Three Women Who Are Retiring From High-Level University Positions

Kathleen Spehar, director of The O’Shaughnessy Auditorium at St. Catherine University in St. Paul. Minnesota, has announced that she will leave her post this summer to accept the role of executive director at the Council on Culture & Arts in Tallahassee, Florida. She has served as director of the auditorium since September 2011. Under her leadership, the auditorium has grown its artistic and community presence through expanding its breadth of programs and creating partnerships with both local and national organizations.

Spehar is a graduate of Western Michigan University where she double-majored in music education/performance and communications. She holds a master’s degree in interdisciplinary studies/arts administration.

Hazel V. Carby, the Charles C. & Dorathea S. Dilley Professor Emerita of African American Studies & American Studies at Yale University, retired from full-time teaching this spring after serving 30 years on the Yale faculty. As a world-renowned scholar in the fields of feminist literary studies and Black studies, she was instrumental in transitioning Yale’s African American studies program into a full department, and eventually into a Ph.D.-granting unit. She is the author of Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford University Press, 1987), Race Men  (Harvard University Press, 1998), Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America (Verso, 1999), and the forthcoming Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands (Verso, 2019).

Dr. Carby holds a Ph.D. from the University of Birmingham in England.

Patricia White, director of the First Year Experience Program at Alcorn State University in Mississippi, has announced that she will retire from the university after 25 years of service. Before her promotion to director, she spent 13 years as an academic advisor for the University College.

White also served as an adjunct instructor for the School of Education and Psychology at Alcorn State University for more than 10 years.