New FAMU Business Dean Promotes The Gold Ring Standard
By Marlon A. Walker
More than 20 years ago, Dr. Lydia A. McKinley-Floyd’s job was to recruit sponsors to the business program at Morehouse College. She says she was turned away at nearly every corner. “Oh, no, we’re going with the School of Business and Industry,” she remembers being told.
That’s the name of the program at Florida A&M University, founded by trailblazing businesswoman Dr. Sybil C. Mobley. More than 20 years ago, McKinley-Floyd ran into Mobley, the petite but stern head of the premier business school at a historically Black university. “I’m gonna be the next Sybil Mobley,” McKinley-Floyd thought at the time.
Now she is, having recently been named dean of the business school
Mobley built.
McKinley-Floyd’s career has taken her to Chicago State University and, most recently, to Savannah State University, where she was the associate dean of the university’s business school. She’s spent the past two months learning the ropes and easing into her latest challenge: furthering the work of Mobley at SBI.
You gotta be careful what you wish for,” she says, sitting behind her desk in her Tallahassee office. She discusses with Diverse the famed program, her plans for its future and moving past recent missteps.
