Update
Dr. P. George Benson has been selected as the next president of the College of Charleston. See below for complete information.

Press Release

Dr. George Benson Named New College of Charleston President

Dr. P. George Benson has been elected by the College of Charleston Board of Trustees as the 21st president of the College of Charleston. The vote by the Board of Trustee was unanimous.

“I am delighted that Dr. Benson will be the next president of the College of Charleston,” says Bobby Marlowe, chairman of the Board of Trustees. “The Board is very pleased with the selection of George among the strong field of candidates presented by the search committee. The contributions of the Board of Trustees, the search committee, the campus community and our constituent boards were invaluable in this process, and I want to sincerely thank each and every person who participated in this process and gave so freely of their time.”

Dr. Benson takes over the position vacated by Lee Higdon, who left earlier this year to become president of Connecticut College. Dr. Benson will officially begin as the new president in spring 2007.

Since 1998, Dr. Benson has been the dean of the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia. He previously served from 1993 to 1998 as the dean of the Rutgers Business School at Rutgers University. From 1977 to 1993 he was a faculty member in the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. Prior to that, he was a member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Whippany, New Jersey.

He is currently chairman of the Board of Overseers of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, as appointed by U.S. Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez. The Baldrige Award recognizes the highest achievements in performance excellence by U.S. businesses, health care organizations, and educational institutions. Dr. Benson also serves on the boards of directors of AGCO Corp. (Duluth, Ga.), Nutrition 21 Inc. (Purchase, N.Y.), Crawford & Company (Atlanta) and SignalONE Safety (Atlanta).

A native of Lewisburg, Pa., Dr. Benson received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Bucknell University in 1968, did graduate work in operations research in the engineering school of New York University and received a Ph.D. in decision sciences from the University of Florida in 1977.

The College of Charleston is a nationally preeminent, public liberal arts and sciences university located in the heart of historic Charleston, South Carolina. Founded in 1770, the College is among the nation’s top universities for quality education, student life and affordability.

Biography of Dr. P. George Benson

Dr. P. George Benson has been elected by the College of Charleston Board of Trustees as the 21st president of the College of Charleston.

Dr. Benson comes to the College of Charleston from his position as dean of the University of Georgia’s C. Herman and Mary Virginia Terry College of Business, a post he has held since July 1, 1998. He previously served for five years as dean of the Rutgers Business School at Rutgers University. From 1977 to 1993, he was a faculty member in the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota.

At Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, he was dean of the Graduate School of Management, the School of Management at Newark, and the School of Business at New Brunswick. He led the merger of these schools in 1996. He established executive MBA programs in Beijing and Singapore; and started off-campus, part-time MBA programs, including one in partnership with Merrill Lynch at their corporate campus near Princeton, N.J. In 1996, Business News New Jersey named Dr. Benson one of the “Top 100 Business People in New Jersey.”

In 1997, Dr. Benson was appointed by U.S. Secretary of Commerce Mickey Kantor to a three-year term as one of nine national judges for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. In 2004, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans appointed Dr. Benson to a three-year term on the Board of Overseers for the Baldrige Award.  In April 2005, Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez appointed him to a two-year term as Chairman of the Board of Overseers. The Baldrige Award recognizes the highest achievements in performance excellence by U.S. businesses, health care organizations, and educational institutions. The Board of Overseers advises the director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the U.S. Secretary of Commerce on the conduct of the Baldrige Award program and on how well it is serving the nation.

In 2000, he was named a Fellow of the Decision Sciences Institute, the institute’s highest honor.

He is a member of the Board of Directors of AGCO Corp. (Duluth, Ga.), Nutrition 21, Inc. (Purchase, N.Y.), Crawford & Company (Atlanta, Ga.), Athens First Bank and Trust Company (Athens, Ga.) and SignalONE Safety (Atlanta, Ga.). He serves on the Board of Advisors for Carter (Atlanta, Ga.) the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, and is a member of the Board of Governors of the Buckhead Club (Atlanta, Ga.).

At the University of Minnesota, he taught statistics, quality management, and decision analysis, and from 1983 to 1988 was head of the Decision Sciences Area. In 1992, he became director of the Operations Management Center. Prior to joining the faculty at Minnesota, he was a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T’s Bell Telephone Laboratories, Whippany, N.J., working in the area of information systems. He also worked for the U.S. Army Security Agency, Arlington, Va., as a management analyst in the area of personnel planning.

Dr. Benson received a bachelor of science degree in mathematics from Bucknell University, did graduate work in operations research in the engineering school at New York University, and received a doctorate in decision sciences from the University of Florida.

His research interests include quality management, strategic management, belief formation, and judgmental forecasting. He consults nationally in the areas of applied statistics, quality management, and employment discrimination. He is active in the national initiative to improve the teaching of statistical thinking and quality management in schools of business.

Dr. Benson is the co-author of one of the leading textbooks in business statistics. It has been widely used in the U.S. and abroad for the last 28 years. Prentice Hall published the ninth edition in 2005.

Dr. Benson’s research spans several fields including decision analysis, operations management, statistics, finance, and economics. His work has been published in many academic and professional journals including: Management Science, Decision Sciences, The Journal of Quality Technology, The Journal of Production and Inventory Control, The American Statistician, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, The Journal of Forecasting, The International Journal of Forecasting, The Journal of Finance, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, and The Journal of Behavioral Decision Making.

At the University of Georgia, Dr. Benson led the establishment of a customized MBA program for IBM Business Consulting Services. The students are full-time consultants living in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico; the program is delivered face-to-face in Athens, Georgia, and using distance technology. He also initiated an evening MBA program at the Gwinnett University Center in Metro Atlanta; an Evening MBA program for the U.S. Department of Energy at the Savannah River Site, Aiken, S.C.; an Executive MBA program in Atlanta; and a music business program in concert with the Hodgson School of Music on the Athens campus. Since 2000, Terry has presented a highly successful monthly breakfast speaker series in Atlanta known as Terry Third Thursday. 

Dr. Benson led the establishment of two new research centers: the Institute for Leadership Advancement and the Center for Information Systems Leadership. He also fostered the development of several innovative executive education programs including a nationally accredited Directors’ College for current and prospective corporate directors and a quarterly roundtable for Chief Financial Officers.

Dr. Benson and his development staff have raised over $40 million for the Terry College.

In May 2005, the Terry College opened a 28,000 square foot executive education center in the Buckhead section of Atlanta. It is the new home for the Executive MBA program, the Directors’ College, Terry Third Thursday, and other executive programs. Dr. Benson led the planning, acquisition, design, and development of the center.

Terry’s MBA and undergraduate programs are consistently ranked among the top 20 public programs in the U.S. For research productivity, Terry’s faculty recently climbed from 20th to 16th among public business schools (Academy of Management Journal).

Dr. Benson is a bimonthly columnist for Georgia Trend, a statewide business and politics magazine.

To download the vita of Dr. Benson, click on the name below (PDF format):

Dr. George Benson