Next Phase of a High-Impact Career

On March 17, 2022, Dr. Shaun Harper took to social media to share a personal career announcement that had lots of people talking, both inside and outside of education.

Harper told his thousands of followers that come May 2023, he was planning to step away from the USC Race and Equity Center, the national research center he founded that works, as its website indicates, “to illuminate, disrupt, and dismantle racism in all forms,” while “eradicating sexism, xenophobia, islamophobia, antisemitism, ageism, ableism, sizeism, and other engines of human suffering.”

Dr. Shaun HarperIn the post that quickly spread across LinkedIn, Facebook, and X (formerly known as Twitter) like a raging wildfire, Harper noted: “While I am enormously proud of what our center has accomplished, I know for sure that administrative work is no longer the best use of my gifts as a scholar and teacher. I have many, many other creative, entrepreneurial, and social impact activities that I want to explore in the next chapter of my faculty career at USC. I have important books I want to write. When I transition in May 2023, I would have been our center’s executive director for 12 full years – that is long enough.”

Ask Harper if he still feels that way today, and his answer is a resounding yes. Yet, five months after he vowed to step away as the leader of the center that has been catapulted to national heights, he’s still at the helm, taking a surgical approach to cementing the center’s structure and enduring legacy.

“I feel a sense of responsibility to the organization that I created and to all the people that it serves – not just the 29 people who work here, but also the hundreds of companies, universities, and school districts that we’re working with,” says Harper in an interview with Diverse. “I just know in my gut that it wouldn’t be right to walk away from the center without doing more to ensure its future.”

Building beyond higher education