Dear Members of the TC Community,

I am thrilled to announce the appointment of Dr. Ezekiel Dixon-Román as Professor of Critical Race, Media and Educational Studies in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching, as well as Director of the Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Urban and Minority Education for a five-year term beginning on January 1, 2023.

Professor Dixon-Román is a visiting professor within the Gordon Institute for the Fall 2022 term and is preparing to deliver TC’s Sachs Lecture in early 2023. He is joining us from the University of Pennsylvania where he has served as an Associate Professor, Director of the Master of Science in Social Policy Program and Chair of the Data Analytics for Social Policy Certificate Program. His research and work focus on examining and deconstructing how power and inequity are reproduced via technologies of quantification. Specifically, he considers quantification in education through a critical lens and explores how alternatives to current practices may improve “sociopolitical relations and the movement and flow of social life.” He is the author of Inheriting Possibility: Social Reproduction & Quantification in Education, winner of the 2018 Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association, and co-editor, along with Dr. Edmund W. Gordon, of Thinking Comprehensively About Education: Spaces of Educative Possibility and Their Implications for Public Policy. He has also co-guest edited four special issues of academic publications and published more than two dozen articles on the topics of Black studies, cybernetics, new materialisms, governmentality and biopolitics. He holds a Bachelor of Arts from North Carolina Central University, a Master of Arts from University of Chicago, and a Master of Arts and Doctorate of Philosophy from Fordham University.

Professor Dixon-Román’s focus on critical perspectives of quantification and data science that is attentive to systems of power is a wonderful complement to the existing scholarship of the Department of Curriculum and Teaching. He will teach courses that invite data praxis and critical inquiry, including on the intersections of race and quantification, Black Studies in education, the ethics of AI and algorithmic governance, and the preparation of critical scholars in data science. TC will also benefit from his positions as Co-Founder, Principal Investigator and Director of the Institute in Critical Quantitative, Computational, & Mixed Methodologies, a multi-institutional collaborative training institute in critical approaches to data science; and as Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Critical Computation Bureau of the Critical Computation Bureau, a collective of researchers, artists, and writers working at the intersection of technology and culture, computer science and information theory, aesthetics and politics.

As Director of the Gordon Institute, Professor Dixon-Román will carry on the legacy of groundbreaking leaders and scholars who have developed innovative research and programs to improve educational and life outcomes for people of color in urban areas. He will succeed Erica Walker, Clifford Brewster Upton Professor of Mathematical Education, who will become Dean of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto, in January 2023. Under Professor Walker’s exemplary leadership over the past five years, the Gordon Institute has expanded significantly, both in terms of engaged faculty affiliates, graduate students, and fellows, but also in securing substantial external grants and gifts in support of its research and development projects as well as graduate student funding. Professor Dixon-Román will continue that work, and build on Walker's successful efforts to expand public-private partnerships in Harlem and nearby communities; to develop and sustain collaborative initiatives with national organizations as well as TC, Columbia, and community partners; and to bring public engagement opportunities to the TC community and broader public through lectures, forums and other forms of public scholarship such as exhibits and podcasts. He will work in collaboration with Sonali Rajan, Associate Professor of Health Education, who joined the Gordon Institute as Senior Associate Director on September 1.

Many of you will have the opportunity to engage with Professor Dixon-Román this fall as he spends time learning more about the Gordon Institute and its many partners. I know that our entire community will benefit from his vision, scholarship and leadership, and I look forward to collaborating with him to further TC’s commitment to increase access and equity in our local communities and beyond.

Please join me in welcoming Professor Dixon-Román.

Sincerely,

William J. Baldwin
Interim Provost and Dean