The board of trustees of Warner Pacific University in Portland, Oregon, announced the appointment of Brian L. Johnson as the educational institution’s eighth president. He will take office on August 1, 2020.
When describing what drew him to Warner Pacific, Dr. Johnson said, “I want to be somewhere where I can bring to bear my faith commitments, my scholarly commitments, my ethnicity, and frankly, all the things that prepared me for this moment I see evidenced and embodied in Warner Pacific as a Christ-centered, urban, minority-serving and Hispanic-serving institution situated in a metropolitan environment. It fits everything I enjoy.”
Warner Pacific University enrolls just over 360 undergraduate students and only a few graduate students, according to the most recent data submitted to the U.S. Department of Education. African Americans make up 12 percent of the student body.
Dr. Johnson has been serving as vice president of Mercy College and senior campus administrator at the college’s New York City campus in Manhattan. Before that, he was president of Tuskegee University in Alabama from 2014 to 2017.
Dr. Johnson is a graduate of Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he majored in English. He holds a master’s degree in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Ph.D. in English from the University of South Carolina.
