Biography
In December 2023, after serving as the executive director of AASCU’s Millennium Leadership Initiative, John Silvanus Wilson, Jr. was named the managing director of the Open Leadership Program in collaboration with MIT, and chairman of The Open Leadership Council. This was a temporary return to MIT for him, as he launched his career in 1985 with a 16-year stay at MIT, mostly as a senior fundraising official in two major capital campaigns.
After leaving MIT in 2001, he became a professor and executive dean at the George Washington University. Next, he served in the first term under President Barack Obama as the executive director of the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities. He then served with distinction as the 11th President of Morehouse College, his Alma Mater.
More recently, after spending a year as president-in-residence at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, he began service in 2018 as senior advisor and strategist to Harvard Presidents Drew G. Faust and Larry S. Bacow. In 2021, as a visiting scholar at the Harvard Business School, he completed a book entitled Hope and Healing: Black Colleges and the Future of American Democracy, released by the Harvard Education Press in May 2023.
He has served on several boards, including Spelman College (2006–2009) and Harvard University (2015–2021). His current board memberships include the Citizen Service, Campus (chairman), and Liberation Ventures.
He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Morehouse College, a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard University, and both master’s and doctoral degrees in administration, planning and social policy from Harvard University.
Wilson’s primary research interests are an outgrowth of his longstanding diagnosis of American higher education’s congenital glaucoma. A defective optic nerve was predictable, given the industry’s toxic womb. The early campuses faced the morally distortive task of shaping “a learned ministry” for a budding nation already deeply invested in the scaled elimination, dispossession, and exploitation of othered human beings. Unsurprisingly, the system’s subsequent greatness has been more apparent than its goodness. Yet, if taken seriously, the persistent glaucoma remains treatable, and total blindness remains preventable.
To those ends, Wilson’s work and research explores what shifts higher education institutions can now make to finally repair its optic nerve. The frameworks he uses are best revealed by the key questions scaffolding much of his work. For instance, since higher education has become increasingly vocationalized, with an over-emphasis on horizontal development, what are the best ways to integrate an optimized version of vertical development? Can campuses known for capital preeminence now also commit themselves to a serious pursuit of measurable character preeminence? And in the context of online education, is it possible to be both high-tech and high-touch? Is it possible to enrich mindsets with “durable skills,” rather than with employment skills only? More generally, what does it mean to be a “high-definition institution,” or a “high-definition leader?”
Another remedial response to higher education’s defective vision is to ensure that all campuses have much more to do with the fate of America and the world. John Dewey was right when he wrote about democracy in 1916, and insisted that “it must be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.” Given the condition of American democracy today, higher education has yet to truly qualify, writ large, for a degree in midwifery. In fact, Wilson’s research has shown that only America’s historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have convincingly answered Dewey’s call, based on their aggressive, democracy-enhancing work in the middle of the last century. He is exploring the many ways in which today’s largely outcome-agnostic industry of American higher education has much to learn from the HBCU tradition.
Publications
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