Franklin A. Tuitt

Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer at UConn, and Professor of Higher Education and Student Affairs

Educational Leadership

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Titles:

Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer, University of Connecticut

Biography:

Frank Tuitt is the University of Connecticut’s Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer and Professor of Higher Education and Student Affairs in the Neag School of Education. With 25 years of experience as an administrator, academic, and change agent in higher education in the United States (and more recently around the globe), Tuitt is responsible for systems-wide strategic planning and implementation of mission-driven institutional diversity efforts. These responsibilities include overseeing the Office for Diversity and Inclusion and its six cultural centers and programs.

Tuitt’s scholarship critically examines issues of race, Inclusive Excellence, and diversity in and outside the classroom from the purview of faculty and students. Tuitt is a coeditor and contributing author of five books including Race, Equity, and the Learning Environment: The Global Relevance of Critical and Inclusive Pedagogies in Higher Education and most recently Campus Rebellions and Plantation Politics: Power, Diversity, and the Emancipatory Struggle in Higher Education. His most recent articles include “More than a Hashtag: Nurturing Black Excellence in Traditionally White Institutions” published by the Journal of Minority Achievement, Creativity, and Leadership, and “When the Levees Break: The Cost of Vicarious Trauma, Microaggressions and Emotional Labor for Black Administrators and Faculty Engaging in Race Work at Traditionally White Institutions,” published originally in the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, then reprinted in Black Liberation in Higher Education: Considerations for Research and Practice.

Before his time at the University of Connecticut, Tuitt was on the faculty at the University of Denver’s (DU) Morgridge College of Education from 2004-2019 and the Chief Diversity officer at DU from 2015-2019. In 2019, he received the National Association of Chief Diversity Officers in Higher Education Individual Leadership Award in recognition of “outstanding contributions to research, administration, practice, advocacy, and/or policy, and whose work informs and advances understanding of diversity and inclusive excellence in higher education.” In 2018, Tuitt received the Harvard Graduate School of Education Alumni Achievement Award presented by the Alumni of Color Conference Awards Committee for an alumnus who has demonstrated commitment to equity in issues of race, class, and education.

Internationally, Tuitt was a visiting scholar at the Echo Center for Diversity Policy in 2019-2020 at The Hague, Netherlands. He was the inaugural visiting scholar at the Echo Center and delivered lectures, facilitated training, and conducted research in support of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in the Netherlands and to post-secondary institutions in Europe. Tuitt received an honorary doctorate in 2019 from the University of Hasselt for making higher education more equity-minded and inclusive.

Tuitt holds a BA in Human Relations (Sociology Based) from Connecticut College, and an MA and Ed.D. in Administration, Planning, and Social Policy with a concentration in Higher Education from Harvard Graduate School of Education.