Vice President for Strategic Affairs and Diversity at Virginia Tech

Menah Pratt-Clarke, JD, PhD, is the vice president for strategic affairs and diversity at Virginia Tech. She is also a professor of education in the university’s School of Education, with affiliations in Africana studies, women’s and gender studies.

With twenty-five years of administrative, academic, and legal experience, Pratt-Clarke has led and managed large-scale institution-wide transformational strategic initiatives at public and private higher education institutions.

As a member of the President’s executive staff at Virginia Tech, she oversees the Office for Strategic Affairs and the Office for Inclusion and Diversity. In addition to implementing InclusiveVT, Virginia Tech’s diversity and inclusion commitment, she manages and oversees the Council on Virginia Tech’s History as part of the Sesquicentennial Committee.

She previously served for almost ten years as associate chancellor for strategic affairs, associate provost for diversity, and Title IX officer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was also a tenured associate professor in the College of Education.

She also worked at Vanderbilt University for eight years. As the first university compliance officer and assistant secretary, she oversaw governance, ethics, and compliance matters, including the Board of Trustees office and associated committees.

Pratt-Clarke is licensed to practice law in Illinois and Tennessee. Her practice areas include real estate, commercial lending, public finance, construction law, civil rights, and equal employment opportunity law.

Pratt-Clarke has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Iowa with a major in English and minors in philosophy and African-American studies. She received her master’s degree in literary studies from the University of Iowa and a master’s in sociology from Vanderbilt University. She also earned a PhD and JD from Vanderbilt University. Her research interests include transdisciplinary scholarship that crosses, intersects, and incorporates multiple disciplines, including critical race studies, Black feminism, critical race feminism, ethnography, autoethnography, womanism, and womanist theology.

In addition to her first book, ‘Critical Race, Feminism, and Education: A Social Justice Model,” she has released “A Black Woman’s Journey from Cotton Picking to College Professor: Lessons about Race, Gender, and Class in America,” “Journeys of Social Justice: Women of Color Presidents in the Academy,” and “Reflections on Race, Gender, and Culture in Cuba.” “A Black Woman’s Journey” received the 2018 Critics’ Choice Award by the American Education Studies Association for scholarship deemed to be outstanding in its field. She regularly writes a blog at menahprattclarke.com.