James C. Garland
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- This article is about the president of Miami University. For the congressman and lawyer, see James Garland.
James Garland was the 20th President of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. His tenure in that position started in 1996 and concluded June 30th, 2006. His discipline is physics. He lives with his wife, Carole, and has two children, Elizabeth and James. Known as a meticulous administrator during his tenure at Miami, Garland was well liked by alumni. Because of his commitment to scholarship and high standards for tenure, he was respected by many of the campus' top professors. However, he was sometimes criticized by undergraduate students for not engaging enough with them. In his first year, he oversaw the change of the Miami team name from Redskins to Redhawks, a controversial move that angered some alumni, overjoyed others, and earned him a reputation for decisiveness.
His main program is "First in 2009," which aims to make Miami University the best in its class of higher education institutions by the year 2009, the university's bicentennial. This program consists of eight points, the principals of which are raising the intellectual environment of the campus and a commitment to quantitative benchmarking and best practices. He also instituted a new tuition plan that made in-state and out-of-state tuition the same, but gave residents automatic scholarships and scholarships based primarily on need. He led Miami University to be the first public university in Ohio to have domestic-partner benefits, in the summer of 2004, and in that year, he publicly opposed Ohio's Issue 1, an amendment to the state Constitution that barred same-sex domestic unions of any sort, as well as rights and privileges related to them. During his tenure, the university embarked on the largest capital improvement and construction program in its history, the endowment was doubled, and applications increased by sixty percent.
On August 19th 2005, Garland announced that he would be retiring in the summer of 2006, after 10 years as president of the institution. Garland now resides in Santa Fe, NM.
