Nigerian Becomes The First Black President of Westminster College In USA

A Nigerian, Benjamin Ola Akande, has been named the president of the
Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, reports SL Today. The Webster University
business dean will take over on the 1st of July and will be replacing George B. Forsythe, president since
2008, now retiring after 10 years.

The announcement was made in Fulton on Friday morning in a press
release by Wallace L. Head, chairman of the
Westminster Board of Trustees:
“We’re proud to introduce Dr. Akande as president of Westminster College. We’ve achieved our year-long
goal of finding the most qualified person to lead Westminster and to continue executing our strategic plan. It includes developing leaders for a global
community by establishing one of the country’s most internationally diverse colleges, and maintaining a
graduate placement rate that exceeds 95 percent”.

Akande, born in Nigeria, is an American citizen and a professor of economics and dean of the George
Herbert Walker School of Business and Technology at Webster University.

He is also the leader of
Webster’s global Office of Corporate Partnerships. He arrived the USA to attend Wayland Baptist University
in Plainview, Texas, where he bagged a bachelor’s degree in business administration.
He also has a doctorate of economics from the University of Oklahoma, and finished his post-doctoral studies at
Harvard and Oxford.

Akande said of the school he will now be heading:
“Westminster offers a distinctive destination for undergraduate education focused on student
achievement and diversity, which are critically important. We must prepare graduates to live and
work in a world that is far more diverse and richer in new opportunities than ever before.”
Westminster has almost 1,000 students from 28 U.S. states and 76 countries worldwide.