Eddie R. Cole, Ph.D.
Role: Panelist
Affiliation: University of California, Los Angeles
Title: [187]
Session Name: Saturday Luncheon
Bio:
Eddie R. Cole, Ph.D., is Professor of Education and History at UCLA and a 2023-24 Joy Foundation Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. A historian of higher education, Professor Cole’s research explores race and social movements on college campuses; power and systems of power; and the outsized influence of colleges and universities on American society.
His award-winning first book, The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom, is a history of how academic leaders shaped racial policies and practices during the mid-twentieth century. The book received five book prizes:
• 2022: Winner of the Outstanding Publication Award, American Educational Research
Association, Division J.
• 2021: Winner of the Outstanding Book Award, History of Education Society
• 2021: Winner of the Frederic W. Ness Book Award, Association of American Colleges and Universities
• 2021: Winner of the Outstanding Book Award, Association for the Study of Higher Education
• 2021: Winner of the Critics’ Choice Book Award, American Educational Studies
Association
His essays and op-eds on education and race have appeared in TIME, The Guardian, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Chronicle of Higher Education. He has
appeared as an expert commentator for CNN, BBC World News, MSNBC, and C-Span Book TV.
His second book, With Faith in God and Heart and Mind: A History of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity (University of North Carolina Press, 2025), is a co-authored, comprehensive, and
authoritative history of the Fraternity through the lens of Black organizing across multiple eras of the Black freedom struggle. In addition to those two books, Professor Cole has published articles in leading academic journals, including the Journal of African American History and Journal of Diversity in Higher Education.
Aside from his own writing, Professor Cole’s research has also been mentioned in The New York Times and Fortune Magazine coverage on Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs); He has also commented for The Atlantic regarding political attacks on American higher education; the Associated Press and Forbes Magazine on the hiring of Black college presidents; and Vox News on the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling on race in college admissions. His third book, which is currently in progress, will be a Black intellectual history of American higher education to be published by Princeton University Press.
Professor Cole’s research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Woodrow
Wilson National Fellowship Foundation (now the Institute for Citizens and Scholars), the Spencer Foundation, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, the National Academy of Education, the University of Chicago, and Princeton University.
He was initiated into Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc. in 2009 through the Nu Alpha Alpha chapter in Bloomington, Indiana. As a student, he received two of the Fraternity’s prestigious international scholarships—the 2010 Founders’ Memorial Scholarship and the 2010 George E. Meares Scholarship—in addition to being a 3-time (2010-12) Tenth District Graduate Scholar of the Year.
