Dr. Menah Pratt

Menah Pratt is the Vice President for Strategic Affairs and Diversity and Professor of Education at Virginia Tech. She has almost 25 years of leadership experience in higher education, with a focus on large-scale institutional transformation. Prior to joining Virginia Tech, she held senior leadership positions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Associate Chancellor and Associate Provost) and Vanderbilt University (Assistant Secretary of the University, University Counsel, and University Compliance Officer). She is the founder of the Faculty Women of Color in the Academy National Conference, now in its 12th year and hosted by Virginia Tech, focuses on supporting, empowering, and connecting women of color faculty, administrators, and graduate students to help them succeed in higher education. She also founded the Black College Institute, a summer leadership program for 600 rising junior and senior high school students, hosted at Virginia Tech. 

Nationally and internationally recognized as a leader, scholar, and author of four books on issues of race, class, gender, culture, diversity, education, women’s leadership, and critical race feminism, Dr. Pratt was elected chair-elect for the Council on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for the American Public Land-Grant University Association, a 250-member organization. She has also received several national awards: the 2023-2024 American Council on Education Fellowship; 2023 Top 50 Women We Admire in Virginia; 2023 Individual Winds of Change award by the Forum on Workplace Inclusion; the 2021 Inclusive Excellence Individual Leadership Award by the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education; and the 2018 American Education Studies Association Critics’ Choice Award for outstanding scholarship for A Black Woman’s Journey from Cotton Picking to College Professor: Lessons about race, gender, and class in America, a biography about her mother, Dr. Mildred Pratt. Her forthcoming book in 2024, Blackwildgirl: A Writer’s Journey to Take Back her Superpower, is a power and transformational autobiography of her life journey from Black girlhood to Black womanhood in America.  A writer, poet, public speaker, creative artist, scholar-activist, academic advocate, and a blogger at www.menahpratt.com, her life’s work reflects a commitment to helping others actualize their potential to serve humanity. 

She 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 degree in Sociology from Vanderbilt University. In addition, she earned her PhD and JD from Vanderbilt University. A former federal court of appeals law clerk, she is licensed to practice law in Illinois and Tennessee, with expertise in real estate, construction law, affirmative action, equal employment opportunity, disability, and governance.