Professor Harris-Perry to leave post for Tulane University

“The offer at Tulane is an extraordinary one,” Harris-Perry said. “It offers me the opportunity for campus leadership in a way I simply did not have at Princeton.”

Harris-Perry said she was motivated to leave when the Center for African American Studies denied her a promotion to a full professorship earlier this year. She held the post of tenured associate professor since arriving at Princeton from the University of Chicago in 2006.

Harris-Perry said she was informed that her work was not of sufficient quality or quantity for promotion. “That was a very clear statement to me that my colleagues did not value my intellectual contributions,” she explained.

Harris-Perry also cited personal reasons for the move. After getting married in October and having commuted between Princeton and New Orleans for two years, she and her husband ultimately decided to commit to the South.

Though Princeton is a wrong match professionally, Harris-Perry said, she will miss the “absolutely extraordinary” students.

“Princeton undergraduates are ... involved, engaged, smart, hardworking, least-complaining,” she said. She also praised President Shirley Tilghman for her maintenance of a diverse student population and commitment to the study of race and gender.

Many of Harris-Perry’s students said they would miss her passion and enthusiasm.

“Her lectures took topics, such as women’s bodies and media stereotypes, and brought in knowledge and theses of her own, taking our class discussions in totally unpredictable directions but in a thought-provoking way,” said Lily Gold ’14, who took Harris-Perry’s WOM 202: Women in Politics, Media, and the Contemporary United States this fall.

Gold also praised Harris-Perry’s effort to interact with students outside of class by taking them to dinner with class speakers.

However, one student who took WOM 202 said that Harris-Perry’s attempts to juggle her schedule took a toll on the quality of the class.

“She seemed distracted with her new marriage,” Paige Tsai ’13 said. “She had difficulty balancing working from a hotel and commuting to school and teaching a seminar.”

Tsai, who is also on The Daily Princetonian layout staff, said that class dinners were interesting but expensive and that when she asked Harris-Perry about the expense, the professor responded, “It’s my last semester teaching at the University,” and explained that she wanted to make the most of it.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

Harris-Perry said she hopes to foster public discourse and provide Tulane’s students with opportunities for service learning, adding, “I am very committed to the idea that university work should always contribute to community and broader national discourse.”