Editor’s Note: Diverse: Issues In Higher Education has announced the three distinguished 2018 recipients of the Dr. John Hope Franklin Award. Dr. William R. Harvey is the final profile in a series this week.
Over the span of 40 years, Dr. William R. Harvey has led Hampton University to new heights of excellence, making it one of the premier higher education institutions in the country.
Under Harvey’s leadership, the university initiated 92 academic programs at the undergraduate and graduate levels, added 28 new structures to campus, expanded research into medical and other STEM fields and sustained an 866 percent increase in the university’s endowment, totaling more than $250 million.
The Harvard graduate and trailblazer owes his calling to be a leader in higher education to his parents, who valued the importance of education, and to the military discipline he experienced while serving in the United States Army immediately after graduating from Talladega College.
“I saw leaders leading people with some of the same kind of tenets that my parents had taught,” Harvey says — honesty, integrity, respect for oneself and others, accountability and loyalty. “It was a natural coming together of leadership, education and business. It’s just what I am … an educator and a businessman.”
From the beginning, Harvey told Hampton’s Board of Trustees that he “was going to run Hampton like a business for educational objectives.”
In many ways, he has done just that, adding to the 150-year legacy and vision of the founder and first president of Hampton, Gen. Samuel Chapman Armstrong.
