Jackson Free Press

Carmen J. Walters became the 14th president of Tougaloo College on July 1. Tougaloo College Board of Trustees Chairman Wesley F. Prater named her to the position on March 18, 2019. She is the second female president of Tougaloo after her predecessor, Beverly Wade Hogan, who held the position since 2002.

Walters previously served as executive vice president of enrollment management, student success and institutional relations at Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College in Perkinston from 2013 to 2019. She also worked at Delgado Community College in New Orleans for 18 years, where she served as assistant vice chancellor of human resources, executive assistant to the chancellor, and assistant to the vice chancellor for academic and student affairs. Walters also previously worked as an instructor for Jefferson Parish Department of Employment and Training in Louisiana and as a high-school teacher in New Orleans.

She received a bachelor's degree in accounting and business administration from Southern University in Louisiana in 1984, a master's in postsecondary counseling from Xavier College in New Orleans in 1990 and her PhD in community-college leadership from Mississippi State University in 2009.

Walters is a board member with Mississippi Women in Higher Education, Mississippi Girl Scouts of Greater Mississippi, the United Way for Jackson & George Counties, the National Congress of Black Women and Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. She is also a member of the Jackson County Chamber of Commerce and the National Council on Black American Affairs.

USM and University of Indiana Partner for School Ground-Breaking in Africa

The University of Southern Mississippi's College Panhellenic Council, which comprises eight on-campus sororities that are members of the National Panhellenic Council, partnered with the University of Indiana to organize a trip to Malawi, Africa, to conduct a ground-breaking for a new school there.

Malawi is located in southeast Africa and has a population of around 18 million. The country is one of the world's least-developed countries, USM's release says, with roughly 85% of the population living in rural areas.

USM and UI began raising funds for the project through the Circle of Sisterhood, a nonprofit sorority organization that promotes education for women and girls in impoverished nations, in 2016.

Megan Wilkinson, assistant director of fraternity and sorority life at USM, and four USM students joined students from UI to hold the ground-breaking in Kasiya Village in Malawi on May 23, 2019. The students also joined laborers from Malawi to assist with initial construction work on the building for two weeks.

The school will house students in grades one through eight. A release from USM states that construction should be finished within another six months.