Rhodes College has been awarded a one-year Capacity-Building Grant of $50,000 by Wake Forest University’s Educating Character Initiative, thanks to Lilly Endowment Inc. “We truly believe in character education at Rhodes,” said Provost Timothy S. Huebner. “A century ago, President Charles Diehl described the college as an institution ‘vitally concerned with scholarship, but . . . even more concerned with character.’ The work that our faculty will do in the next year has the potential to transform the first-year experience at Rhodes.”

Dr. Earl Wright II, the Neville Frierson Bryan Chair of Sociology at Rhodes College, has authored a new book, along with Dr. Kalasia S. Ojeh of Kean University, titled An Introduction to W. E. B. Du Bois (Routledge, 2024). Also, Wright will be featured in Fifty Key Scholars in Black Social Thought, to be published in October by Routledge.

Rhodes College has undergone several name changes since its founding in 1848, reflecting the growth and expanding mission of the college. On July 1, 1984, it took on its current name to honor Dr. Peyton Nalle Rhodes, who served as president from 1949 to 1965.

Rhodes College has been designated as one of the “Best Value Colleges for 2024” by The Princeton Review. This is the sixth consecutive year it has made the list.

Rhodes College is being awarded a U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) grant in the amount of $502,946 for research conducted by Dr. Qian Shen, assistant professor of biology. The award for the project titled “The Molecular Basis For Carbon Dioxide Sensing And Response In Dimorphic Fungi” will be distributed over three years and will involve students from Rhodes College and LeMoyne-Owen College.

Rhodes College has joined the national Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison, deepening its commitment to creating access to higher education for incarcerated people. The group cultivates and supports college-in-prison programs in partnership with colleges and universities across the country. It was established in 2009 by the Bard Prison Initiative at New York’s Bard College. Rhodes is the Consortium’s first institution in the South.

Rhodes is one of the “Best Colleges in America 2024,” according to Money, and has received four out of five stars based on the company’s unique star system. Colleges were scored in three areas: quality, affordability, and future earning potential.

Recent Rhodes College graduate Janay Kelley ’24 has curated the Threaded Legacies exhibition currently on view at Memphis’ Cossitt Library. The exhibition is a result of a project titled “Threading Legacy: Artistry, Ritual, and Southern Black Women Lineages” that Kelley worked on in 2023 as a fellow in the eight-week Rhodes Institute for Regional Studies.

Rhodes College visitors often become enamored when stepping on the picturesque campus for the first time, so it is no surprise that the college is among Architectural Digest’s “64 Most Beautiful College Campuses in America.” The publication notes the college’s “beautiful wooded campus with uniformly Collegiate Gothic buildings made of Arkansas sandstone, Vermont slate, and Indiana limestone.”

Dr. Shana Stoddard, associate professor of chemistry at Rhodes College, has been selected to receive the 2024 Lloyd N. Ferguson Young Scientist Award for Excellence in Research from the National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers. She will be presented the award at the organization's national conference in September.