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In 2008, Dr. Hrabowski was named one of America’s Best Leaders by U.S. News & World Report, which ranked UMBC the nation’s #1 “Up and Coming” university for six years (2009-14).
In 2009, the venerable UMBC President was named one of America’s 10 Best College Presidents by Time magazine, which described him as “a charismatic leader who was jailed for almost a week as a 12-year-old in the fight for civil rights in early-’60s Alabama” and who “has been so successful at cultivating his school’s reputation for steering African-American students toward science and engineering — fields in which they have been traditionally under-represented.”
Time magazine later named the esteemed educator to its 2012 list of The World’s 100 Most Influential People, writing: “When you think of the top science universities in the U.S., schools like MIT and Caltech may jump to mind. But perhaps the most envied science program in the country is at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. That’s where Freeman A. Hrabowski III, 61, has spent 20 years as president turning a humble commuter school into one of the nation’s leading sources of African Americans who get Ph.D.s in science and engineering.”
In 2012, President Barack Obama selected Dr. Hrabowski to chair the President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for African Americans.
In 2018, Dr. Hrabowski received the American Council on Education’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
In 2019, he was honoured with the University of California, Berkeley’s Clark Kerr Award, which recognizes “those who have made extraordinary and distinguished contributions to the advancement of higher education.”
Born in 1950 in Birmingham, Alabama, Dr. Hrabowski graduated from Hampton Institute with highest honours in mathematics. He received his M.A. (mathematics) and Ph.D. (higher education administration/statistics) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. You can learn more about Dr. Hrabowski here: https://president.umbc.edu/.
