Mason, Ronald Jr 1949–

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Ronald Mason, Jr 1949–

President of Jackson State University

Named President of Jackson State University

It is a calm level-headedness and determination, as well as a knack for fixing things from the inside, that Ronald Mason brings to his job as president of Jackson State University. Mississippi’s largest historically black university, with a student enrollment of 6,400, Jackson State is one of a number of state schools targeted for institutional and financial enhancements. Recognizing that the university’s current endowment of only eight million dollars is not sufficient to cover its projected growth, Mason hopes to reorganize and strengthen its Development Foundation—which will include enlisting the involvement and financial support of Jackson State alumni—in order to attract additional services and resources.

According to an internal publication produced by Jackson State University to mark Mason’s inauguration in October of 2000, Mason “recognizes the University’s unique opportunity to make a substantial contribution to the region, not only in producing effective, competent graduates, but also in furthering the overall economic prosperity of the region.” In a news brief released by the Associated Press shortly after Mason accepted Jackson State’s offer, he described his appointment as “...a great opportunity to show America how to connect a traditionally historically black university to a city that has visions of greatness for itself that can’t be great without making this university great.”

The eldest of six children, Ronald Mason, Jr. was born and raised in New Orleans. His father worked as a mailman while his mother stayed home to raise the family. A hardworking student and an altar boy who was also a popular basketball player, Mason was the first black freshman at Jesuit High School. “I stood on the corner and watched him that day,” Mason’s mother said in an interview with The Times-Picayune, recalling his first day at the all-white school. “And he threw that coat over his shoulder and he walked down that walkway through all those boys. He just looked like he was going to brave this thing and wasn’t going to worry about what anybody said.” When he graduated in 1965, he went on to Columbia University, where he earned both his bachelor and doctoral degrees.

After finishing law school, Mason returned to Louisiana to work for the Southern Cooperative Development Fund in Lafayette. It was here, while acting as a community organizer, that he met Eamon Kelly, an official with the Ford Foundation who later went on to become president of Tulane University. Mason and Kelly worked together so well that when Kelly left for Tulane, he asked Mason to come along as the university’s legal counsel. Mason spent the next 17 years at Tulane, serving the university in a variety of administrative capacities.

Expanded Academic Programs at Tulane

According to The Times-Picayune, Mason brought “a kind of corporate model to the job of running the business end of the school [Tulane].” By identifying and eliminating inefficiencies in the administration, he was able to redirect millions of dollars to the academic

At a Glance…

Born Ronald Mason, Jr., 1949, in New Orleans, LA; married Belinda DeCuir, 1985; children: Nia, Jared, Kenan. Education: Columbia University, B.A., J.D.; Harvard Institute of Educational Management, graduate.

Career: Southern Cooperative Development Fund, community organizer; Tulane University, legal counsel, senior vice president, vice president for Finance and Operations; Housing Authority of New Orleans, executive monitor, 1996-98; National Center for the Urban Community, director, 1998-99; Jackson State University, president, 2000-,

Member: Fellowship Foundation; Metropolitan Area Committee; New Orleans Jobs Initiative; Southern Institute for Education and Research; Southern Development Foundation.

Address: Office—Jackson State University, P.O. Box 17490, Jackson, Mississippi 39217-0390.

program and oversee the construction of new law, art, and theater buildings. In addition to serving as principal legal adviser to the president, senior officers, academic deans, and the administrative board of the Tulane Educational Fund, he played a major role in bringing the Amistad Research Center—one of the largest collections of manuscripts, documents, and artwork relating to the experiences of African Americans and other minorities—to the university. He also served as principal investigator on a Ford Foundation grant to explore the issue of racism in higher education.

Though he helped boost diversity at Tulane, where in 1998 the undergraduate population was almost 10 percent black—one of the highest levels of all comparable universities—his push for racial equality also raised controversy. In 1990 Mason wrote the first draft of a document entitled “Initiatives for Race and Gender Enrichment at Tulane.” When the document was circulated on campus, many faculty members saw it as divisive, and felt it created, according to The Times-Picayune, “a juggernaut to hire more black faculty members.” Others saw it as a useful way to initiate conversation on the issue of faculty diversity. In retrospect, Mason said he wished he had been more tactful in his use of language. “I’m older now and probably a little more selective in the way I present things,” he told The Times-Picayune. “Sometimes discretion is the better part of valor.”

