BiographyB. Joseph White is the chief executive officer of the University of Illinois and its three campuses in Urbana-Champaign, Chicago and Springfield, a higher education system with total enrollment of 70,000 students and a 2009 budget of $4.1 billion. Each of the campuses has a chancellor who reports to the president. White lives in an official residence on the east side of the Urbana-Champaign campus and maintains offices in Urbana and Chicago. The president is responsible to the University of Illinois Board of Trustees, a 13-member governing body, nine of whom are appointed for six-year terms by the governor of the State of Illinois. A student trustee is elected by the student body from each campus annually, and the governor appoints one of these student trustees to have an official vote on board matters. The governor serves as an ex officio member of the board. White took office as the 16th president of the University of Illinois on Jan. 31, 2005. In his inaugural address, he set forth five strategic priorities for the University:
On June 1, 2007, White announced the University of Illinois’ $2.25 billion Brilliant Futures fund-raising campaign, focused on endowing professorships and student scholarships. White is familiar with both public higher education and the Midwest. He spent nearly three decades affiliated with the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He served for a decade as dean of its Stephen M. Ross School of Business and its highly ranked undergraduate, MBA, doctoral and executive-education programs. He also served as interim president at the University of Michigan in 2002. White’s field of academic expertise is organizational behavior and industrial relations. White has private-sector executive experience, including six years at Cummins Engine Co. Inc. and a year helping rebuild a Wall Street firm devastated by 9/11. He is a director or trustee of several companies and has served on the boards of two health-care systems. White is currently on the boards of directors of the American Council on Education, the National Merit Scholarship Corp. and the Chicago 2016 Olympics Evaluation Committee. He is also on the Board of Governors of the Argonne National Laboratory. White received the Martin Luther King Jr. Leadership Award from the Illinois Commission on Diversity and Human Relations in 2007, the Leadership Award from the Illinois Legislative Latino Caucus Foundation in 2005 and an honorary doctorate in humane letters from Wabash College (Indiana) in 2003. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Beta Gamma Sigma honor societies. White, 61, is a native of Detroit who was reared in Kalamazoo. He earned his bachelor's degree, magna cum laude, in international economics from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in 1969 and an MBA, with distinction, from Harvard University in 1971. He received his doctorate in business administration in 1975 from the University of Michigan. White has written, taught and lectured extensively on leadership, management, higher education and organizational change. He is the author of The Nature of Leadership: Reptiles, Mammals, and the Challenge of Becoming a Great Leader (AMACOM, 2007). B. Joseph White Highlights
Updated: July 2008 |
