Retirements

I retired at the end of January 2025, marking the end of a 47-year career at the University at Buffalo. Prior to taking up a position at UB, I worked as a program coordinator at a Title IV-funded Race/Sex Desegregation Center at the University of Missouri/Columbia, where I trained school administrators, counselors and teachers in aspects of the law. Prior to this, I conducted research for my dissertation in Ghana over two years, a set of collective life experiences that cumulatively shaped my then-present and now future, wherein my sole connection to “back home” was an occasional blue aerogram letter that punctuated life at that time. Such concurrent space of disconnection, connection and reconnection shaped much of who I was and became as I ventured back to graduate school to write my dissertation and take up a position at a research university.

This space of liminality—living methodologically, substantively and theoretically “in-between”—marked my return to the States wherein crossing theoretical, methodological and human boundaries came to define my overall research agenda and associated set of practices for close to 50 years, always with a practiced eye toward tracking and challenging intensifying inequalities and outcomes by social class, race/ethnicity, gender and nation of origin within the United States and across the globe.

Although my future is yet unclear, I look forward to its unfolding, as I engage a new and exciting chapter in my life. Thanks for everything, UB. I appreciate the opportunity to be part of the institution and greatly value all those administrators, faculty, staff and students that I have worked with for close to half a century. I am most proud of the fact that more than 65 PhD students from a broad range of nations and backgrounds have completed excellent dissertations under my direction as a major professor! Congratulations all!