WASHINGTON – In a move that should bring new expertise and strategic guidance to historically Black public universities, the Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF) has appointed John W. Garland, the former president of Central State University, to be the organization’s first-ever President-in-Residence. Earlier this month, Garland, who retired from Central State last July, began the year-long appointment at the TMCF office in Washington.
In the new role, Garland is working with TMCF senior executives to provide strategic counsel to the organization’s 47 member institutions and to offer guidance on TMCF policies and programs. Established in 1987, TMCF supports and represents nearly 300,000 students attending member schools that include public Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), medical schools and law schools. Over a history of more than 25 years, the organization has become well known for raising funds for scholarships and providing career development opportunities for public HBCU students.
“I truly admire the work that they do and how they have developed and grown as an organization over the last 25 years. And to the extent that I can [share] some of my experiences to help them that’s what I’m looking to do right now,” Garland says.
Johnny C. Taylor, the TMCF president and CEO, says the President-in-Residence position Is expected to strengthen the “voice” of the HBCU president within TMCF as it develops and executes programs. “When you look at our constituencies and the groups of people represented on our board, we have students, we have governmental agencies, [and] we have employers. We have a number of stakeholder groups, and all along, we just didn’t have, in my opinion, sufficient representation from our presidents,” he says.
In putting together the President-in-Residence initiative, TMCF sought “an accomplished president who had a really good record … to give [the organization] the president’s view on all sorts of matters related to the work that we do,” Taylor explains. “The thinking is really about making sure that we have a recent, well-informed, and balanced perspective from a HBCU president about all matters of policy and programmatic initiatives,” he says.
When Taylor began searching for a candidate last year, the timing coincided with Garland’s departure from Central State. Garland, a lawyer by training, retired from the Wilberforce, Ohio-based school after a 15-year presidency. It was well known within the HBCU community that the attorney had engineered “a great turnaround job at Central State because it was struggling” when he became university president in 1997, Taylor says.
Under Garland, Central State saw its enrollment jump 160 percent, had eight new buildings constructed, created new academic programs and won designation as a Center for Excellence in Emerging Technologies, according to the Dayton Daily News. Garland is a graduate of Central State University and the Ohio State University law school.
