Royel Johnson is joining the USC Rossier School of Education as an associate professor in January 2022. He is coming from Penn State University where he was a faculty member and associate director of the Center for the Study of Higher Education. Johnson will play an important leadership role in the USC Race and Equity Center as our Inaugural Director of Student Engagement, which entails the following:

  • Ensuring each Ph.D. student in the Center is deeply and meaningfully engaged in high-quality research opportunities that annually result in multiple conference presentations, publications, and competitive fellowship application submissions.
  • Collaborating with our Ph.D. students and their faculty advisors to co-construct annual research goals, track progress toward the actualization of those goals, and revise goals as students’ research interests evolve.
  • Providing substantive feedback to our Ph.D. students on their ideas and written work.
  • Connecting our Ph.D. students with the Center’s faculty affiliates, to professors at other universities who can help support their scholarly development, and to prospective research partners.
  • Assisting our Ph.D. students with negotiating access to research sites and participants.
  • Working with the Center’s Chief Marketing Officer and each faculty advisor to strategically promote our Ph.D. students in ways that will ultimately benefit them in competitive fellowship, award, and job search processes.

In addition to supporting the Center’s students, Johnson will also create and lead a fellows program for Ph.D. seekers in Rossier and other USC academic schools who have interests in the study of race, racism, and a range of other researchable topics related to people of color. Doctoral fellows will be convened at the Center monthly to co-create interdisciplinary community, workshop their ideas, present early-stage research projects for feedback, interact meaningfully with faculty affiliates, learn new race-focused theories and methods, and engage with center researchers in a range of valuable ways. Facilitating interdisciplinary racial equity research collaboration and production among doctoral fellows will be another aim of this program. Lastly, in 2023, Johnson will lead the design and launch of a similar research engagement program for USC undergraduates who are interested in the study of race.

“I cannot wait to work with our amazingly talented students at USC,” says Johnson. “This new role provides an exciting opportunity for me to help develop and support the next generation of critically-conscious racial equity researchers.”

Johnson’s scholarly expertise on racial equity, college student success, and sense of belonging poises him for this leadership role in the Center. The Journal of Higher Education, Journal of College Student Development, Community College Journal of Research and Practice, Peabody Journal of Education, Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, and Journal of Negro Education are among the numerous highly-respected peer-reviewed journals in which his research is published. SUNY Press is publishing his first book, Racial Equity on College Campuses: Connecting Research and Practice, a month after his arrival to USC. Additionally, Johnson has been awarded more than $5.1 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences, the Spencer Foundation, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Administration, the Pennsylvania Department of Health and Human Services, and several other entities to fund his research.

“Through thoughtfully-curated research and professional engagement opportunities, my goal is to strengthen our students’ readiness to address systemic racial inequities in education and beyond,” Johnson notes.