Another of Mason’s achievements while at Tulane was encouraging and strengthening the university’s ties with nearby Xavier University, a predominantly black institution, and harnessing the resources of both to bring about real social and economic change in New Orleans. While serving as Tulane’s ranking administrative officer, he helped formulate a policy that would make involvement in urban affairs a high priority for the university. “Tulane could not sit idly by and watch the city go down the tubes,” he said in an interview with The Times-Picayune. “Not only from a good-citizen point of view but from a self-interest point of view, too.” With this in mind, Mason and Tulane’s President Eamon Kelly drafted a proposal for a modest neighborhood-improvement scheme and submitted it to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Chosen To Oversee New Orleans’s Housing

That proposal came to the attention of Henry Cisneros, the U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Cisneros offered Mason a challenging new assignment: directing and managing the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO), one of the most beleaguered public housing agencies in the nation. Buildings were toppling, pipes were leaking, rats were scrambling through rubbish piles, and in some cases, sewage had backed up into tenants’ kitchens. The murder rate was sky high, and drugs were ubiquitous. HANO’s Femap score—a scale used by the Office of Housing and Urban Development to rate housing authorities—stood at 28 out of a possible 100. “When we got in, all the internal systems were broken,” Mason said in an interview with The Commercial Appeal. “...It is easy to come in and slap paint on and make things look well. But it is harder to come in and fix broken internal systems.”

In 1996 Mason took over as HANO’s executive monitor—the only position of its kind in the nation. An outsider with no experience in housing management, Mason was initially regarded with anger and suspicion by project tenants. “It took some time for us to accept Ron Mason,” Donna Johnigan, president of the City-wide Tenants Council, told The Commercial Appeal. “We fought the change. But while we were bickering, our residents were suffering.”

Over the years, the HANO management board had been beset by fraud and scandal, and 15 executive directors had come and gone in 10 years. Within 18 months of Mason’s appointment, however, glimmerings of change—and hope—were clearly visible. He quickly fired most of the authority’s top managers and brought in competent leaders from the private sector to run the organization. In addition, he set up a residents’ advisory council in order to give tenants a voice and fully involve them in rebuilding the agency that managed their housing. Crumbling apartment units were demolished, police substations were set up, and programs were introduced to help residents obtain business loans. During the first year, the authority’s Femap score rose 20 points, inching closer to the grade of 60 that makes it possible to move off the federal roster of troubled housing.

Among the enterprises Mason established through HANO were the Campus Affiliates Program, which brings some 600 students and 100 faculty to the enormous C.J. Peete complex in uptown New Orleans to help with job skills and job-readiness training, tutoring, and teen counseling. Another program, the Institute for Resident Initiatives, has led to the creation of on-site social service offices at every housing complex and provided staff to help residents improve their literacy skills, start businesses, find jobs, or handle drug addiction. By 1998, real changes were visible in New Orleans’s housing projects, and only 25 percent of HANO’s tenants felt their living conditions were deteriorating, versus 85 percent the year before. “That’s what this job is about,” Mason said in an interview with The Times-Picayune. “Little victories. And every little victory invigorates you enough to get up and fight for another victory the next day. This is a big, big issue that will be solved by a series of small solutions: one person, one family, one apartment at a time.”

In July of 1998 Mason resigned from his position as senior vice president and legal counsel at Tulane to devote full time to urban issues and public policy as director of the newly formed National Center for the Urban Community, a joint enterprise created by Tulane and Xavier Universities. In this role, he continued to work for HANO, but also involved himself in a number of other important urban initiatives. He helped develop the New Orleans Welfare to Work Collaborative, which involves more than 60 businesses and public agencies, and directed the Ford Public School Reform Initiative, which is bringing together three schools and six university and community organizations to work for system-wide improvement in the public schools.

Named President of Jackson State University

When Mason was offered the job as ninth president of Jackson State University in late 1999, the match seemed like a perfect one both for him and for the university. He brought a wealth of experience in higher education and administration together with a solid knowledge of urban issues. From the outset, however, his selection stirred protest among faculty and students at the university and inspired controversy among black academic leaders. “That Mason had a strong reputation as an administrator proved to be of little consolation to a university community feeling betrayed by its state higher education board,” wrote Ronald Roach in Black Issues in Higher Education. “Mason, a Columbia-educated attorney, was seen as a relative newcomer to Black college leadership even though he ran a public housing research institute that involved Xavier University of Louisiana.”

While many saw him as an outsider, others recognized the value of hiring an individual with career experience outside the black academic community in business and at majority white institutions. “I think boards are reaching out to find people who are prepared to bring change to the campus,” Knoxville College President Barbara Hatton said in Black Issues in Higher Education. “Black colleges and universities have to compete in a much wider world.” In the same article, Dr. George Ayers, president of a Virginia-based higher education management consulting and executive search firm, added that boards are “also seeking candidates who have demonstrated that they have fund-raising skills and can win assistance for their school from corporations and foundations.”

As for Mason, who took over the presidency of Jackson State University on February 1, 2000, he is confident in his ability to lead the 123-year-old institution into the 21st century. In addition to expanding programs in engineering, applied science, and education, he hopes to strengthen the university’s technological infrastructure and raise faculty pay scales. Even while working for Tulane, Mason said in an interview with Black Issues in Higher Education, he had hoped to one day become president of an historically black institution. “I wanted to be able to do some good for my people...Now I feel like part of a family here.”