Murray State University held its second of four town hall meetings Monday for campus and community members to meet Diana Rogers-Adkinson, one of the finalists to be the college’s next president.
Rogers-Adkinson currently serves as the Vice Chancellor of Academic and Student Affairs at Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education.
At the town hall, Rogers-Adkinson spoke about initiatives at MSU that she thinks will draw more people to the far western Kentucky college.
“Everybody’s thinking about the vet school or some collaborations with med schools or dental hygienists [programs],” Rogers-Adkinsons said. “All of those have some really unique opportunities to bring more and different students to help us grow in some pretty exciting ways.”
Rogers-Adkinson said she is a first generation college graduate and the first woman in her family to graduate high school. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Ball State University in 1983. She then attended Kent State University, where she completed doctoral degrees in special education and counseling in 1994.
After working as a professor at Wichita State University, she took a position at the University of Wisconsin Whitewater as chair of the school’s special education department. In 2012, she became the dean of the College of Education – and later the College of Education, Health, and Human Studies – She then spent over half a decade working at Southeast Missouri State University.
At Monday’s town hall, Rogers-Adkinson mentioned hearing about MSU while recruiting for SEMO.
“Every time I was asking a student ‘Where are you looking [beside]us?’Nine times out of 10, if they were going to name another institution, they said Murray State,” Rogers-Adkinson said.
Rogers-Adkinson then took on the role of Provost and Senior Vice President of Academic Affairs at Bloomsburg University in 2019, and kept this title when Bloomsburg was merged with two other state universities in 2022 to become Commonwealth University of Pennsylvania. She held this position until assuming her current role last year.
During the town hall, Rogers-Adkinson highlighted her time working with rural universities and said she believes this experience would make her an asset to Murray State.
“I have to look at my own career, and I’ve primarily always been at a regional rural comprehensive institution, and what I know about regional rural institutions is we are the heart and soul of higher education right now,” Rogers-Adkinson said. “We produce more educators, more nurses, more students for the average everyday workforce for our states.”
According to her Curriculum Vitae, Rogers-Adkinson has developed and implemented several programs that have aided student enrollment and retention.
At the town hall meeting, she also addressed several questions regarding affordability in higher education, noting the importance of the university presidential role.
“Looking at all of the aspects of maintaining affordability,” Rogers-Adkinson said. “Part of that is, you know, through the president’s role in fundraising… try[ing] to continue to grow the number of scholarships that help support students in opportunities”
Two more town hall meetings featuring MSU presidential finalists will be held within the upcoming days, including one on Thursday afternoon with finalist Ron K. Patterson. Murray State’s board of regents is expected to make a hiring decision before the start of the next academic year.
