Starting on March 8, Marybeth Gasman, a historian of higher education in Penn’s Graduate School of Education, will serve as a guest blogger on The New York Times’ “The Choice.” The blog is exploring the admissions policies and offerings of historically black colleges and universities through March 12. “The Choice” is written by New York Times education reporter Jacques Steinberg, and is one of the most widely read online resources about admissions and related topics.

Members of the Penn community and the general public are invited to submit questions to the blog, to participate in the online discussion and to check the blog at http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/ for insights about historically black colleges and universities.

Gasman is an expert on HBCUs and the author of “Understanding Minority Serving Institutions,” “Envisioning Black Colleges: A History of the United Negro College Fund” and “Historically Black Colleges and Universities: Triumphs, Troubles and Taboos.” She also is a leading authority in diversity and higher education, African-American educational leadership, fundraising and philanthropy.

She will be joined as a guest blogger by Walter Kimbrough, president of Philander Smith College in Little Rock, Ark. Kimbrough is one of the youngest college presidents in the country and the first college president from the so-called hip-hop generation. He is an expert on historically black fraternities and sororities.