Franklin Tuitt

Franklin A. Tuitt serves as Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer at the University of Connecticut, a role he began in July 2020.

Previously, Tuitt was a member of the University of Denver faculty since 2004 and was that school’s Chief Diversity Officer from 2015-19. Since September 2019, he has been a visiting scholar at the Echo Center for Diversity Policy at The Hague, Netherlands. Tuitt is the inaugural visiting scholar at the Echo Center and delivers lectures, facilitates training, and conducts research in support of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in the Netherlands and to post-secondary institutions in Europe.

In his most recent position at Denver, he was responsible for addressing diversity and equity matters and oversaw the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, which includes the Interdisciplinary Research Institute for the Study of (In)Equality, and the DU Latino Center for Community Engagement and Scholarship.

In 2019, he received the National Association of Chief Diversity Officers in Higher Education Individual Leadership Award in recognition of “outstanding contributions to research, administration, practice, advocacy, and/or policy, and whose work informs and advances understanding of diversity and inclusive excellence in higher education.

Tuitt first came to the University of Denver as an assistant professor in the Morgridge College of Education and later served as the director for the Higher Education program until leaving the college to become the Associate Provost for Inclusive Excellence. He began his professional career with positions at Wesleyan, Harvard, and UMass-Boston.

Tuitt earned his undergraduate degree in human relations from Connecticut College in New London in 1987 and has both a master’s and doctorate from Harvard School of Education in administration, planning and social policy with a concentration in higher education.