Stephens, Clarence Francis

Impact on the world

Earned his PhD in mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1943, becoming the ninth African American to hold that degree, then spent 15 years as chair of Morgan State College's mathematics department, where he personally mentored Gloria Ford Gilmer, already profiled in this collection, alongside several students, including Earl Barnes, Arthur Grainger, and Scott Williams, who became the only three students from the same class at any historically Black college to all earn mathematics PhDs; he later developed and refined what became known as the 'Morgan-Potsdam Model' as chair of SUNY Potsdam's mathematics department from 1969 to 1987, a supportive, confidence-building teaching philosophy credited with making the program one of the nation's top producers of mathematics majors, a method later adopted by departments across the country and documented in the 1993 book 'Math Education At Its Best: The Potsdam Model.'

Life & background

Born in Gaffney, South Carolina in 1917, the fifth of six children, Stephens lost his mother to the 1918 flu epidemic and his father seven years later, growing up orphaned at age eight and raised afterward by his grandmother. He attended the Harbison Agricultural and Industrial Institute, a boarding school for Black students, working on the school farm each summer just to cover its $100 fee, before graduating from Johnson C. Smith University in 1938 with a professor's strong encouragement after solving all 58 problems in an advanced calculus course he had only been assigned ten of. He earned his master's and PhD in mathematics from the University of Michigan by 1943, served as a teaching specialist in the segregated U.S. Navy through 1946, then taught briefly at Prairie View A&M before accepting Morgan State College's mathematics chair in 1947 largely because the position placed him near a research library at nearby Johns Hopkins University, intending at the time to pursue his own research career. Confronted instead with students, many from Baltimore's inner city, whom few people believed capable of succeeding in mathematics, he became, in his own description, appalled at how poorly the broader discipline taught and inspired students, and redirected his entire professional focus from research toward developing a teaching philosophy grounded in patient confidence-building; no Morgan State student had earned a math master's degree before his arrival, and by the time he left in 1962, his program had produced multiple students who went on to earn full mathematics doctorates. After shorter stints at SUNY Geneseo, he was recruited to chair SUNY Potsdam's mathematics department in 1969, where he fully developed what became known as the Morgan-Potsdam Model, built on the conviction, which he stated plainly throughout his career, that any college student who wanted to learn mathematics could do so given a sufficiently supportive and patient environment; eleven of his Potsdam students went on to earn doctorates, and the department became nationally recognized as a model of teaching excellence, eliminating gender gaps in completion rates that persisted at most other institutions. He retired in 1987 and lived to 100, dying in 2018 after 69 years of marriage to his wife Harriette; the National Association of Mathematicians named both a Centenarian Award and an annual teaching award in his honor that same year, and SUNY Potsdam unveiled a permanent bronze plaque commemorating his legacy in 2016.

Sources

1. SUNY Potsdam (In Memoriam; Celebrating the Legacy); MacTutor History of Mathematics; Mathematics of the African Diaspora (University at Buffalo); Mathematically Gifted and Black; Rafe Kinsey blog (The Potsdam Miracle)