John W. Garland, Esq.

Central State University President John W. Garland embodies the spirit and 122-year legacy of the institution he leads. When he became the University's seventh president in 1997, he had already battled heavy odds to forge a successful career in higher education and the law. When he accepted the presidency of his alma mater, he returned to serve a campus that had nurtured him as a young man returning from war.

After dropping out of high school to work full time, Mr. Garland enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1962, at age seventeen. He served on a troopship off the coast of Cuba during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and also during the1964 military action in Panama. He saw combat duty in South Vietnam with the 3rd Battalion, 9th Marines, and was awarded the Purple Heart for wounds he sustained while serving as an infantry squad leader.

Mr. Garland was honorably discharged in 1967, returned to his hometown of New York City, and earned a high school equivalency diploma. He entered Central State University in 1968 and graduated in three years, in 1971, with a bachelor of arts degree in political science. He was admitted into the Ohio State University School of Law, graduating in 1974, and was admitted into the Bar of the State of Ohio that same year.

Mr. Garland was the Founding Director in 1979 of the Legal Services of the Coastal Plains, which provides legal representation to low-income persons in rural northeastern North Carolina. Under his direction this program represented and assisted African-American farmers and developed creative solutions to stem the loss of black-owned lands.

Mr. Garland also organized the legal teams that provided pro bono representation to the people arrested for protesting apartheid at the South African Embassy in Washington, D.C. For this he received a distinguished service award, in 1987, from TransAfrica. In addition, he directed a project that provided representation to veterans who had received less than honorable military discharges.

In 1988, Mr. Garland began his career in higher education, accepting an appointment as general counsel to the University of the District of Columbia, where he also taught in the Criminal Justice Department. In October of 1991, he was named associate general counsel and special assistant attorney general for the University of Virginia. In 1993, he became executive assistant to the president of the University of Virginia, and in 1996, he was named the university?s Associate Vice Provost for Intellectual Property. While at the University of Virginia, he also taught in the Department of Government and Foreign Affairs and served on numerous university committees and task forces.

Since accepting the Central State University presidency, Mr. Garland has led a successful effort to restore financial and operational stability. Enrollment has grown significantly under his leadership, the University has established strong cooperative relationships with its sister institutions in Ohio, and it has won pledges of support from Ohio's political and educational leadership.

He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2006 Joseph Cinque Award, presented by Black Law Students Association at the University of Dayton, and the 2004 Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund Educational Leadership Award. He was inducted into the Central State University Achievement Hall of Fame in 2004 and was named Alumnus of the Year in 2001 by the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. The Parity 2000 program named him one of the Top Ten African-American Males in the Miami Valley in 1998, and in 1997, the Ohio State University College of Law presented him with its Alumni Certificate of Achievement. He was also named Father of the Year by the District of Columbia Federation of Civic Associations.

Mr. Garland is married to Carolyn Farrow-Garland, a 1970 Central State graduate, and they have two children, Amy of Washington, D.C., and Jabari of New York City.