Champlain College officials announced Tuesday that trustees had chosen the school’s next leader. Benjamin Ola. Akande, an economist and top administrator at Washington University, will become Champlain’s ninth president starting July 1.
Akande will take over for Laurie Quinn, Champlain’s provost and senior vice president for academics, who has been serving as the interim president since July 1 of last year, when then-president Donald Laackman abruptly stepped down.
“Dr. Akande is an agent of change and a visionary leader with a global perspective. His enterprising mindset and commitment to student success will be essential as he leads Champlain College in an evolving higher education landscape,” Charles Kittredge, chair of the Champlain College board of trustees, said in a statement.
In an interview with Vermont Public Radio, Akande said he had decided to come to the Burlington school because of its enterprising ethos.
“I was attracted to their industrious, entrepreneurial approach, their commitment to student success, and overall, just to an institution that has found a way to continually reinvent itself over the years,” he said.
Akande will step into his role during an extraordinarily turbulent time in higher education. Demographic shifts have translated into a severe enrollment crunch across the region, and four Vermont colleges announced last year that they would close or merge. The coronavirus pandemic, meanwhile, has prompted colleges to return millions in room and board fees to students as they pivoted to online education.
In a statement, Akande said he was honored to take the helm during “this period of great transformation and even greater opportunity.”
“While the challenges we currently face as global citizens are daunting, they also sharpen our focus and urge us both individually and as a community, to lead from wherever we are,” he said.
Akande is currently assistant vice chancellor for International Affairs–Africa, and the associate director of the Global Health Center at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Before that, he was president of Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, from 2015 to 2017.
Between 2000 and 2015, Akande was an economics professor and dean of the George Herbert Walker School of Business and Technology at Webster University, also in St. Louis. While at Webster, Akande developed several partnerships with corporate donors, according to Champlain’s announcement, and helped secure the largest donation in the university’s history.
Akande also currently serves on the boards of Argent Capital, a $4 billion asset management company based in St. Louis, and of Enterprise Bank & Trust, a regional bank headquartered in Clayton, Missouri. He has also been a director of Ralcorp Holdings Inc., a $5 billion publicly traded manufacturer of food labels, and has consulted for corporate clients including Anheuser-Busch, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Voith, and SeaWorld.
A Nigerian-American citizen, Akande will be the first person of color to lead Champlain. He holds a doctorate in economics from the University of Oklahoma and has completed postdoctoral studies at the JFK School of Government at Harvard University and Saïd Business School at Oxford University.
Details about Akande’s compensation package were not available Tuesday afternoon.
Akande and his wife, Bola Taiwo-Akande, a pharmacist and businesswoman, have three adult daughters. The couple will relocate to Burlington this summer.
