Dear Campus Community,
We are delighted to announce Dr. Margaret “Maggie” Hunter’s hiring in the Division of Equity & Inclusion where she will serve as the Senior Director for the Centers for Educational Justice and Community Engagement (EJCE), reporting to the Vice Chancellor for Equity & Inclusion. Maggie is most recently the Associate Provost for Student Success and Undergraduate Education and Fletcher Jones Professor in Race and Sociology at Mills College in Oakland, California. She earned a fellowship with the American Council of Academic Deans and completed leadership training with the National Equity Project. She served as the co-chair of the Mills-Berkeley Partnership Task Force, where she worked closely with Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate Education, Cathy Koshland.
At Mills, Maggie co-led the First Year Experience and helped create an innovative partnership between student affairs and academic affairs to bolster student success and belonging. She also led a group of faculty and staff to co-create MPOWER, Mills’ signature academic experience that guarantees high-impact educational experiences to all of their undergraduate students including a faculty-mentored research or creative project.
Maggie is a leading sociological researcher on colorism in Black and Latinx communities as well as the racial politics of education and knowledge production. Her book, Race, Gender and the Politics of Skin Tone, and numerous peer-reviewed articles have garnered significant attention and helped shape the field of colorism. Maggie is a frequent media commentator on issues of race and racism in publications including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, and more. She has also delivered keynote addresses on racial equity issues at UC Santa Barbara, UC Irvine, Duke University, and Princeton University among other institutions. Her newest research concerns the racial attitudes of “Generation Z,” our youngest university students, and how that shapes the youth activist agenda for racial justice.
Maggie has extensive experience building strategic educational partnerships. In the past four years, she facilitated the signing of nearly a dozen MOUs with community colleges and East Bay public school districts that created enrollment pipelines and student success programs. In addition, she has co-written a number of successful grant applications helping to bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars for equity and student success programs. We are thrilled that Maggie will leverage her scholarship and organizational experience in leading EJCE and forging partnerships across campus beyond those that she already has established.
Maggie will take on this important E&I leadership role on February 8, 2021. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Margaret Hunter to the Division of Equity & Inclusion and to the Berkeley campus.
In partnership,
Oscar Dubón
Vice Chancellor, Equity & Inclusion