Guilford to Inaugurate Kent John Chabotar

Guilford College will inaugurate Kent John Chabotar as its eighth president April 11 in Ragan-Brown Field House on campus. More than 1,000 invited individuals are expected to attend the afternoon event.

Chabotar was appointed Guilford's president and a professor of political science July 1, 2002. He was vice president of finance and administration and treasurer at Bowdoin College in Maine from 1991-2002 and has had a 30-year career as a higher education administrator and faculty member.

Inauguration attendees are expected to include delegates from approximately 90 higher education institutions nationally, alumni and other friends of the college and current faculty, staff and students. Guilford's two living former presidents, William R. Rogers and Donald W. McNemar, will attend.

Joseph M. Bryan Jr., a civic leader and college trustee, will preside over the 90-minute ceremony. Associate Academic Dean James W. Hood, senior Tanisha Layne and Greensboro Mayor Keith Holliday will deliver greetings to the new president. Bryan, Hood and Holliday are alumni in the classes of 1960, 1979 and 1975, respectively.

McNemar will transfer the college charter to Chabotar. The former president, who served from 1996-2002, is now teaching international studies at Bentley College in Massachusetts. Bryan will perform the presentation and investiture and Chabotar will then deliver an inaugural address entitled "Pride and Promise," in which he plans to speak to the heritage and the future of the 166-year-old institution founded by the Religious Society of Friends.

Others participating in the ceremony include Max Carter, Guilford's coordinator of campus ministry, who will deliver the invocation, and Rev. John Frambes of the Catholic Student Fellowship at UNCG, who will deliver the benediction.

The Guilford College choir will perform three selections: Festival Introit by Greg Knauf, Let Justice and Judgement by George Frederic Handel, and The Lord Bless You and Keep You by Peter C. Lutkin. The choir will also lead a singing of the alma mater. The Quaker Brass, an ensemble of faculty and student musicians, will perform during the processional and recessional and accompany the choir on the Knauf and Handel selections. The processional will be led by student flag-bearers representing 34 countries and the United States.

Chabotar, a New York City native, has held teaching positions at Michigan State University, the University of Massachusetts at Boston, the Harvard University Graduate School of Education and Bowdoin as well as the Harvard Institutes for Higher Education and the Getty

Leadership Institute on Museum Management at the University of California at Berkeley.

He graduated magna cum laude from Saint Francis University in Loretto, Pa., in 1968 with a bachelor of arts degree in political science. He earned a master of public administration degree and doctor of philosophy degree in public administration from Syracuse University in 1969 and 1973, respectively.

April 11, 2003