FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:
Ralph Newell
Phone: 703.385.2411
Email: [email protected]
FAIRFAX, Va. — Diverse: Issues In Higher Education is pleased to announce that Dr. Ken Atwater will be the recipient of this year’s Diverse Champions Award.
Dr. Ken Atwater became the seventh president of Hillsborough Community College (HCC)- the seventh largest community college in Florida’s State College System, serving more than 45,000 students each year at its five campuses and three centers – on July 1, 2010. Under his leadership student graduation rates have increased by 50 percent. Over his three decade span of higher education leadership he has been recognized as a collaborative leader with an unwavering commitment to student success.
Dr. Atwater currently serves as chair of the Tampa-Hillsborough Economic Development Corporation Foundation of which he is a past Chair of the Board, serves on the Board of Directors for the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship and is on the American Association of Community Colleges Higher Education Reauthorization Task Force of which he is also a past Chair of the Board.
About this Award:
The Diverse Champions Award recognizes higher education leaders who have shown unwavering commitment to equal opportunity and access for all, particularly at the community college level.
The award was created by Diverse: Issues In Higher Education in 2012 upon the retirement of the inaugural Diverse Champions Award winner, Dr. John E. Roueche, as director of the Community College Leadership Program (CCLP) at the University of Texas at Austin. Of the more than 500 CCLP graduates produced during his 40-plus year tenure at CCLP, more than 60 percent are women and people of color.
The Diverse Champions Award is given to individuals who have made similarly extraordinary contributions to the world of higher education.
The 2018 co-recipients of the award were Dr.Christine Johnson McPhail, founder of the Community College Leadership Doctoral Program at Morgan State University (MD), and longtime National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD) leader Dr. Suanne Davis Roueche (posthumously).
The April 18, 2019, edition of Diverse will contain a tribute to Dr. Atwater.
For more than three decades, Diverse: Issues In Higher Education has been America’s premier source of timely news, provocative commentary, insightful interviews and in-depth special reports on diversity in higher education. Savvy individuals who appreciate the crucial and ever-changing role that higher education plays in the lives of students, professionals, their families and their communities make reading Diverse a regular habit.
