Agenia Walker Clark has been selected as the new president of historically Black Fisk University in Nashville. When she takes office on November 6, she will be the university’s third woman leader and the eighteenth president in the 158-year history of the university.
Fisk University enrolls just over 1,000 undergraduate students and a few dozen graduate students, according to the most recent data available from the U.S. Department of Education. African Americans are 73 percent of the student body with foreign students making up 16 percent of the total enrollments.
“To serve a new generation of brilliant, socially minded students — not unlike their counterparts of decades past, like W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, John Lewis, and Diane Nash — is surely the honor of my lifetime,” said Dr. Clark. “No institution of higher-ed has a richer legacy — or a richer promise for the future — than Fisk.”
For the past 19 years, Dr. Clark has been CEO of the Girl Scouts of Middle Tennessee. Prior to the Girl Scouts, Dr. Clark was the vice president of human resources for the Tennessee Education Lottery Corporation, senior director of human resources at Vanderbilt University, and directed human resources for Canadian telecommunications provider Nortel Networks, where she also served as a manager of government relations.
Dr. Clark earned a bachelor’s degree in communication and an MBA from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She holds a doctorate in educational leadership from Vanderbilt University.
