Fredrick Dixon

A lifelong resident of Chicago, Dr. Fredrick Douglass Dixon is a second-generation educator, historian, and community advocate. One of Dixon’s fundamental roles in higher education is to build bridges between the all-too-often divisive worlds of campus, community, and the most at-risk populations. His overarching theoretical perspective is taken from Robert Chrisman's black-scholar-activist model, which espouses that the black scholar must contribute their knowledge of African American experience outside the Eurocentric cannons to enhance traditional research, teaching, service, and community engagement. The inextricable link between historical accuracy and democratic citizenship remains the foundation that frames his approach to classroom instruction. This vein of student-teacher interaction adds to the Western paradigms and theories that dominate the customary historical narrative. As his indispensable duty, he remains devoted to providing successful pathways for the most at-risk students toward access, matriculation, and graduation while interjecting the paradigm that self-improvement is the basis of community development. To concretize his efforts, Dr. Dixon works with multiple national educational and grassroots organizations that possess a liberatory lens to prepare students to become successful in an ever-increasingly competitive global society.