Biography

P. George Benson is the 21st president of the College of Charleston. He became president on February 1, 2007.

President Benson came to the College of Charleston from his position as dean of the University of Georgia's C. Herman and Mary Virginia Terry College of Business, a post he assumed on July 1, 1998. Prior to that, he served for five years as dean of the Rutgers Business School at Rutgers University. From 1977 to 1993, he was a faculty member in the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota.

At Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, he was dean of the Graduate School of Management, the School of Management at Newark, and the School of Business at New Brunswick. He led the merger of these schools in 1996. He established executive MBA programs in Beijing and Singapore; and started off-campus, part-time MBA programs, including one in partnership with Merrill Lynch at their corporate campus near Princeton, N.J. In 1996, Business News New Jersey named President Benson one of the "Top 100 Business People in New Jersey."

In 1997, President Benson was appointed by U.S. Secretary of Commerce Mickey Kantor to a three-year term as one of nine national judges for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. In 2004, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans appointed President Benson to a three-year term on the Board of Overseers for the Baldrige Award. In April 2005, Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez appointed him to a two-year term as Chairman of the Board of Overseers. The Board of Overseers advises the director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the U.S. Secretary of Commerce on the conduct of the Baldrige Award program and on how well it is serving the nation. In 2007, President Benson was appointed to the Board of Directors of The Foundation for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award.

In 2000, he was named a Fellow of the Decision Sciences Institute, the institute's highest honor.

President Benson serves on the boards of directors of AGCO Corporation (Duluth, Ga.), Nutrition 21, Inc. (Purchase, N.Y.), Crawford & Company (Atlanta, Ga.), and the National Bank of South Carolina (Columbia, S.C.).

At the University of Minnesota, he taught statistics, quality management, and decision analysis, and from 1983 to 1988 was head of the Decision Sciences Area.

In 1992, he became director of the Operations Management Center. Prior to joining the faculty at Minnesota, he was a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T's Bell Telephone Laboratories, Whippany, N.J., working in the area of information systems. He also worked for the U.S. Army Security Agency, Arlington, Va., as a management analyst in the area of personnel planning.

President Benson received a bachelor of science degree in mathematics from Bucknell University, did graduate work in operations research in the engineering school at New York University, and received a doctorate in decision sciences from the University of Florida.

His research interests include quality management, strategic management, belief formation, and judgmental forecasting. He has consulted nationally in the areas of applied statistics, quality management, and employment discrimination. For many years, he was active in the national initiative to improve the teaching of statistical thinking and quality management in schools of business.

President Benson is co-author of one of the leading textbooks in business statistics, Statistics for Business and Economics. The 10th edition was published by Pearson Prentice Hall in 2008.

President Benson's research spans several fields including decision analysis, operations management, statistics, finance, and economics. His work has been published in many academic and professional journals including: Management Science, Decision Sciences, The Journal of Quality Technology, The Journal of Production and Inventory Control, The American Statistician, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, The Journal of Forecasting, The International Journal of Forecasting, The Journal of Finance, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, and The Journal of Behavioral Decision Making.

At the University of Georgia, President Benson led the establishment of a customized MBA program for IBM Business Consulting Services. The students are full-time consultants living in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico; the program is delivered face-to-face in Athens, Georgia, and using distance technology. He also initiated an evening MBA program at the Gwinnett University Center in Metro Atlanta; an Evening MBA program for the U.S. Department of Energy at the Savannah River Site, Aiken, S.C.; an Executive MBA program in Atlanta; and a music business program in concert with the Hodgson School of Music on the Athens campus. In 2000, he established a highly successful monthly breakfast speaker series in Atlanta known as Terry Third Thursday.

President Benson led the establishment of two new research centers: the Institute for Leadership Advancement and the Center for Information Systems Leadership.

He also fostered the development of several innovative executive education programs including a nationally accredited Directors' College for current and prospective corporate directors and a quarterly roundtable for Chief Financial Officers.

President Benson and his development staff raised over $40 million for the Terry College.

In May 2005, the Terry College opened a 28,000 square foot executive education center in the Buckhead section of Atlanta. It is the home for the Executive MBA program, the Directors' College, Terry Third Thursday, an evening MBA program, and several executive programs. President Benson led the planning, acquisition, design, and development of the center.

Terry's MBA and undergraduate programs are consistently ranked among the top 20 public programs in the U.S. For research productivity, Terry's faculty recently climbed from 20th to 16th among public business schools (Academy of Management Journal).

President Benson was a bimonthly columnist for Georgia Trend, a statewide business and politics magazine from 1998 - 2006.

At the College of Charleston, President Benson is building and strengthening relationships with individuals, groups, local and state governments, and businesses to increase academic collaboration, community engagement, and entrepreneurial activities. He has launched several initiatives designed to improve the College's current operations and future development. These include reorganizing and streamlining the reporting structure of the senior administrative leadership, instituting a new budgeting system, rebuilding the College's Institutional Advancement Division, creating a Legal Affairs Office, and strengthening the Governmental Affairs Office. In addition, he instituted a new merit review system for evaluating and rewarding faculty. Most notably, he initiated a comprehensive strategic planning process involving faculty, staff and students, along with alumni, friends, and other important constituents across the state and the nation. The plan articulates the College's purpose, vision, core values, and future priorities. The College's Board of Trustees approved the Strategic Plan in October 2009.

President Benson is a native of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and is married to Jane Oas Benson of Wayzata, Minnesota. They have three children, Jeff, Laura and Alison. Jeff and Laura are recent graduates of the University of Georgia, and Alison is a student at the College of Charleston.