Mark Pope

In 2018, the Association for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Issues in Counseling (ALGBTIC) named an award in Dr. Pope's honor, the ALGBTIC Mark Pope Social Justice and Advocacy Award, for his lifetime of contributions in service of social justice and advocacy for the LGBT community.

In 2018, the University of Missouri System presented him with The Thomas Jefferson Award, the highest award that any faculty member may receive. Only one such award is given annually and faculty are nominated from all four campuses of that university system. In 2015 he was named a Curators' Distinguished Professor, only the 2nd such professorship awarded to a College of Education faculty member at the University of Missouri - St. Louis since the founding of that campus in 1953. Later, upon his retirement in 2018, he was named a Curators' Distinguished Professor Emeritus.

Dr. Pope attended the University of Missouri – Columbia (A.B., political science and sociology, 1973; M.Ed., counseling and personnel services, 1974) and the University of San Francisco (Ed.D., counseling and educational psychology, 1989). He was elected student body vice-president at the University of Missouri – Columbia in 1971 and president of the graduate student council at the University of San Francisco in 1986.

Pope was awarded the NOGLSTP LGBTQ+ Educator of the Year in 2012.

His other major contribution has been to the literature on the training of counselors and includes seven books on teaching career counseling classes (Experiential Activities for Teaching Career Counseling Classes and for Facilitating Career Groups (3 volumes) and the Career Counseling Casebook (2 editions)); on teaching multicultural counseling classes (Experiential Activities for Teaching Multicultural Counseling Competence, 2010), on teaching classes on counseling sexual minorities (Casebook for Counseling Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Persons and Their Families, 2012), and on teaching social justice and advocacy competence in counseling (Social Justice and Advocacy in Counseling: Experiential Activities for Teaching, 2020). (See “Books” below.)

He has been the recipient of a number of major awards in the mental health professions including the human rights awards from the American Counseling Association and the state professional counseling associations of both California and Missouri, and culminating with receiving the Eminent Career Award of the National Career Development Association in 2008, the highest award in career counseling and development in the US.

In 2004, Dr. Pope was selected for the OUT 100 as one of the major contributors to lesbian and gay culture in the US in that year He received this recognition for being elected as the first openly gay person to serve as president of a major mental health professional association exactly 30 years after the removal of "homosexuality" from the list of psychiatric disorders in the US (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association), repudiating once and for all the illness model used to limit the rights of gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals in the US and around the world.

Pope was raised in Fisk, Missouri, a small town of less than 500 people in rural and agricultural southeast Missouri, in a family of teachers and preachers. He founded the student council at Fisk-Rombauer High School and was elected as its first president in 1968. He was valedictorian of his graduating class and elected state vice-president of the Beta Clubs of Missouri; however, he was also quite well thought of by his classmates and was voted the “most talented” and “most likely to succeed” as well as class vice-president in his senior year. Between his junior and senior years in high school, he was selected to attend the National Science Foundation-funded Summer Institute in Mathematics and Science at the University of Kansas.

Mark Pope, Ed.D. (born April 23, 1952 in Saint Louis, Missouri, USA) is Thomas Jefferson Professor and Curators' Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Missouri – Saint Louis (1997–2018), where he was a colleague to the social theorist Robert Rocco Cottone. Dr. Pope also served from (2006-2016) as chair of the Department of Counseling and Family Therapy at that university. He was president of the American Counseling Association (2003–2004), National Career Development Association (1998–1999), Association for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Issues in Counseling (1976–1978), and Society for the Psychological Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Issues (Division 44 of the American Psychological Association) (2011–2012), and founder and first chair of the Professional Counseling Fund (2004–2006). Dr. Pope is widely considered to be one of the founders of and leading authors in the field of cultural diversity issues in career counseling and career development, especially gay and lesbian career development. His major publications have included writings in counseling with sexual minorities and international students, the history of and public policy issues in counseling, and professional identity. He also served as editor of The Career Development Quarterly (2004–2008), the preeminent journal in career counseling and development.