08/19/2026
Colleagues and friends of Richard Quantz have written the following account and tribute to his work at Miami University. We will share more details of a memorial service when they become available.
Richard Quantz tribute
8/18/26
Richard Quantz came to Miami University as a Visiting Assistant Professor in 1979. Moving into a tenure line in 1981, Richard stayed to make his career in the Department of Educational Leadership (EDL). Richard moved here from Charlottesville, Virginia, where he earned his bachelor’s degree, Master’s of Education and Ph.D. in Social Foundations of Education at the University of Virginia. In between his graduate degrees Richard was an elementary school teacher, first in Vicksburg, Mississippi, then in Fairfax, Virginia. Richard began cultivating his great patience, his pedagogical craft, and deep understanding of learning in these elementary school classrooms that influenced the remainder of his career. He wrote in a teaching philosophy in 2011 that “if you want to be a good teacher of graduate students, teach elementary school first. Elementary teachers learn that they are teaching students, not subjects. Graduate education is no different...”
Through his early work in public schools, Richard began to develop a deeper understanding of how and why schools end up failing some children and some groups in our society. His experiences as a white teacher in the American South during the 1970s had a lasting impact on his commitments as an educator who would spend his career working towards a more racially inclusive and just society. One of the quiet but powerful hallmarks of Richard’s career was his effort to make Miami and EDL more diverse and more inclusive. In 1999 he received the Marion Musgrave & Heanon Wilkins Outstanding Faculty Service Award presented by Miami’s Department of Affirmative Action & Human Resource Development. While he was Graduate Director in EDL, the number of graduate students of color expanded in number from a small handful to 50% of each incoming cohort of students in the Ph.D. and Ed.D programs.
As a scholar Richard developed specializations in both social theory as well as evaluation, measurement, and evaluation design at the University of Virginia. And as a true social foundations of education scholar, he wrote and published across multiple sub-fields in educational foundations. His first scholarly papers were related to program evaluation work, as well as to both the philosophy and the history of education. He published on labeling theory, oral history, on the ethic of care, and on multicultural education. But it is in sociology and anthropology of education that Richard left his real mark on the field. His research and theorizing on social and cultural theories in education will have lasting impact. Richard is among a small handful of educational scholars to look closely, carefully, and creatively at the nonrational aspects of education. This is the scholarship that dominated his research and teaching for the last two decades, and the work that is destined to become classic in the social foundations field. His many articles on school ritual have forged new ways of thinking about classrooms, teachers and students — powerfully arguing that so much of what happens around teaching and learning is the province of the nonrational. His 2011 book, Rituals and Student Identity in Education: Ritual Critique for a New Pedagogy (Palgrave-MacMillan) is an award-winning text analyzing how the non-rational powerfully shapes education and schooling. In the book, he develops and uses the methodology of ritual critique. Of this book, Professor Peter McLaren of UCLA wrote, “The work is cutting edge. It will stand alone as a major contribution to the ethnographic literature on schools.”
As a social and cultural theorist working in a department of educational leadership, Richard would connect his scholarship with the life of the department in all sorts of transformational ways. He worked with Nelda Cambron-McCabe and others to re-examine the Educational Leadership Ph.D. program in the 1980s, eventually reconstructing the program around a focus on ethics, culture, and power. The sixteen principles that evolved from this focus created one of the most innovative and cutting edge programs in the nation. Richard was a leader throughout his career in developing the department’s focus on culture as a key foundational concept for educational practice in general and educational leadership work more specifically.
Both in visioning the department’s trajectory and in the rest of his professional life, Richard was a pioneer and an original thinker. His graduate course in the foundations of multicultural education was the first diversity course at Miami University. Richard co-chaired the first committee to study affirmative action at Miami, and co-founded the first center on cultural studies in education in the world. He authored the first oral history published by the History of Education Quarterly journal. He was an early advocate for the inclusion of qualitative research studies in the major educational research associations and conferences, helping to methodologically diversify the field. A persistent, intelligent, and often renegade approach to changing the organizational structures of opportunity and inclusion, to make academic fields broader and inclusive of diverse voices, was a hallmark of Richard’s career. This emphasis also had a direct impact on the department and its students.
For his thirty-seven years as a professor, the greatest part of Richard’s energy focused on students. Richard was a master teacher who thought regularly and deeply about student learning and how to improve instruction, viewing teaching as a craft on which one continuously works and improves. He designed and inaugurated EDL 204, a core undergraduate class in the Sociocultural Foundation of Education, and continuously revised, reinvented, and reconstructed the syllabus, assignments and teaching tools every year that he led the course. He intentionally saw the class as a humanities course in the Liberal Education sequence, bucking common assumptions that education was a social science.
Richard won many accolades for his teaching, including the 2012 Outstanding Graduate Teaching and Mentoring Award awarded by Miami’s graduate school. In a nomination for the Effective Educator Award in 1990, a former student, an Art Teacher from Richmond, Indiana, clearly articulated what it was that made Richard such a legendary teacher:
“I remember coming out of my educational leadership class with more questions than answers. At first this confused and frustrated me, and I couldn’t understand why a professor who seemed so intelligent could not lead us to any clear conclusions. What I did not realize at the time was that Dr. Richard Quantz was one of the first educators who was teaching me to THINK. He was not simply an effective teacher who threw in a brainteaser now and then. He was training us to be the best teachers possible by insisting that we all find within us the answers we could live with, work with, and hopefully, more questions in the process.”
Richard also served as a masterful advisor of student research and dissertations. He chaired or cochaired over sixty dissertations in his career. One former doctoral advisee and elementary teacher, wrote of his experience as Richard’s dissertation advisee:
“I made every mistake possible but somehow Richard was able to communicate his reservations in such a way that I did not grow discouraged. He did not tell me what to write, but his never-ending flow of insightful comments worked on me over time to indicate where a better way for me to write might dwell. As my strange dissertation took a more definitive shape, Richard spotted what was best about my work and encouraged me to venture more decisively in that direction, even if it meant changing or breaking many of the typical rules. Thanks to Richard, I wrote the dissertation that I wanted to, even though I began the process with little clue what that might be.”
As a teacher, Richard’s ethic of care was as expansive as his intellectual gifts. As a former doctoral advisee recalled, he “patiently, doggedly, quietly and durably committed to each learner, supporting and challenging each one with great precision.” Richard was a powerful advocate for doctoral students, in particular, pushing them very hard intellectually, even as he was very conscious of how difficult doctoral work can be, especially for working students. He always sought to make EDL a place where people who did not have family histories of higher education attainment could achieve success.
Both in visioning the department’s trajectory and in the rest of his professional life, Richard was a pioneer and an original thinker, even as he refused the credit. As former EDL colleague Bernard Badiali, now of Penn State, wrote, “Richard is one of those professors who never sought the limelight but had a profound influence on all those around him. His wisdom and insight contributed to making EDL the best educational leadership program in Ohio.” Those who have worked with Richard over the years also attested to his intelligence, character and humility. Former Dean Carine Feyten commented, “I learned so much from him. He has my greatest respect and admiration. A man of great insight, and clear about his values.”
Richard was also a tremendous mentor and friend to his colleagues in the Department and across campus. His wisdom and insight contributed to making EDL the best educational leadership program in Ohio. He was a persistent and principled voice for equitable, inclusive, and caring approaches to education. He was a consistent, leading contributor to a departmental culture that valued democratic processes of decision-making and transparency. He was a team player, and someone who many counted on for sage advice. Richard leaves a formidable legacy at Miami University as a teacher, leader, and scholar.
