 146 R1 institutions, the highest ranking afforded to the country’s most prestigious research institutions. And he has created opportunities for students from diverse and non-traditional academic backgrounds. For years, UMBC has produced more Black M.D. and Ph. D. degree-earners than any other college in the country.
Freeman Hrabowski’s commitment to civil rights and social justice has been life-long. He grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. Before he was a teenager he was marching with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, and he counted among his friends the girls who were murdered in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963.
Dr. Freeman Hrabowski joins us on our digital line from the UMBC campus in Catonsville.
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