George Mason University

Walter Earl Fluker is executive director of the Leadership Center at Morehouse College, Coca-Cola Professor of Leadership Studies and since 1992, has served as editor of the Howard Thurman Papers Project.  Under his direction, the Center has developed into preeminent academic center for the study and practice of ethical leadership in national and global venues.

He is currently engaged in expanding a multi-faceted international leadership project in South Africa in partnership with The Oprah Winfrey Foundation, the United States Department of State and the African Presidential Archives and Research Center at Boston University.

Known as an expert in the theory and practice of ethical leadership, Fluker is a featured speaker, lecturer and workshop leader at foundations, businesses, corporations, religious institutions, colleges and universities as well as consultant to both national and international organizations.  In his consulting practice, he works with professionals and emerging leaders in both the public and private domains.

Recently, he was appointed to the Board of Overseers at Boston University School of Theology, served as faculty for the Goldman Sachs Global Leaders Program and was distinguished speaker for the U.S. Embassy Speaker/Specialist Program in South Africa, Nigeria and India.  He was keynote speaker and special workshop facilitator at the Democratic Leadership Council’s National Conversation and a member of National Selection Committee for U.S. News & World Report America’s Best Leaders.   He serves on the editorial board of Liberal Education, the flagship quarterly journal of the American Association of Colleges and Universities and advisor to the Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies.

He has completed the first volume of the trilogy entitled, The Sound of the Genuine: The Papers of Howard Washington Thurman, which is pending publication by University of South Carolina Press and a manuscript, At the Intersection Where Worlds Collide: Ethical Leadership and the Quest for Character, Civility and Community.  He is completing a manuscript, entitled, The Ground Has Shifted: Essays on Spirituality, Ethics and Leadership from African American Moral Traditions.  His publications include: They Looked for a City: A Comparative Analysis of the Ideal of Community in the Thought of Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King, Jr.; The Stones that the Builders Rejected: Essays on Ethical Leadership from the Black Church Tradition; co-editor with Preston King of Black Leaders and Ideologies in the South: Resistance and Non-Violence; co-editor with Catherine Tumber of A Strange Freedom: The Best of Howard Thurman on Religious Experience and Public Life; and is the author of numerous articles and essays in scholarly journals and anthologies.

His prior academic experience includes professorial and administrative positions at Vanderbilt University, Harvard College, Dillard University and Colgate-Rochester Divinity School; and has served as a visiting professor and scholar at Harvard University, The University of Cape Town in South Africa, Columbia Theological Seminary and Princeton Theological Seminary.  He earned a Ph.D. in Social Ethics from Boston University, a Master of Divinity degree from Garrett-Evangelical Seminary and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and biblical studies from Trinity College.