Heritage & History
- Charles W. Merideth
- 1990-1996
Dr. Charles W. Merideth was named the president of New York City Technical College in 1990. Before coming to City Tech, he served as chancellor of the Atlanta University Center for 11 years. Previously, he served as the center’s provost and as director of its Institute of Technology dual degree programs in engineering.
After graduating magna cum laude from Morehouse College with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and mathematics and with the college’s all-time batting average of .463, Merideth turned down major league baseball contracts from the Dodgers, Pirates and Indians to spend the summer as a research scientist at the Lockheed Georgia Company in Atlanta. He went on to the University of California/Berkeley to receive a PhD in physical chemistry in 1965 and was a post-doctoral Fellow at the University of Illinois. He attended the Institute for Educational Management at Harvard, the NATO School on Electronic Spin Relaxation in Norway and also held professional appointments at both Morehouse and Berkeley.
Merideth served on President Jimmy Carter’s Science Advisory Committee on the Salt II Treaty with the Soviet Union, was a member of the Educational Committee of the Committee on Minorities in Engineering of the National Academy of Engineering and chair of the Article VIII, Education Sub-Committee of the Committee to Rewrite the Georgia Constitution. He served as a science consultant to the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and was a member of the Advisory Committee to the Education/Human Resources Directorate of the National Science Foundation.
At City Tech, Merideth institutionalized long-term strategic planning, implemented a comprehensive audit of the entire portfolio of the College’s academic programs, increased the number of baccalaureate programs from three to seven and launched efforts to develop five more. Representing the University, he worked closely with the New York City Board of Education to obtain a five-year, $15 million National Science Foundation Urban Systemic Initiative grant to reform mathematics, science and technology curricula throughout the city’s K-12 public education system.
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