Robert Michael Franklin

Dr. Robert Michael Franklin ’75 is the tenth president of Morehouse College, the nation’s largest private, four-year liberal arts college for men. Prior to Morehouse, Franklin was a Presidential Distinguished Professor of Social Ethics at Emory University, where he provided leadership for a university-wide initiative titled “Confronting the Human Condition and the Human Experience” and was a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at the law school. Franklin graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Morehouse in 1975 with a degree in political science and religion. He continued his education at Harvard Divinity School, earning a master of divinity degree in Christian social ethics and pastoral care in 1978, and the University of Chicago, earning a doctorate in ethics and society, and religion and the social sciences in 1985. Franklin has served on the faculties of the University of Chicago, Harvard Divinity School, Colgate-Rochester Divinity School and at Emory University's Candler School of Theology, where he gained a national reputation as director of Black Church Studies. He also has served as program officer in Human Rights and Social Justice at the Ford Foundation, and as an adviser to the foundation’s president on future funding for religion and public life initiatives. Franklin is married to Dr. Cheryl Goffney Franklin, an OB-GYN physician who holds degrees from Stanford University, Columbia University School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School. He is the father of three children: Imani Renee Franklin; Robert M. Franklin III and Julian Michael DeShazier, a 2005 Morehouse graduate.