After months of searching and multiple emails keeping the university updated, the New School has found a new president. Dr. Dwight A. McBride will be the ninth president of the New School starting Spring 2020, following David Van Zandt’s ten year presidency.
Throughout 100 years and eight university presidents, Dr. Dwight McBride is the first person of color to lead the New School.
McBride is an academic of race and literary studies with award winning authorship. He is currently provost and executive vice president of academic affairs at Emory University. McBride is also an Asa Griggs Candler professor of African American studies and an affiliated professor of English.
He began teaching at the University of Pennsylvania until he became the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. McBride then went on to teach African American studies, English and Performance Studies as a Daniel Hale Williams Professor at Northwestern University while also being the dean of the Graduate School and an associate provost. Van Zandt was also a dean at Northwestern, at the Pritzker School of Law.
His published work includes Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality, which was nominated for the Lambda Literary Award and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. McBride “offers the evolving insights of one black gay male scholar” in the collection, according to the New York University Press.
McBride’s book Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism and Slave Testimony was also nominated for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, with his co-authored fiction anthology Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual African American Fiction winning the Lambda Literary Award.
McBride is already connected to the New School’s history, as he is the co-founder and co-editor of the James Baldwin Review. Baldwin took classes at the New School, and is often included in promotional materials.
Dr. McBride was the Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison’s research assistant, according to an interview with Chicago Magazine. In the same interview, he also told a story of singing in front of the renowned singer Ella Fitzgerald.
The search for a new president began earlier this year when David Van Zandt announced his departure in January. Since then, the Presidential Search Committee, consisting of thirteen members who are involved in multiple areas throughout the university, have been reviewing candidates based on whether their experience, background and values run parallel to the New School’s.
The New School community was informed of McBride’s presidency in an email from the President Search Committee on Friday morning.
“In every conversation with the Search Committee and its members, he evidenced his understanding of our university’s unique strengths and qualities and his ability and enthusiasm to elevate and advance them,” the email said.
“He is an accomplished scholar, an experienced academic administrator, and an engaged, curious, and exuberant leader. He brings deeply-held values for inclusion, equity, diversity and social justice in higher education,” according to the university-wide email.