Dr. Fred A. Bonner II
Prairie View—a historically Black university located near Houston—has awarded Bonner an endowed chair and given him his own center that will focus on helping to advance the status of minority populations across P-20 education and workplace contexts.
“Their offer was absolutely on par with Rutgers, pound for pound,” said Bonner, who has held the prestigious Samuel DeWitt Proctor Endowed Chair in Education at Rutgers’ Graduate School of Education for the last two years.
To accommodate his ambitious research agenda, Bonner will teach one course each semester at Prairie View and will house many of the initiatives that he started at Rutgers—such as the HBCU Deans Think-Tank and the Black Male Summit—at his new center when he arrives on campus in January.
“The work that I do makes more sense in an HBCU context,” said Bonner, who added that his hire is part of an aggressive campaign by Prairie View to actively pursue top scholars in a variety of academic disciplines across the university.
It’s a strategy that other HBCU presidents have said that they will also pursue if they are successful in raising enough funds to make attractive offers to top-tier Black faculty at majority institutions.
Dr. Terence Hicks, dean of the Whitlowe R. Green College of Education at Prairie View, said that Bonner’s presence on campus will undoubtedly raise the research profile of the 138-year-old public institution.
