Fayetteville State University’s 2012 Fall Convocation

 

http://www.uncfsu.edu/

 

Fayetteville State University (FSU) will kick off the 146th academic year with Fall Convocation. The event is scheduled for Tuesday, October 4, at 2:00 p.m. in the J.W. Seabrook Auditorium. The public is invited to attend.

Keynote speaker for the event will be John S. Wilson, Executive Director of the White House Initiatives on Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). In that role, part of Wilson’s duties is to ensure that HBCUs are a significant force in helping the nation to reach the goal set by President Barack Obama of having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by the year 2020.

 

Before working with the White House Initiative, Wilson was an associate professor of higher education in the Graduate School of Education, and an executive dean at the George Washington University. He spent the first 16 years of his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he ultimately served as director of foundation relations and assistant provost. He received a bachelor’s degree from Morehouse College, a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard University, and both a master’s and a doctoral degree in administration, planning and social policy, also from Harvard University. While working at MIT, he served as a teaching fellow in Harvard University’s Afro-American Studies Department as well as in Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.

 

Presiding over Fall Convocation will be Chancellor James. A. Anderson. Chancellor Anderson was named the 11th Chief Executive Officer of FSU on March 7, 2008. He comes to FSU from the University of Albany in New York where he served as the Vice President for Student Success and Vice Provost for Institutional Assessment and Diversity. He also was a professor in the department of psychology.

 

Raised in Washington, D.C, Anderson majored in psychology at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, graduating in 1970. He later earned a doctoral degree in the field (1980) from Cornell University in New York. Early in his career, Chancellor Anderson chaired the Department of Psychology at Xavier University in News Orleans (1976-1983) before joining the Indiana University of Pennsylvania as a professor of psychology.

 

In 1992, he began an 11-year tenure as Vice Provost for Undergraduate Affairs at North Carolina State University. In that role, he was credited with leading a revision of the general education curriculum, as well as the development of the First Year College, the Honors Programs, the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning, the Minority Engineering Program, and the North Carolina State Diversity Initiative, among others.

 

In 2003, Anderson was recruited to Texas A&M University, a major land-grant institution serving more than 46,000 students, as Vice President and Associate Provost for Institutional Assessment and Diversity. He held that post until joining the University of Albany in 2005.

 

Founded in 1867, FSU is the second-oldest public institution in North Carolina. It offers nearly 60 degrees in the arts, sciences, business, and education at the undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral levels. It serves a student body of nearly 6,000 students and has a faculty and staff of approximately 900.

 

For more information, call (910) 672-1474 or email jwomble@uncfsu.edu.