The Massachusetts Board of Higher Education on Tuesday made it official, approving Frederick W. Clark Jr., ’83, as the next president of Bridgewater State University.
Mr. Clark had previously been unanimously selected by the Board of Trustees to become the institution's 12th president.
“I am pleased to have an opportunity to work with President Mohler-Faria over the next several months to complete his ambitious agenda for the university,” Mr. Clark said after the trustees selected him. “I am also looking forward to highlighting and celebrating President Mohler-Faria's remarkable contributions to the development of BSU as a leader in public higher education in Massachusetts and beyond.”
A lawyer by profession, and a 1986 graduate of Suffolk University School of Law, Mr. Clark had served for a decade as executive officer of the Massachusetts State Universities’ Council of Presidents, where he represented the commonwealth’s nine state universities in governmental, legislative and public policy issues.
He has been on public higher education governing boards as well, most recently with the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education (2007-2008) and, prior to his career in public higher education, on the BSU Board of Trustees and the Bridgewater State University Foundation.
For two decades, he was chief aid to the late Congressman John Joseph Moakley and since 2001 he has presided over the Moakley Charitable Foundation, which has allocated $2 million to assist public service-oriented scholarship recipients who seek to pursue education beyond high school.
Mr. Clark will succeed Dr. Dana Mohler-Faria, who has served as Bridgewater’s president since 2002. President Mohler-Faria will retire next June 30.
Mr. Clark will begin his presidency during the institution’s 175th anniversary year and following more than a quarter century of historic growth, during which he has played a direct role as either COP executive or in a leadership role on one of the university’s governing boards, or as a member of the president’s cabinet.
Like Mr. Clark himself, more than half of Bridgewater’s undergraduate student body represents the first members of their families to go to college. Of the six children in his family, five attended Bridgewater and it was at Bridgewater where Mr. Clark met his wife, Carrie M. Kulick, who would go on to become president of the Alumni Association. Their sons have also attended Bridgewater.
