Vaughn Williams, a senior executive at Kennesaw State University, has a strong sense of purpose about his campus and his role in trying to make it a great place.
“My job is to emphasize at least three elements of growth among the students I touch at Kennesaw,” he said in a recent interview. “I call them three C’s: Classroom achievement, Community involvement and a Commitment to compete.”
You might hear that charge from the dean of students, but Williams is the athletic director at the huge, public university in north Georgia. His main job is supervising a department with nearly 300 athletes, some 40 coaches and overseeing a budget of more than $8 million. But his perspective is bigger than sports.
“We operate an athletic program, but, foremost, we want to see our students as achievers and as leaders,” said Vaughn.
That perspective closely reflects the goals of Kennesaw’s president, Daniel S. Papp, which is to nourish and grow well-rounded and purposeful students. With 24,000 graduate and undergraduate students, Kennesaw State, which was founded in 1963, is the third-largest university in Georgia and is situated northwest of Atlanta in Cobb County.
President Papp, in his sixth year at Kennesaw, borrows a phrase from the military, saying, “We aim to help students be all that they can be.”
This unified thrust, other administrators say, is all the doing of Papp, who is guiding the growing regional university into a role as a national leader as a unified modern university. Papp graduated from Dartmouth College with a bachelor’s degree in international affairs in 1969 and earned a Ph.D. in international affairs from the University of Miami in 1973.
