Board Member
Board of Trustees
Yale University
Doctor of Philosophy
Yale Law School
Master in the Study of Law
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England
Bachelor of Arts (Hon.)
Dartmouth College
Bachelor of Arts, Philosophy
R. Owen Williams, past president of the Associated Colleges of the South, previously served as president of Transylvania University. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Dartmouth College and a Master of Arts in intellectual history at the University of Cambridge. In 1999, after a twenty-four-year career in finance at Salomon Brothers, Goldman Sachs, and First Union Bank, Williams returned to academic pursuits at Yale University and Yale Law School, where he earned a doctorate in American History and a Master of Studies in Law. Williams was awarded the Raoul Berger Fellowship at Harvard Law School, the Samuel Golieb Fellowship at the New York University School of Law, the Fletcher Jones Fellowship at the Huntington Library, the Legal History Fellowship at Yale Law School, and the Cassius Marcellus Clay Postdoctoral Fellowship in history at Yale. He edited The Encyclopedia of Antislavery and Abolition (Greenwood Press), was an articles editor for the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, and has published in several books, magazines, journals, and encyclopedias. Williams served as vice-chair of the Board of Governors at Gratz College, the oldest Jewish college in America, and is currently on the advisory board at Cambridge University in England.
Morehouse is among the most important institutions in America and it is an enormous honor to have been asked to join the board.
There are so many inspiring people associated with the college–faculty, staff, and alumni–so many of whom have impressed me greatly. I look forward to getting to know more of of the Morehouse community in the coming years.
While I expect to learn more than I contribute, I hope that my experience as a past college president will prove useful. I also hope and assume that my many years of fundraising will also be of value to the college.
My wife and I have an extensive library of wonderful books, none of which mean more to me than my signed copy of Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom. (It was also signed by the preeminent slavery scholar, David Brion Davis, who gave me the book.) As to movies, I have seen so so many, but I especially like Money Ball (we watch a lot of documentaries, of which there are too many to name).