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Paul Quinn College President Named Among ‘World’s 50 Greatest Leaders’

The head of the historically black college in southern Dallas is among good company on a Fortune list that also includes Oprah Winfrey and Nick Saban.
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Michael Sorrell, president of Paul Quinn College in southern Dallas, today got a pretty swell accolade from Fortune magazine, which named him one of the “world’s 50 greatest leaders.” The magazine commends Sorrell, who has led the historically black college since 2007, for “giving Paul Quinn a bigger vision of itself.”

In 2007, when Sorrell started as president of Paul Quinn, a historically black college in Dallas, the institution was on the brink of being shut down. Founded in 1872 at the height of Reconstruction, the school was losing students, and the campus, which housed 15 abandoned buildings, was “closer to a garbage dump than a grocery store,” Sorrell says.

Sorrell quickly set about challenging perceptions, both external and internal, by giving Paul Quinn a bigger vision of itself. Under his leadership, the football field was turned into a farm. He solicited the school’s first-ever seven-figure gift from a donor and used it to raze that campus blight, and he emphasized the recruitment of students from out of state to expand what’s now a 500-plus-member student body.

He also took aim at problems that ail all of higher education—the cost, and the disconnect with what comes after. Paul Quinn is now a federally recognized work college; students get jobs with area companies, helping them to pay tuition and prepare for life postgraduation. Sorrell, who calls this the “new urban college model,” now plans to open Paul Quinn campuses nationwide.

Sorrell’s among good company on the Fortune list, which also names Oprah Winfrey, Nick Saban, and the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

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