Fernández, Ricardo (1940-)

Ricardo R. Fernández is president of Lehman College, a 4-year public liberal arts college located in the Bronx. Lehman is part of the City University of New York, the nation's largest urban university. Before assuming this position (on September 1, 1990), he was affiliated with the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee from 1970 to 1990, where he served as assistant vice chancellor for academic affairs (1988–90) and professor of educational policy and community studies.

Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Fernández received a bachelor's degree in philosophy and a master's degree in Spanish literature from Marquette University, as well as an MA and PhD in romance languages and literatures from Princeton University. He also attended the Harvard Institute for Educational Management in 1992, and was an American Council on Education Fellow in Academic Administration in 1981 to 1982 and a senior fellow of the U.S.-Mexico Solidarity Foundation in 1996. This entry describes Fernandez's career and contributions to education.

Fernández began his career at Marquette University in 1968 as an instructor and became an assistant professor of Spanish in 1970. In his first administrative appointment at the University of Wisconsin, Fernández was director of its Spanish Speaking Outreach Institute from 1970 to 1971. He later directed the Midwest [Page 299]National Origin Desegregation Assistance Center from 1977 to 1987, which was responsible for helping districts in 10 midwestern states to implement education plans to serve English language learners. From 1976 to 1977, he was coordinator of the Governor's Council on Hispanic Affairs (on partial leave from UW-Milwaukee) in the Wisconsin Department of Industry, Labor and Human Relations. From 1986 to 1987, he was a research fellow at the National Center for Effective Secondary Schools at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he worked on a book about at-risk students.

During more than three and a half decades in education, Fernández has focused on ways to improve educational outcomes, especially the preparation and encouragement of minority students to graduate from high school and to enter and succeed in college. His books, articles, and research reports deal with the causes of Hispanic school dropout, the desegregation of Hispanic students in the nation's public schools, and bilingual education policy. At Lehman, he has fostered extensive collaboration between the college and local schools in such areas as technology, the arts, professional development, and curriculum development and enrichment. Building on community resources, the college developed a multilingual journalism department that publishes a newspaper in several languages, which is available to the college community and to schools in the area. During his tenure, the college has steadily increased the level of its grant-funded research and the variety and reach of its programs, while becoming a major resource for the borough's economic, cultural, and educational development.

Fernández has been recognized nationally for his leadership. He is past president of the National Association for Bilingual Education, and past chair of the Board of the American Association of Higher Education, the Governing Board of the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU), and the Hispanic Educational Telecommunication System (HETS), an international distance education consortium of colleges and universities. In 2006, he was elected vice chair of the board of directors of the American Council on Education (ACE). In 2006, he joined the boards of directors of the Intercultural Development Research Association in Texas and the Multicultural Education Training and Advocacy (META), which has offices in California and Massachusetts. Other positions include serving on the New York State Commissioner of Education's Advisory Council on Higher Education, the New York-based National Hispanic Business Group's Advisory Board, and the Frito-Lay (North America) Latino/Hispanic Advisory Board. In addition, Fernández has given expert testimony in support of the Minority-Serving Institution Digital and Wireless Network Technology Opportunity Act of 2003 in Washington DC.

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