Princeton Announces (Mellody) Hobson College, the First to Honor A Black Woman
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Top image: Glenn Close, Actor, Producer and interviewer Mellody Hobson of Ariel Investments during ONE ON ONE. Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in Laguna Niguel, CA Oct. 4, 2011. CC Attribution 2.0 License. Bottom image: Mellody Hobson with the kids in Park City Utah. August 9, 2007. CC Attribution 2.0 License Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
In late June, 2020 Princeton University president Christopher L. Eisgruber announced an earth-shaking decision by the university board of trustees to remove former president Woodrow Wilson’s name from its public policy school and also one of its residential colleges. The decision came at the height of the summer’s racial unrest over the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis but after four years of student protests around Princeton’s seeming embrace of Wilson’s racist beliefs.
Woodrow Wilson was the university’s president before becoming America’s president. In a sign of the times, the 2020 decision to remove Wilson’s honors from the university reversed a 2016 vote by Princeton trustees to keep Wilson’s name on campus buildings and programs associated with the school.
Wilson’s “racist thinking and policies make him an inappropriate namesake for a school or college whose scholars, students and alumni must stand firmly against racism in all its forms,” Princeton’s Eisgruber, said in a new statement that emphasized Wilson’s racism as being “significant and consequential even by the standards of his own time.”
Princeton’s Hobson College
In a new decision this weekend, Princeton announced that 1991 graduate Mellody Hobson, who serves as a chief executive of Ariel Investments — the first Black-owned investment firm — and the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation have made the lead gift to establish a new residential college at Princeton.
This extraordinary gift will be transformative for Princeton,” said Eisgruber, who began discussing the gift with Hobson last year, according to the press release. “It will enable us to improve the student experience at Princeton and to reimagine a central part of our campus, while also recognizing a remarkable woman who is a positive, powerful force for change in the world. Mellody Hobson is a wonderful role model for our students, and we are thrilled that her name will now grace our newest residential college. I am grateful to Mellody and the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation for their generosity and their forward-thinking commitment to Princeton.”
The building, Hobson College, will be the first in the school’s history to honor a Black woman, and is tentatively scheduled to open in the fall of 2026, in time to welcome the Class of 2030.
“No one from my family had graduated from college when I arrived at Princeton from Chicago, and yet even as I looked up at buildings named after the likes of Rockefeller and Forbes, I felt at home,” said Hobson, who is co-CEO of Ariel Investments and a member of Princeton’s Class of 1991. “My hope is that my name will remind future generations of students — especially those who are Black and brown and the ‘firsts’ in their families — that they too belong. Renaming Wilson College is my very personal way of letting them know that our past does not have to be our future.”
Ms. Hobson and her husband George Lucas, the filmmaker, were awarded the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy in 2019 for their charitable work, including After School Matters, a nonprofit that supports Chicago teenagers with after-school enrichment programs and summer jobs. This video tells us more about the program.
In the next video, Mellody Hobson and George Lucas, of the George Lucas Family Foundation, U.S.A., accept the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy at the New York Public Library on October 16, 2019. Quoting his beloved Star Wars character Yoda, Mr. Lucas encouraged the audience to embrace the light side of “The Force” – compassion – versus its darker twin, selfishness. In emotional remarks, Ms. Hobson, added that the couple’s philanthropy reflected their view that they are merely “stewards of society’s money” repaying the debt that they owe for their good fortune.
Hobson delivers the majority of their humble and inspiring acceptance speech with special emphasis on their joint commitment to education. Hobson chairs the After School Matters, whose Freshmen On-Track program has a remarkable record of supporting student success: 90 percent of participants graduate from high school — 11 percentage points higher than the state’s average graduation rate for low-income students.
The couple has an exciting new project they are building in LA — one we will share individually: The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. They have one daughter Everest.
In April 2015, Vanity Fair’s Bethany McLean wrote: Why Sheryl Sandberg, Bill Bradley, and Oprah Love Mellodie Hobson.
