David Wilson, President, Morgan State University | The CEO Magazine

When David Wilson led a campus boycott of the dining hall as an undergraduate at Tuskegee University in Alabama, little did he expect the encounter with the university president to change his career trajectory.

“I wanted to be a civil rights lawyer, having grown up in rural Alabama in the Jim Crow era,” Wilson tells The CEO Magazine. “I lived out injustices and racism every single day.”

As a political science student, he had become active in the student government association to counter what he and his peers believed was a university administration that was not listening to its students. The dining hall boycott was born out of that frustration and desire to be heard. But upon being called to speak with the university president, Wilson left with a new role model.

“It was an encounter that opened my eyes to what a rewarding career could be like in American higher education,” he says. “I realized I could achieve some of the same goals I was looking to achieve by going down the path of becoming a civil rights lawyer.”

Elevating its mission

Leadership roles at Rutgers University, Auburn University, and University of Wisconsin Colleges and University of Wisconsin Extension followed. In 2010, Wilson was appointed Morgan State University’s 10th president. One of the largest historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), and located in Baltimore, Maryland, it had not long been reclassified as a doctoral research university.

Wilson, who until then had worked at predominately white research institutions, spotted another opportunity – the potential to elevate its mission in the research arena, the innovation space and in workforce development. He wasted no time putting in place a strategy that made Morgan State University attractive to investors, including the state of Maryland.

“As a result, we began to receive increased support on the capital side of the university,” he says.

With increased investment, the university has forged an aggressive effort to expand academic programming, facilities and research capacity to yield significant returns in student achievement, research innovation, economic impact and institutional growth.

Punctuating Morgan State University’s positive momentum are several notable milestones, including a recent Forbes ranking as the number four HBCU in the nation. The Earl G. Graves School of Business and Management’s MBA program earning a national ranking of 54 among business schools in the United States – the only HBCU program to make the list.

It also developed a US$171 million health and human services facility for its for its public health, social work, nursing and medical technology programs.

“As a result, our nursing graduates are scoring 100 on the NCLEX exam, number one in the state of Maryland,” he says.

In total, the university has invested nearly US$1.4 billion in infrastructure during his tenure, including two new 10-story student housing towers on campus that accommodate 650–700 residential students each. A third is set to open in 2028. It also acquired in 2022 the 24-hectare Lake Clifton site, not far from its existing 75-hectare campus, which is being developed to support research expansion.

“With these kinds of strategic investments in academic facilities, world-class laboratories, world-class classrooms and world-class housing facilities, we are able to drive enrollment and impact,” he says.

Morgan State University currently has nearly 12,500 students enrolled across over 150 academic programs in fields such as engineering, architecture, business, education, social work, public health and journalism.

Uniquely Morgan

This all feeds into another strategic plan, which is for Morgan State University to achieve R1 Carnegie research classification, after reaching R2 status in 2018 – a ranking that only a handful of HBCUs have achieved.

“We fully anticipate that when the next round of Carnegie classifications are made public that Morgan will join Howard University as only the second HBCU ever in America to achieve R1 status,” he says. “Everyone is excited about what we are on the cusp of becoming.”

While such a classification will see Morgan State University join an elite group of universities, including the Ivy League and the Big Ten, Wilson says that it intends to remain uniquely Morgan.

“We are bringing a unique perspective to the penthouse of research institutions in this country,” he says. “We are not seeking to become one of the very high research institutions in America just to say we are. It is to make sure that we are grappling with some of the intractable challenges that have faced marginalized communities and populations.

“We are not coming to be afraid, we are coming to lead. Morgan wants to be known as the number one place for policymakers, educators, philanthropists and anyone else to come.”

Heartbeat of the country

Last year was a banner year as Morgan State University surpassed US$100 million in new sponsored research commitments.

Such funding supports eight research centers including the National Center for the Elimination of Educational Disparities, the Center for Research and Education in Microelectronics, the Center for Urban Violence and Crime Reduction, the Center for Urban Health Equity and the Center for Equitable Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Systems.

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“SodexoMagic is proud to celebrate more than six years of partnership with Morgan State University, working alongside a team we deeply admire. Together, we’ve helped create environments that bring a little magic to campus life with spaces designed to support David Wilson’s vision of preparing students to thrive on a global stage. We look forward to building on this partnership for years to come.” – Earvin ‘Magic’ Johnson, Chairman and CEO, SodexoMagic

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Wilson knows how essential relationships across the private sector are to the success of the university, including with partners such as Sodexo Magic. As the only HBCU currently on the Google AI Research Council, Morgan State University is also working closely with Google to build its own AI ecosystem, called Obsidian.

“It will be trained on our own data and allow us to align our AI development with our values and our priorities and our academic mission,” he says, adding that the platform will be rolled out across all departments and allow the university to steward its own data to become more strategic in its decision-making.

He might be the longest-serving president of a major HBCU in the country, but Wilson believes he’s had at least three distinctive presidencies during that time.

“You have to reinvent yourself, to remain current and to be in alignment with the moment that meets you,” he says.

In doing so, he steered Morgan State University to become one of the most consequential universities in the country in terms of research and innovation. Wilson says he spends so much time in the moment and preparing the university for a future that they cannot clearly see that he hasn’t thought much about his legacy.

“But having the question put before me, I would hope that people look back on this particular period in our history and say that we were able to position Morgan to become a university that is not an afterthought in the United States – it’s more like one of the heartbeats of the country,” he concludes.