Marybeth Gasman

Marybeth Gasman is Samuel DeWitt Proctor Endowed Chair and a Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University. She also serves as the Executive Director of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute for Leadership, Equity and Justice and the Executive Director of the Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions.

Her areas of expertise include the history of American higher education, Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) (with an emphasis on Historically Black Colleges and Universities), racism and diversity, fundraising and philanthropy, and higher education leadership. She is the author or editor of 30 books, including Doing the Right Thing: How to End Systemic Racism in Faculty Hiring (Princeton University, 2022) and HBCU: The Power of Historically Black Colleges and Universities with Levon T. Esthers (John Hopkins Press, 2024). She has penned over 450 opinion articles for the nation’s newspapers and magazines and in 2024 was listed as #28 on Education Week’s list of the Top 200 Most Influential Public Scholars. 

Marybeth has raised over $23 million in grant funding to support her research and that of her students, mentees, and MSI partners. She has served on the board of trustees of The College Board as well as historically Black colleges – Paul Quinn College, Morris Brown College, and St. Augustine College. She considers her proudest accomplishment to be receiving the University of Pennsylvania’s Provost Award for Distinguished Ph.D. Teaching and Mentoring, serving as the dissertation chair for over 80 doctoral students since 2000.

She has spoken about her research to, among others, the U.S. State Department, TIAA, the National Science Foundation, and faculty and students at Harvard and Stanford Universities. You can watch her talk for TEDxBloomington here.