George E. Cooper, a former president of South Carolina State University, has been chosen to lead the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges, the U.S. Department of Education has said.
His appointment this month as the initiative’s executive director comes a few months after leaders and advocates of historically black colleges complained that they were “disappointed and dismayed” by the administration’s delay in filling the post, which has been vacant since January, when John S. Wilson Jr. left to lead his alma mater, Morehouse College.
The appointment also comes 18 months after Mr. Cooper resigned following a tumultuous four years at South Carolina State, saying he wanted to spend more time with his family. He has since served as a senior fellow at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, reviewing federal legislation affecting HBCUs.
The university’s Board of Trustees had fired Mr. Cooper in June 2010, only to rehire him two weeks later, after two new members joined the board.
Later in 2010, a faculty member filed a lawsuit asserting that Mr. Cooper and the vice president for academic affairs had demoted her for criticizing them. In 2011, the Faculty Senate voted no confidence in Mr. Cooper, partly in response to the lawsuit’s allegations.
The lawsuit was settled in 2012, restoring the faculty member’s position as a department chair and providing her with more than $68,000 in state funds, plus an undisclosed amount from the defendants.
The National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education congratulated Mr. Cooper and Ivory A. Toldson, an associate professor of counseling psychology at Howard University who has been appointed as the initiative’s deputy director, in a news release. The group said that Mr. Cooper’s “experiences at the helm of an HBCU provide him with unique sensitivities and understandings that will serve well” the Education Department and HBCUs.
In July the association and the Thurgood Marshall College Fund joined in criticizing the administration for appointing a second interim leader for the initiative and ignoring their recommendation that the job be filled permanently by Linda Earley Chastang, a special adviser to the chairman of the President’s Board of Advisors on HBCUs.
“The decision to have the White House Initiative on HBCUs without leadership for almost a year is confounding, especially given the administration’s higher-education goals and the vitally important role HBCUs must play in reaching the goals,” the two groups said in a letter to the White House at the time.