Noliwe Rooks

After the spring 2021 semester at Cornell, she joined the faculty of Brown.

In a review of Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education, Kirkus Reviews writes, "Weighing in on the charged topic of public education, Rooks [...] mounts a blistering and persuasive argument against school reforms that she sees as detrimental to disadvantaged students." Publishers Weekly writes that Rooks "introduces the term segrenomics, which she defines as 'the business of profiting from high levels of racial and economic segregation.'" In a review for Education and Urban Society, Lauren Martin, Katie Loomis and Jemimah L. Young write, "Rooks tells the story of racism and segregation in America with a beautiful and heartbreakingly human element that captures the essence of where we stand in education today." Wendy Lecker writes in the Stamford Advocate, "Rooks illustrates how officials and 'reformers' have virtually ignored successful models for education, such as: adequate funding, integration, and community-initiated reforms." In a February 2018 article for The New York Times, Tayari Jones named Cutting School as the last book that had made her furious, writing, "My hair almost caught on fire when I read the chapter about single moms tossed into prison - prison - for trying to enroll their children into schools in better-resourced neighborhoods. [...] This is an important work; hopefully it will make people mad enough to act."

Rooks arrived at Cornell University in 2012 as an associate professor of Africana studies. At Cornell, Rooks was the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of Literature and published Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education. In Cutting School, Rooks coined the term "segrenomics" to describe a form of profit derived by businesses that continue to sell what she describes as "separate, segregated, and unequal forms of education" during the modern era of privatization and deregulation of public education.

In an essay review of White Money/Black Power: African American Studies and the Crises of Race in Higher Education for The Journal of African American History, Alan Colón of Dillard University concludes, "The Black Studies movement, and the tradition from which it emanated, requires documentation, analysis, and interpretation that surpasses what is found in White Money/Black Power." In an essay review for The Black Scholar, Perry A. Hall concludes, "There are, as indicated, ideas within her text that could bear fruitful discussion. However, in the form they have been presented - buried and entangled in flaws in logic and structure, and gaps in perspective - they are largely unusable." In The Journal of African American History, James B. Stewart of Pennsylvania State University writes, "Hall took Rooks to task appropriately for ignoring the comprehensive exploration of the origin and evolution of Black/Africana Studies contained in the volume by Dolores Aldridge and Carlene Young, Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies (2000)." Publishers Weekly describes the book as "Perhaps too specialized for general readers, this volume is a must for anyone working in the field."

By 1996, Rooks was one of the first Black professors in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. She was the associate director of the African-American program at Princeton University for ten years, and published White Money, Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education while she was there.

Noliwe Rooks (born 1963) is an American academic and author. She is the L. Herbert Ballou University Professor and chair of Africana Studies at Brown University and is the founding director of the Segrenomics Lab at Brown. She previously held the W.E.B. Du Bois Professorship of Literature at Cornell University.

Rooks was born in 1963 to Belvie Rooks, a writer from the Fillmore District in San Francisco. Rooks spent her childhood in San Francisco with her mother and in Florida with her father and grandmother. She also traveled with her mother to Africa and the Caribbean.