Dr. John Lombardi - Convocation Speaker
John Vincent Paul Maher Lombardi, PhD is the fifth President of the Louisiana State University System, serving since 2007. As President of the LSU System, Dr. Lombardi serves as the Chief Executive officer of the five campuses, eleven institutions and ten hospitals within the system. He also holds an appointment as a history professor at Louisiana State University. Dr. Lombardi was formerly the Chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, serving from 2002 to 2007. Dr. Lombardi served as the ninth President of the University of Florida located in Gainesville, Florida, from 1990 to 1999. He was barely settled in his job at the beginning of the fall 1990 semester when Dr. Lombardi was confronted by one of the most serious crises in the University’s history: the horrific murders of five students by serial killer Danny Rollings. He is remembered as both comforter-in-chief and as a “student’s president” during his term as President. As part of his athletics reform agenda, Dr. Lombardi created the Committee on Intercollegiate Athletics, which ultimately removed responsibility for student-athlete academics from the control of the University Athletic Association (UAA) and placed it under the control of the committee.
Dr. Lombardi taught in the history department at Indiana University, first at the Jeffersonville, Indiana, branch campus and then at the main campus in Bloomington, Indiana, from 1967 through 1987. At Indiana, he held various administrative posts, including Director of Latin American studies, Dean of International Programs, and Dean of Arts and Sciences. He served as the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, from 1987 through 1990. As the Provost of Johns Hopkins, Dr. Lombardi played a key role in fund-raising and in resolving a financial crisis in which the University was then embroiled.
Dr. Lombardi is a specialist in Latin American history, and has a particular interest in Venezuela. He has written numerous journal articles and several books on Venezuela and Latin American history and affairs, as well as on many university administration-related subjects. He is a nationally recognized authority on American higher education, and has been the co-editor of the annual editions of The Top American Research Universities from 2000 to the present. In addition to Latin American history classes, he has taught courses on intercollegiate sports, international business and university management.
Dr. Lombardi earned his bachelor of arts degree from Pomona College in Claremont, California, in 1963, and his master of arts and doctorate degrees from Columbia University in New York City in 1964 and 1968, respectively. He also attended the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City, where he learned Spanish while living with a Mexican family, as an undergraduate and the University of California, Los Angeles for graduate school. While he was a graduate student, Dr. Lombardi spent several years living and researching in Venezuela as a Fulbright Scholar.
