Rodney Erickson
17th President of Pennsylvania State University
Rodney Allen Erickson (born 1946) is an American academic administrator who served as the 17th president of Pennsylvania State University from 2011 to 2014. Formerly executive vice president and provost (chief academic officer), he was named interim president of Penn State on November 9, 2011, after previous president Graham Spanier was forced to resign in the wake of the Penn State sex abuse scandal, after which the "interim" tag was removed later that month. The Food Science Building at Penn State, which houses the Berkey Creamery, is named after Erickson.
Education and career
Erickson graduated from the University of Minnesota, where he also earned his master's degree. He earned a Ph.D. in geography from the University of Washington in 1973. After a brief tenure at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he came to Penn State as an assistant professor of geography and business administration. He was promoted to full professor in 1984. He has been part of the Penn State administration since 1995, when he was promoted to dean of the graduate school; in 1997 he was named vice president for research. He was promoted to provost and executive vice president in July 1999.
When Erickson became interim president, initial plans called for him to stay on only until a permanent successor could be found.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rodney Erickson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.