BATON ROUGE, La. — BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — The Southern University Board of Supervisors has selected a new leader.
The board voted Friday to name University of Wisconsin-Platteville President Dennis Shields as the new president of the Southern University System and its second president-chancellor.
Shields will replace President-Chancellor Ray Belton, who announced last year that he would be retiring this fall.
Shields, 66, spoke briefly after being selected about his time spent on campus in early February and his excitement in taking the new role, The Advocate reported.
“It was a remarkable and inspiring experience to spend a couple of hours with the (students) and to observe the leadership of this Board of Supervisors and really take in how much you care about this institution,” Shields said. “I take it as a great responsibility to help with you to continue the rise of the Southern University System.”
Gov. John Bel Edwards congratulated Shields on the appointment as system president and chancellor of Southern University.
“I look forward to working with you and have no doubt that our students and faculty will continue to succeed under your leadership,” Edwards said in a statement.
An Iowa native, Shields obtained a bachelor’s degree in business administration at Graceland College before earning a law degree from the University of Iowa in May 1982. Immediately upon graduating, Shields became assistant director of admissions for the University of Iowa where he helped double the diversity of candidates for admission to the university. Shields took the same positions at the University of Michigan in 1991 and at Duke University in 1998.
After over 20 years in admissions work, Shields became dean and a law professor at the Phoenix School of Law in 2005, its first year of operation. According to UW-Platteville, Shields oversaw a first-time bar-passing rate of over 90% in the school’s first graduating class.
Shields was hired as chancellor of UW-Platteville in 2010, with a focus on diversity, equity and inclusion leading the way as core tenets of his leadership ideology. During Shields’ tenure, the university said it has “doubled the number of students from racially and ethnically diverse backgrounds over the course of the past 10 years."
Shields said during his interview at Southern that his highest priority in his new role would be to improve student outcomes at the end of their college studies.
“I will tell you that they probably need to be better and we ought to really be committing to doing better that way,” Shields said this month. “So that’s the first thing that I would do. It’s not a change, it’s identifying a challenge and saying ‘OK, what’s in place to deal with this now and how do we change that dynamic?’”
Shields plans to schedule another visit to the Southern campus and begin contract negotiations with the Board.
“I am humbled and honored by your confidence in me to take on this role in this wonderful institute of higher education,” Shields told the Board in a video call following the vote. “I couldn’t be more happy.”
