Giants in the Classroom
Twenty influential scholars whose work has inspired others and made a significant impact on the academy

Over the past two decades, Black Issues' writers and editors have featured hundreds, perhaps thousands, of faculty in the magazine's stories and interviews. Deciding on 20 faculty members whose research, teaching and service set them above their peers in excellence has not proven an easy task. What we accomplished was selecting 20 individuals we believe have had a significant impact in the academy, and whose work has inspired and will continue to inspire others.

DERRICK BELL
An "intellectual warrior in the pursuit of social justice" is how one might describe Derrick Bell, a visiting law professor at New York University. Bell, who became the first tenured Black professor at Harvard Law School in 1971, has brought an uncompromising and insistent voice to the public discussion of race and class in American society. For more than four decades, this lawyer, activist, teacher and writer has challenged critics and informed readers with candid and progressive views. Noted for his professional integrity and courage, Bell has abandoned both a deanship at the University of Oregon and a tenured professorship at Harvard in protest of hiring practices that overlooked minority women faculty candidates. 
As a scholar, he has contributed to legal journals published by Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Michigan, Berkeley, Pennsylvania, UCLA and Wisconsin. His most recent book is Silent Covenants: Brown V. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform.

JAMES CARMICHAEL
The driving force behind the success Xavier University's science program has had with getting its Black students into medical school, Carmichael, a physical chemist, gave up prime teaching assignments to instruct freshmen when he joined the university faculty in 1970. A guiding principle of his approach is to push for the success of all his students. "Rather than try to flunk students out, we really try to help them," he says.
That commitment has won him such awards as the CASE professor of the year in 1990 and McGraw-Hill's Harold W. McGraw Prize in Education in 1997. Xavier's national track record in sending the highest numbers of Black students to medical school has inspired other researchers and institutions to set about learning the secret of Xavier's success.