P. George Benson is the 21st president of the College of Charleston. He became president on February 1, 2007.

A native of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, President Benson received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Bucknell University in 1968, did graduate work in operations research in the engineering school of New York University, and received a Ph.D. in decision sciences from the University of Florida in 1977.

From 1998 to 2007, he was the dean of the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia. From 1993 to 1998, he served as the dean of the Rutgers Business School at Rutgers University. In 1996, Business News New Jersey named Benson one of the “Top 100 Business People in New Jersey.” From 1977 to 1993, he was a faculty member in the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. Prior to that, he was a member of the technical staff at AT&T’s Bell Telephone Laboratories in Whippany, New Jersey. In his first job after college, President Benson worked for the U.S. Army Security Agency in Arlington, Virginia, as a management analyst.

In the late 1990s, President Benson served for three years as one of nine national judges for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. In 2004, he was appointed by the U.S. Secretary of Commerce to the Board of Overseers for the Baldrige Award, and in 2005 he was named Chairman of the Board of Overseers.

President Benson serves on the boards of directors of AGCO Corp., headquartered in Duluth, Georgia; Nutrition 21, Inc. of Purchase, New York; Crawford & Company of Atlanta, Georgia; SignalONE Safety, Inc. of Atlanta; and Athens First Bank & Trust Company of Athens, Georgia.

President Benson is co-author of one of the leading textbooks in business statistics. Prentice Hall published the ninth edition of this book in 2005. He has been a bimonthly columnist for Georgia Trend magazine for the past eight years.

President Benson and his wife, Jane, have three children.

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