NACU to Honor Freeman Hrabowski with 2021 Boyer Award

Ceremony and Lecture will take place at AAC&U Virtual Annual Meeting

On Thursday, January 21, 2021, the New American Colleges and Universities (NACU) will award the 11^th Annual Ernest L. Boyer Award to Dr. Freeman Hrabowski III, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), via a virtual ceremony. Following the award presentation, Dr. Hrabowski will deliver the 2021 Ernest L. Boyer Lecture which will include time for a live Q&A with the audience.

NACU will present the Annual Boyer Award as part of the Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) Annual Meeting from 2:45 – 3:45 pm ET on Thursday, January 11. The event is accessible to all conference attendees and NACU’s pre-registered guest list. The event recording will be available at a later date for all NACU campuses.

About the 2021 Ernest L. Boyer Lecture

The Empowered University: Shared Leadership, Culture Change, and Inclusive Excellence  

Dr. Freeman Hrabowski III, president of UMBC, leads a campus widely recognized for its culture of embracing academic innovation and inclusive excellence. This culture has produced a number of distinctive initiatives to support and enhance teaching and learning – from infusing entrepreneurship and civic engagement into the curriculum to establishing an academic innovation fund to support faculty as they redesign courses and develop new approaches to help students succeed. Dr. Hrabowski will discuss some of these innovative initiatives in light of the challenges of the current period, focusing special attention on the important role universities must play in preparing the next generation of leaders.   

About Dr. Freeman Hrabowski III

Dr. Freeman A. Hrabowski III, president of UMBC since 1992, is a consultant on science and math education to national agencies, universities, and school systems. He was named by President Obama to chair the President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for African Americans. He also chaired the National Academies’ committee that produced the report, Expanding Underrepresented Minority Participation: America’s Science and Technology Talent at the Crossroads (2011). His 2013 TED talk highlights the “Four Pillars of College Success in Science.”

Named one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World by TIME (2012) and one of America’s Best Leaders by U.S. News & World Report (2008), he also received TIAA-CREF’s Theodore M. Hesburgh Award for Leadership Excellence (2011), the Carnegie Corporation’s Academic Leadership Award (2011), and the Heinz Award (2012) for contributions to improving the “Human Condition.” More recently, he received the American Council on Education’s Lifetime Achievement Award (2018) and was named a recipient of the University of California, Berkeley’s Clark Kerr Award (2019). UMBC has been recognized as a model for inclusive excellence by such publications as U.S. News, which the past 10 years has recognized UMBC as a national leader in academic innovation and undergraduate teaching. Dr. Hrabowski’s most recent book, The Empowered University, written with two UMBC colleagues, examines how university communities support academic success by cultivating an empowering institutional culture.

About the Ernest L. Boyer Award

The award honors Ernest Boyer’s legacy by recognizing others who are making significant contributions to American higher education. Boyer was the first to define a New American College which gave rise to NACU, a national consortium of private, comprehensive colleges and universities that are recognized for advancing the integration of liberal education, professional studies, and civic engagement to graduate extraordinary professionals for a global workforce and society.

Past Boyer Award recipients include Alexander and Helen Astin, Edward Ayers, Betsy O. Barefoot and John N. Gardner, Jose Antonio Bowen, Nancy Cantor, Cathy Davidson, Ira Harkavy, Frederick Lawrence, Carol Geary Schneider, and Beverly Daniel Tatum. The Boyer Award is made possible through the generosity of the Boyer Award Society.