Dr. Stephen Haynes, professor of religious studies at Rhodes, has been selected to receive the 2026 Harold Love Outstanding Community Service Award. This annual award from the Tennessee Higher Education Commission recognizes students, faculty, and staff in Tennessee higher education who are engaged and committed to exceptional public service to their communities. A task force of higher education professionals reviewed nominations from across the state.
Haynes will receive the award at a ceremony in Nashville on April 29.
Created by the Tennessee General Assembly in 1991, the service award program recognizes individuals who make a meaningful impact beyond campus. In 1997, it was renamed in memory of Representative Harold Love, Jr.
Haynes is the founder and director of the Rhodes College Liberal Arts in Prison Program, which since 2016 has taken about 40 Rhodes faculty to teach at the Women’s Therapeutic Residential Center (WTRC), a state prison in Henning, TN. During the program’s 10 years of operation, more than 80 Rhodes students have served as teaching assistants and peer tutors, most having been trained in Haynes’ campus course, Mass Incarceration: Theoretical and Practical Perspectives.
In 2023, for his work with the program and on campus, Haynes received the college’s Jameson M. Jones Award for Outstanding Faculty Service. That same year, he was recognized with Memphis Magazine’s Innovation Award.
Rhodes has received a $500,000, three-year grant from the Mellon Foundation to expand and enrich its innovative Liberal Arts in Prison Program. Mellon funds will support a new Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies offered at WTRC, recently approved by the Rhodes faculty. In addition, the grant will support the expansion of educational programming to the men’s facility at West Tennessee State Penitentiary and workshops for faculty at other colleges in Tennessee and the Southeast interested in launching prison education programs.