President Names Senior Adviser for Diversity

Professor Frank Rudy Cooper to focus on diversity, inclusiveness, and equity

President Margaret McKenna has appointed Suffolk University Law School Professor Frank Rudy Cooper the president’s senior adviser for diversity.

McKenna believes that the University can do even more to create a diverse, inclusive, and equitable campus environment that is in keeping with Suffolk’s traditional mission of access to opportunity.

In this part-time position, President’s Senior Adviser Cooper will work with McKenna on several initiatives, particularly those involving:

  1. Learning how Suffolk University’s students, faculty, staff, and alumni feel we are succeeding in offering an inclusive environment
  2. Considering appropriate ways for Suffolk University to improve the diversity of its faculty and staff
  3. Helping to organize events that focus on issues of diversity, inclusiveness, and equity, both within and outside the University
“As a former civil rights attorney, I want to make improvements in Suffolk’s diversity, inclusiveness, and equity signature changes of my term,” said McKenna, who declared that her diversity initiatives will “provide our students with valuable skills for working in an increasingly heterogeneous world.”

Cooper, a scholar of racial profiling, noted that he has fought to improve diversity, inclusiveness, and equity in his schools and the nation since becoming a law professor in 2000 at Villanova University School of Law. He came to Suffolk in 2004. In this position, his “first priority will be to listen to the wisdom of our University’s students, staff, faculty, and alumni about how we can make this a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable place.”

Cooper, the son of longtime Suffolk University School of Business Professor Clarence A. Cooper, is a graduate of Amherst College and Duke Law School and attended Cambridge, Massachusetts, public schools.

He teaches criminal procedure, criminal law, constitutional law, and a class on race, gender, and law. He has published extensively on how race and masculinities affect policing and has coedited the book Masculinities and the Law: A Multidimensional Approach (NYU Press 2012) and published in numerous journals, including the Boston University Law Review, Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, and University of North Carolina Law Review. Cooper was named to Lawyers of Color’s 2014 list of “50 Under 50” significant professors of color and National Jurist magazine’s “2015 Leaders in Diversity.”