Ray Belton has been named president of the Southern University System. The system’s flagship campus in Baton Rouge enrolls nearly 7,000 students. The system also operates campuses in New Orleans and Shreveport. Dr. Belton will also have the added duty as chancellor of the main campus of the Southern University System in Baton Rouge.
In accepting the appointment, Dr. Belton said “it is an absolute honor to be afforded this occasion to serve this board and to serve this institution to whom I remain indebted. As president and chancellor of the Southern University System, I will give my all.”
Since 2000 Ray Belton has been serving as the chancellor of the Shreveport campus of Southern University. Dr. Belton is a graduate of Southern University. He holds a master’s degree from the University of Nebraska at Omaha and a doctorate in educational administration from the University of Texas at Austin.
The board of supervisors was impressed by Dr. Belton’s record at the Shreveport campus where enrollments have grown by 156 percent and the graduation rate has doubled.
Let’s hope that Dr. Belton can seriously upgrade the academic experience for Southern University’s students. The school like many other HBCU’s are not graduating the quality and number of students to meet needs of the global economy.
In America we demand more of the HBCU group of universities.
Re: Guillermo E. Diego;
We have to be mindful that until the collective mindset changes within the Black and Latino community as it concerns higher education, the issues you’re pointing out will not be resolved at any HBCU. In other words, both the Black and Latino community are being implicitly and explicitly socially engineered to be anti-intellectual by the empirically dominant White society.
HBCUs need to significantly increase their expectations from their students, faculty, staff, and definitely the administrators. When this occurs, the changes that all HBCU stakeholders will be clearly evident by the students intellectual preparedness, the overall campus experience, along with transparent decision making and prudent fiscal planning/operations.
I agree 100% with Michael’s response to Mr. Diego’s comment. Mr. Diego’s observation and remedy amounted to a facile solution to a very complex issue.