The Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia recently voted unanimously to name Guyanese-born Ivelaw Lloyd Griffith as the ninth president of Fort Valley State University. President Griffith took office on July 22.
A political scientist, Dr. Griffith served earlier as professor of political science and provost and senior vice president at York College of The City University of New York. His notable achievements there include growing the full time faculty by 30 percent over four years, re-organizing the academic division into three Schools, and enhancing the research and scholarly climate by creating a Provost Lecture Series and a companion Distinguished Scholars Lecture Series, recognizing and rewarding research and scholarship, and establishing an Undergraduate Student Research Program.
Before becoming York’s provost in 2007, Dr. Griffith was professor of political science and budget dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Florida International University (FIU), dean of The Honors College at FIU, and provost at Radford University in Virginia. President Griffith holds a Bachelor of Social Sciences, with distinction in political science, from The University of Guyana, a Master of Arts in Political Science and Public Administration from Long Island University, New York, and both a Master of Philosophy and a Ph.D. in Political Science from The City University of New York Graduate School. He also graduated from Harvard Graduate School of Education’s program in educational leadership.
Deeply committed to the intellectual enterprise, Dr. Griffith is a specialist on Caribbean security, drugs, and crime. He has published seven books and more than 50 articles in various scholarly journals. The research for the highly-acclaimed Drugs and Security in the Caribbean: Sovereignty Under Siege, published by Penn State Press, was funded by the MacArthur Foundation. His eighth book, Challenged Sovereignty, will be published in 2014 by the University of Illinois Press. President Griffith also serves on the editorial board of the journal Defense and Security Studies Review.
President Griffith has been a consultant to Canada’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, USAID, and other agencies, and he has testified before the United States Congress on Caribbean security issues. A past president of the Caribbean Studies Association, he has been a Visiting Scholar at the William Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies in Washington, DC, the Royal Military College of Canada, and the George Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Germany. Recently, he was one of 45 experts from across the Americas invited by the Secretary General of the Organization of American States to review the hemisphere’s narcotics policies and practices and propose anti-narcotics scenarios through 2025.
Also passionate about service, President Griffith served on the National Steering Committee of AASCU’s Red Balloon Project and briefly as convener of its Provosts of Color Caucus. As well, he served on the vestry (Board of Directors) of his church, St. George’s Episcopal Church in Hempstead, Long Island, and as chair of their Ambassador Program and Education Committee. A member of The 100 Black Men of Long Island at the time he left New York, he also was a trustee of the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning in Queens, N.Y. President Griffith looks forward to deep engagement with the Fort Valley, Macon, Atlanta and other Georgia communities. He and his wife Francille, a registered nurse, have two adult children.
