Appointment of Dr. Anthony Jack as Inaugural Faculty Director of the Newbury Center and Associate Professor of Higher Education Leadership, Wheelock College of Education & Human Development
From Dr. Jean Morrison, University Provost and Chief Academic Officer
and Dr. David Chard, Dean, Wheelock College of Education & Human Development
With the shared values and interests of the Newbury Center and Wheelock College, we are very pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Anthony Abraham Jack as faculty director of the Newbury Center and associate professor of higher education leadership with tenure, effective July 1.
Dr. Jack will join the Wheelock College of Education & Human Development’s Department of Educational Leadership & Policy Studies, which offers graduate programs in higher education leadership to increase access and success for students who identify as first-generation or as members of historically underrepresented groups. Dr. Jack’s extensive research exploring the experiences and needs of first-generation students will join the department’s growing body of scholarship addressing persistent questions of equity and access in post-secondary education.
Dr. Jack will also serve as the inaugural faculty director of the Newbury Center. Created in 2021, it is one of the few university-based, first-generation centers in the nation serving undergraduate, graduate, and professional first-generation students. It was designed as a central hub for first-generation students to seek advice, direction, community, and a sense of belonging to help them thrive at BU. As a result of its innovative events and programming for current students as well as staff, faculty, and alumni, the Newbury Center has been recognized as a First-gen Forward Advisory Institution by the Center for First-generation Student Success and was recently awarded the Gold Standard award by FGLIstudents.org as one of the “Best Colleges for FGLI Students.”
Throughout our discussions with Dr. Jack, his enthusiasm for the Newbury Center’s mission was very clear. He spoke of ways in which he would work alongside the Center’s inaugural director Maria Erb and her team to enhance the Center’s already robust programming, drawing on his path-breaking body of research to create a program of research and scholarship with the potential to influence higher education and first-generation students nationally and globally.
Previously, Dr. Jack was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and an assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He held the Shutzer assistant professorship at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. His scholarship appears in the Common Reader, Du Bois Review, Social Problems, Sociological Forum, and Sociology of Education and has earned awards from the American Educational Studies Association, American Sociological Association, Association for the Study of Higher Education, Eastern Sociological Society, and the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Dr. Jack has also held fellowships from the Ford Foundation and the National Science Foundation and was a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellow. The National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan named him an Emerging Diversity Scholar. In 2020, Muhlenberg College awarded Dr. Jack an honorary doctorate, and the National Head Start Association named him a BOLD Alumni Leader for his work in transforming higher education.
His research and writing, as well as biographical profiles of his experiences as a first-generation college student, have been featured in the New York Times, Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Nation, American Conservative Magazine, The National Review, The Washington Post, Vice, Vox, NPR, Die Zeit, and Times Higher Education. His first book, The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students, was awarded the 2020 Mirra Komarovsky Book Award, the 2019 Critics Choice Book Award, the 2019 CEP Mildred Garcia Award for Exemplary Scholarship, and the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize and was also named a finalist for the 2019 C. Wright Mills Award and an NPR Book’s Best Book of 2019. Dr. Jack received his BA in women’s and gender studies and religion cum laude from Amherst College and an AM and Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University.
Please join us in congratulating Dr. Jack and welcoming him to Boston University.