After an extensive search, the Morehouse College Board of Trustees officially announced on Monday the selection of Dr. John S. Wilson, the executive director of the White House Initiative on HBCUs, as the school’s 11th president.
In a letter addressed to the Morehouse community, Robert C. Davidson Jr., chairman of the trustees, wrote, “Dr. Wilson has the vision, experience and passion to continue to lead our College in its mission to provide an excellent and relevant academic experience for young men and to further our proud tradition of producing leaders for a global community.”
The current president of Morehouse, Dr. Robert M. Franklin, announced in January that he would be stepping down at the end of the 2012 academic year to take a sabbatical as a Scholar in Residence at Stanford University’s Martin Luther King Jr. Institute. With the help of Heidrick and Struggles, an executive search firm, the Board of Trustees and the Presidential Search Committee chose Wilson, a Morehouse alumnus (class of ’79).
As an alumnus, Wilson brings a unique perspective on the needs of the college and in planning for its future.
“In particular, I would bring a sense of urgency both in the learning environment, in the living environment and in the working environment of our campus. That’s what I especially want to bring to Morehouse College to make sure we are a cutting edge institution,” Wilson commented.
In his role on the HBCUs initiative, he worked under an administration that raised over $400 million of Pell Grant funding, which was exclusively dispersed among students at HBCUs. In addition, working under both President Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, he has first-hand experience in witnessing an administration that raised over $1 billion toward student loan funding for HBCU students. From that experience, Wilson has already conceived several plans to maintain college affordability at the HBCU level and in particular at Morehouse College.
“What I’m going to emphasize is the kind of institutional resources that we need to have available to ensure that our students graduate with less debt so that their graduate school options can still be real,” remarked Wilson in response to his plans as the newly appointed college president.
