William G. Durden is the President of Dickinson College. He was a Fulbright scholar and a recipient of the Klingenstein Fellowship from Teacher's College, Columbia University.
Durden completed high school at The Albany Academy in Albany, New York. He was one of the first generation in his family to attend college,[1] receiving a B.A. degree from Dickinson (class of 1971) and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in German Languages and Literature from Johns Hopkins University. While a student at Dickinson, he was a member of the Theta Chi fraternity.
Durden was the executive director of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth for 16 years and a member of the university's German Department. For 11 of his years at Hopkins, he was a senior education consultant for the U.S. Department of State and chair of its Advisory Committee on Exceptional Children and Youth. Dr. Durden has also served as President of the Sylvan Academy of Sylvan Learning Systems, Inc. and as Vice-President for Academic Affairs of the Caliber Learning Network, a joint distance-learning venture of Sylvan and MCI. He assumed the presidency at Dickinson on July 1, 1999.
Durden was a mentor for the American Council on Education Fellows Program, the premier higher education leadership development program in the USA. He was the mentor for 2004-2005 ACE Fellow Michael B. Brown (now Associate Dean of the Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences at East Carolina University). In 2007-08, Durden served as chairman of the Annapolis Group subcommittee working on proposing an alternative to the U.S. News and World Report rankings of colleges.
Recently, he was appointed chair of the Advisory Board of the Center for the International Exchange of Scholars, Fulbright Scholar Program.