Davidson College names a new president with deep North Carolina roots
Douglas Hicks was named 19th president of Davidson College on Friday, marking a homecoming for the religion scholar and dean of Oxford College of Emory University near Atlanta.
“Davidson changed my life,” the Davidson College graduate who succeeds Carol Quillen said in a post on the school’s website.
“There, I grew up,” Hicks said. “I had the opportunity to learn in new ways, to meet students from across the country, to play varsity baseball in my first year, to study abroad in Madrid, to meet an incredible group of friends and to be challenged by wonderful teacher-mentors, whom I consider lifelong friends.
“I’m excited to return as president and even more excited about the future that we will build at Davidson,” he said.
Hicks, an ordained Presbyterian minister, begins his new role Aug. 1. His selection, however, is the first since the college trustees removed the requirement of that denomination for the president, school officials said.
Saying “it’s time” after 11 years at the helm, Quillen in August said she would resign at the end of the 2021-22 school year, The Charlotte Observer reported at the time.
After a sabbatical year in 2022-23, she said, Quillen will return to the campus as a professor of history.
Quillen was the school’s first female president and the first non-alumnus in that role in more than half a century.
Deep academic background
The 54-year-old Hicks earned a master’s of divinity at Duke University and master’s and doctorate degrees in religion and economics at Harvard.
He has authored or edited nine books and taught in leadership studies and religion at the University of Richmond, Virginia, where he became founding director of the Bonner Center for Civic Engagement.
He next joined Colgate University as provost and dean of the faculty, the school’s chief academic officer, before becoming dean at Oxford in 2016, according to his biography.
“Doug learned and led at some of our nation’s top liberal arts colleges,” Alison Hall Mauzé, Davidson College board of trustees chair, said in Friday’s announcement.
Oxford College is Emory’s original campus and “a highly selective, two-year liberal arts institution” whose graduates join another Emory college for their final two years of study, according to Friday’s post on Davidson’s website.
Diversity efforts, contemporary challenges
Oxford and Davidson were founded a year apart and have faced similar “tough, contemporary challenges,” according to the Davidson College post.
Hicks co-leads Emory’s efforts to memorialize enslaved people whose labor helped build the Oxford campus, Davidson officials said, mirroring Davidson’s like efforts on its campus, they said.
Hicks also doubled the diversity of Oxford’s faculty and leads a student body that is two-thirds domestic students of color or international students, according to Davidson College officials.
“He secured the first naming of an Emory University academic building after a Black leader, the late Judge Horace Johnson, a friend and mentor,” according to Friday’s announcement.
Ties with Anthony Foxx
Anthony Foxx, the former Charlotte mayor and U.S. Transportation secretary, chaired the committee that searched for Quillen’s successor.
“I can say with confidence that this has been the most wide-open search in the history of the college,” Foxx said in Friday’s announcement. “We could have selected any candidate in the world. Doug emerged as the absolute right candidate.”
Foxx and Hicks also share ties dating to their undergraduate days.
As a Davidson College senior, Hicks chaired the solidarity committee, a social justice group whose Martin Luther King Day event included keynote remarks by Foxx, then a Davidson College freshman.
Hicks’s undergraduate thesis at Davidson was titled “Poverty in Charlotte, North Carolina,” according to the college. “His doctoral dissertation at Harvard focused on a theologically informed approach to inequality and becoming a more just society,” according to Friday’s announcement.
This story was originally published April 29, 2022 at 11:30 AM.