Africa-Press – Liberia. The University of Liberia (UL) has set up a think tank in honor of its first female president, Dr. Mary Antoinette Brown Sherman, regarded by the university as a transformational leader who was committed to higher education in Liberia.
The Mary Antoinette Brown Sherman Think Tank will serve as a policy institute that will source and identify women achievers who will help develop, empower and train women and men through an institutionalized process aimed at making them understand each other’s roles and supporting one another for leadership, governance, research, and modalities needed for overall progress.
Dr. Brown Sherman, in whose memory the UL Think Tank is named, served the University of Liberia as president at a critical time in the history of the institution. Officially launching the Mary Antoinette Brown Sherman Think Tank, Prof. Dr. Julius Julukon Sarwolo Nelson, Jr., President of the University of Liberia, said the university will turn Dr. Brown Sherman’s vision into reality in preparation for the 2021 – 2022 academic year.
President Nelson said Dr. Brown Sherman provided leadership for the process of renewal of the university and she played a decisive role in the aftermath of the 1980 coup d’etat when students and professors were clamoring for social, economic, and political change the rule of law in the Republic of Liberia.
In 1950, Dr. Brown joined the education faculty at the University of Liberia. Mary Antoinette Brown was appointed Dean of the Teachers’ College at the University of Liberia in 1958, and later Vice President for Academic Affairs (1975-1978). She was president of the University of Liberia from 1978 to 1984. During her tenure as president, the university saw expanded facilities and programs and improved scholarship funding. She also worked on behalf of faculty members against government interference.
In 1980, President Samuel K. Doe attempted to appoint Sherman as his Secretary of Education, but she declined the offer. In 1984, Dr. Sherman was dismissed from the university after the Liberian Army violently invaded the campus, and effectively shut down the school for several years.[7] She relocated to the United States in 1986, where she helped to found the University of Liberia Alumni Association. She also wrote a biography of her mother, published in 200
After completing undergraduate studies at Liberia College in 1947, Grimes earn a master’s degree in teaching from Radcliffe College in 1949; she completed doctoral studies in education at Cornell University in 1967.] Her dissertation was titled “Education and national development in Liberia, 1800-1900.”
The Think Tank was launched in the auditorium of UL’s Capitol Hill campus during the celebration of International Women’s Day organized by the Kofi Annan Institute for Conflict Transformation, University of Liberia, under the topic, “Breaking the Bias.”
Dr. Brown was born in Monrovia, the daughter of Louis Arthur Grimes and Victoria Elizabeth Jellemoh. Her father was once upon a time Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Liberia.
Her brother Joseph Rudolph Grimes was Liberia’s Secretary of State from 1960 to 1972. Her mother was from the Vai ethnic group and was raised in the household of Joseph J. Cheeseman, the twelfth president of Liberia. Mary Antoinette Grimes was also related to the 15th president of Liberia, Arthur Barclay, and the 18th president, Edwin Barclay. She wrote a history of her Barclay foremothers.
Mary Antoinette Grimes married twice, in 1950 and 1973. Her first husband, banker Kedrick Wellington Brown, died in 1962. They had three children. Their daughter Lducia Brown died in a car accident as a child. Her second husband George Flamma Sherman was Liberia’s Secretary of Education and a former ambassador. She was widowed a second time when Sherman died in 1999, after several years with Alzheimer’s disease.
Dr. Sherman died in 2004. She was buried in Bayview Cemetery, Middletown, New Jersey. A special issue of Liberian Studies Journal, published in 2005, was dedicated to her memory.
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