Former Morehouse President Will Lead Diversity Initiatives At Harvard

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John Silvanus Wilson To Help Harvard With Inclusivity

John Silvanus Wilson, who is the former president of Morehouse College, is going to help Harvard University become a more inclusive institution.

Wilson served as president of Morehouse for 5 years (from 2013 to 2017) before he left in order to sit on Harvard University’s board of overseers. He is now taking a leave of absence from the board to serve as a senior adviser and strategist on the institution’s Presidential Task Force for Inclusion and Belonging.

According to Harvard University President Drew Faust, Wilson is going to “serve as a point person during the presidential transition in bringing the task force report to life and ensuring its enduring impact.” Wilson himself earned a master’s degree and doctorate from Harvard University, and said his job is to improve the way people experience the institution.

“The assignment is to build a bridge from what the task force is saying to how we are functioning and living at Harvard. Are there things we can do? Are there programs, initiatives, practices, policies, ways of seeing, strategic thinking that we can begin to evidence here at Harvard, all of which begin to qualitatively change the way our students, staff, and faculty — everyone in the Harvard community — experience Harvard?” Wilson explained.

The former Morehouse president is currently writing a book about Harvard alum W.E.B. Du Bois, who commonly talked about feeling “othered” at the school when he attended back in the late 19th century. Wilson’s goal in taking on diversity initiatives is to make sure others don’t have the same negative social experience.

“Du Bois said he benefited enormously from the professors here. And obviously he brought a great mind here in the first place, as do a lot of people today, but he also said he found the culture at Harvard to be reflective of the problematic caste-based culture in the greater society,” Wilson said about the conflicting experience had by W.E.B. He then elaborates saying, “So I believe that the task force that President Faust appointed is a task force that is still looking to address the same kind of qualitative aspects of the Harvard experience that W.E.B. Du Bois pointed to 130 years ago.”