Jan. 28, 2009 — St. Croix residents, UVI alumni and trustees met Calvin D. Jamison, one of the two finalists vying to be president of the University of the Virgin Islands, on Wednesday.
Currently the vice president of business affairs at the University of Texas at Dallas, Jamison was born, raised and educated in Virginia. A native of Martinsville, Va., a small, formerly industrial town in south-central Virginia near the North Carolina border, Jamison went to college at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, where he attained his B.S., M.A. and Ed.D degrees.
Jamison asked as many questions as those gathered in the Great Hall of the St. Croix campus Wednesday asked of him.
"What is UVI known for that no one else has? What is uniquely UVI?" he asked. "It is imperative we carve out our niche and fill it. We must fulfill our primary educational mission, but also say to the world at large, 'This is what is uniquely UVI.'"
He offered tourism as an easy example.
"Why don't we have a very aggressive hotel-management program?" he said. "If given a choice, do you think a student would choose to be at Cornell in January or the Virgin Islands?"
Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., has the nation's best-regarded hotel and restaurant-management school.
Having a flagship department and having high quality in the classroom would draw interest and make it easier to raise funds, too, he said.
"I am a strong believer that access and quality are not mutually exclusive," Jamison said. "If quality is high, it will be easier for us to go out and raise money."
At UT-Dallas, Jamison is a clinical professor in the School of Economic, Political, and Policy Sciences, as well as a vice president. Prior to assuming his current position, he was senior vice president and chief administrative officer at Hampton University in Virginia. He has also served as assistant to the president at Virginia Tech, and held faculty and administrative positions at Virginia Commonwealth University. He began his career in higher education as a recruiter responsible for general admissions, with a special focus on increasing matriculation of African-American students.
Asked why he was moving from a very large university to a much smaller one, Jamison said the smaller size was part of the draw, as well as the opportunity to move into the top spot as president.
"The opportunity to make a difference is precisely the attraction," he said. "Hampton University was not always that size, nor was U. Texas. They had to be led to grow. There is an enormous opportunity and potential given by being the only university in the territory. … There are a lot of places you could go and not make a difference. But I think UVI is a place where with the right, strong leadership we can see how to go to the next level."
He would like to see UVI become the university of choice for residents.
"Like a lot of people, my degree is much more valuable today than when I got it," he said. "Your degrees also have more value today than when you got it. My goal is to make it so much more valuable over time."
He described himself as an "even-keeled" manager who communicates well with staff and faculty.
Jamison has extensive experience in local government and the private sector, too. For several years he served as city manager of Richmond, Va., where he managed a city workforce of 4,500 and a budget of more than $1.2 billion. Richmond, the state capital, is a city of 200,000. In the private sector, he was director of human-resource development for the Ethyl Corporation, a Fortune 1000 company headquartered in Richmond. All told he has more than 25 years of experience in higher education, corporate America and local government.
David Hall, the other finalist, will visit St. Croix Thursday, speaking to the public and taking questions at 2 p.m. in the northwest wing of UVI's Great Hall. UVI alumni are invited to meet him at 3:15 p.m. The UVI Board of Trustees will meet with the two finalists Friday and Saturday.
The board is expected to name the successor to current UVI President LaVerne Ragster early next month. Ragster will step down at the end of June after serving for the past seven years as UVI's president.
Both finalists were selected by a search committee appointed by the UVI board with help from executive search firm Isaacson Miller. More than 70 applications were received during the search process, and more than 300 educational leaders throughout the mainland and Caribbean were contacted, according to UVI. (See "UVI Down to Two Finalists for President.")
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