The Making of a First-Time President

By Dwaun J. Warmack’s count, he is one of 13 first-time college presidents whom Edison O. Jackson mentored. "He prided himself on his success in doing that," says Warmack, president since 2014 of Harris-Stowe State University, in St. Louis.  Jackson’s accomplishment in nurturing future presidents during the five years he led Bethune-Cookman University and, before that, Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York and a community college in California, makes him something of a fabled figure at historically black colleges and universities like Harris-Stowe, even as he is known elsewhere for getting mired in controversies toward the end of his tenure at Bethune-Cookman.