Professor Alice Tait, Ph.D., of the Department of Journalism at Central Michigan University, received the Lionel C. Barrow Jr. Award for Distinguished Achievement in Diversity Research and Education at the AEJMC convention in San Francisco in August 2015.
Created in 2009 by the MAC Division and the Commission on the Status of Minorities, the award recognizes outstanding individual accomplishments and leadership in diversity efforts within the
Journalism and Mass Communication discipline. Winners must have a distinguished record of teaching and service, scholarship or publication of an important book relating to historically underrepresented groups.
Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Inc., gave Tait its Outstanding Faculty Award in 2012. In 1989, Central Michigan University awarded her a teaching fellowship, and in 1990 a teaching excellence award. Butler University, in Indianapolis awarded her a 1991-92 visiting African-American scholar position. Central Michigan University selected her as one of two distinguished faculty members in 1996. For 10 years she directed Central Michigan University’s AHANA (African-Americans, Latinos/Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans) High School Journalism Workshop. She spent the 1996-1997 academic year as a visiting distinguished professor at William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey. She is the mother of Joseph Conrad Smith II and the grandmother of Leiah, Joseph lll, Brigham and Robert.
Commission on the Status of Minorities 