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Westchester Community College President Belinda S. Miles, center, was joined by H. Carl McCall, chairman of the State University of New York Board of Trustees, and SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher at an Oct. 2 inauguration ceremony on the WCC campus in Valhalla.
Her formal investiture in the office came nine months after Miles, the former provost of Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland, started work as the third president of WCC in the two-year college”™s 69-year history.
Hundreds of family members and past and present colleagues and academic mentors of Miles attended the inauguration ceremony.
Raised in Queens, she earned a bachelor”™s degree in political science at York College of the City University of New York and received master”™s and doctoral degrees from Columbia University Teachers College.
“Belinda has been preparing to be an extraordinary president for decades,” said Sharon McDade, a former emerging leaders program director at the American Council on Education and Miles”™s doctoral dissertation adviser at Columbia Teachers College.
“While you chose her” as president, “she also chose you,” Jerry Sue Thornton, president emeritus of Cleveland”™s Cuyahoga Community College, said. “You are fortunate, Westchester.”
Zimpher, the SUNY chancellor who conferred on Miles the medallion worn by SUNY college presidents, said of her selection to succeed Joseph Hankin, who retired in 2013 after 42 years in the office, “I think we would all agree you got it right.”
David Swope, chairman of the Westchester Community College Board of Trustees, said Miles”™s inauguration as the college”™s third president was accompanied by “tremendous anticipation” of what she will achieve.
“We are at a critical juncture at community colleges around the country,” Swope said. Led by Miles, he said WCC is expected to become “a national leader of the community college movement.”
Miles in her inaugural address outlined early achievements in her first year on the Valhalla campus and said the college has embarked on “a new era of service and success” and “a transformation” that draws on the legacy of the school while looking to the future.
“Affordability must continue to be a hallmark of community college education,” said Miles, noting WCC achieved a balanced budget this year with no tuition increase.
The college also must meet the changing needs of its diverse students and train them in the job skills needed by their future employers and the college”™s corporate partners in the Westchester community, she said.
Miles surveyed an auditorium filled with her family members, friends and colleagues, about 20 of whom traveled from Cleveland for the ceremony.
“This is just a wow moment,” she said.
