Dorothy Cowser Yancy: The Yancy Years (1994-2008) Johnson C. Smith University

When Dr. Robert L. Albright, eleventh president of Johnson C. Smith University, gathered Johnson C. Smith Board of Trustees members, administrators, faculty, staff, students into Biddle Auditorium on January 5, 1994, to announce that he would join the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, NJ as its executive vice president for research and programs little did the university community know that an arrow was already fashioned and formed “for such a time as this”-Dr. Dorothy Cowser Yancy.

Besides possessing a very impressive and long list of academic credentials-including but not limited to-becoming the first African American professor to be promoted and tenured as a full professor at Georgia Tech Institute of Technology in its School of History, Technology and Society and the School of Management, publishing numerous scholarly articles and cases, receiving significant recognition as a labor arbitrator and serving in several consulting and advisory roles to governmental agencies, unions and companies-President Yancy’s unique preparation for the role of 12th President of Johnson C. Smith University began well before her appointment including several more experiences unbeknownst to many.

In the fall of 1991, then Professor Dr. Yancy was appointed to serve on Johnson C. Smith University’s Board of Trustees. Armed with professorial and administrative experiences, she eagerly returned to the place where her academic career began with the hopes of assisting the institution’s entry into the 21st Century.

Shortly after her appointment to the Board of Trustees, Dr. Yancy was called upon to chair a board-appointed strategic planning committee that produced a little-known but all important document in the annals of Johnson C. Smith University history. “The Johnson C. Smith University Board of Trustees Strategic Planning Committee Report-April 3, 1993.”

In effect, this 1993 document completed under the direction of the university’s future president provided an outlay of the university’s strengths and non-strengths for the coming century and this outlay would provide both the future President Yancy and the then Board of Trustee members with intimate familiarity of the university’s existing infrastructure, resources and personnel.

All the same, this commemorative history is not an attempt to exhaustively etch into history all of her successes and trials during her 14-year presidency. (A more full-length biography and/or history waits to be written by the person or institution to whom she passes all of her important personal and professional papers.)

The history set out in these pages is designed to present a documented educational narrative for alumni of Johnson C. Smith University and Johnson C. Smith University’s 12th President. It is the authors’ hope that this narrative equally conforms to the message’s simplicity and captures the Person and Presidency-not Perception-of Dorothy Cowser Yancy.

This excerpt and The Yancy Years (1994-2008): The Age of Infrastructure, Technology and Restoration can be read , downloaded and seen digitized with accompanying documents in its entirety at: https://lib.digitalnc.org/record/237981?ln=en or https://drbrianjohnson1.com/books/the-yancy-years-1994-2008-the-age-of-infrastructure-technand-restoration/29b29a43-618f-4619-95eb-dd0991d1fbcd