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President Emeritus Hall

President Emeritus Timothy L. Hall

President Emeritus Timothy L. Hall

Timothy L. Hall served as the 12th president of Mercy University from May 2014 through June 2023 and is lauded for enhancing the legacy of Mercy and for his steadfast leadership through the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic. 

President Hall’s tenure can be characterized by his razor-sharp focus on equitable student success and initiatives focused on securing the College’s long-term relevance in the rapidly changing higher education landscape.

A hallmark of Hall’s presidency was the tremendous improvement in student outcomes; during this period, the College’s retention and graduation rates for students of all backgrounds – and particularly students of color – leaped to historic levels. The cornerstone of this success was the Mercy Success Toolkit.  The Toolkit is shorthand for the way he motivated and organized faculty and staff to regard students as the center of the institution and to focus resources to implement a set of student-focused practices proven to increase student success, such as risk-based proactive advising, co-requisite course redesign, creating a sense of belonging, and a career-focused curriculum. Further, Hall was instrumental in establishing several programs focused on lessening the financial stress faced by many of Mercy’s students including the Mav Market and Student Emergency Fund. Along with several lead donors, he established the Mercy Scholars Program to enable high-achieving students to graduate with little to no debt. In recognition of this progress, the College was recognized in 2022 with the Seal of Excelencia by the organization Excelencia in Education.

Hall’s tenure is cemented by his tireless efforts of service to the College in maintaining its financial stability and guiding the College to adapt to a changing landscape in the region and sector. Several core initiatives exemplify this work: Hall oversaw the prodigious growth of the College’s nursing programs and the establishment of the School of Nursing. He oversaw an expansion and complete renovation of the Manhattan Campus, including the opening of a new dorm in Herald Square. He launched the Division of Workforce Credentialing and Community Impact to expand the College’s reach in the local community and relevance to an adult market. He solidified an agreement with the College of New Rochelle to teach-out 1,800 students and maintain the legacy of its over 50,000 alumni. 
  
As president, Hall was recognized by numerous external organizations for his leadership of the College: City & State Magazine (Power 100 List for Westchester and New York City), Nonprofit Westchester (Individual Changemaker Award), The Latino Center on Aging (Effective Leadership Award) and Education Update (Distinguished Leader Award). President Hall and his wife, Lee Nicholson Hall, received the Lifetime Achievement Award from Mercy University at the 2023 Annual Trustees’ Scholarship Gala. 

Prior to Mercy, Hall served for seven years as president of Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee, as a law school professor from 1989 to 2002 and then associate provost from 2002 to 2007 at the University of Mississippi, as a trial attorney in Austin, Texas from 1984 to 1989, and as a judicial clerk for the Honorable William Garwood of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals immediately after his graduation from law school in 1983.

Hall received a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from the University of Houston, completed graduate work in religious studies at Rice University, and received his juris doctorate from the University of Texas Law School.

In recognition of his leadership and outstanding service to the College, the Mercy University Board of Trustees conferred upon President Hall the title President Emeritus, effective upon his retirement on July 1, 2023. 
 

Tim Hall Timeline

President Hall

A Timeline of Events and Accomplishments

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Resolution of the Board Of Trustees Of Mercy University to Confer the Title President Emeritus, Mercy University to Timothy L. Hall

Office of the President Video Highlights

Presidential Publications

The President's Bookshelf

Becoming Michelle Obama

Latest Review:

“Becoming” by Michelle Obama

I read next to no memoirs but am very happy to have read “Becoming,” by Michelle Obama. Though the book chronicles the former first lady’s life through her time in the White House with President Obama, I probably enjoyed most the parts of the book detailing her life before the White House: her life as a brilliant student from a working class family in Chicago, her time as an undergraduate and later a law student at Ivy League universities, her meeting Barack Obama as a young lawyer charged with mentoring Barack, then a summer law clerk at Michelle’s law firm, their eventual marriage, her juggling the responsibilities of a career, and as a wife and mother, as Barack became first a state legislator, then a U.S. senator, and finally the President of the United States. Especially toward the end, the book is not simply a personal but a political memoir. Republicans during her husband’s presidential administration earn few gracious remarks; the current president is an object of outright scorn, including a terse note that during Trump’s inauguration Michelle Obama eventually stopped even trying to smile. Overall, the book is an important window into the lives of President and First Lady Obama: beautifully written, wonderfully transparent, and imminently readable.

Read President Hall's reviews of favorite books at Goodreads goodreads.com/author/show/527260.Timothy_L_Hall

Past Book Reviews

I like Brené Brown a lot.  Her latest book, “Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts” gathers together themes from her previous works and packages them for a corporate audience.  This is a kind of sellout for some of her readers, but for me it is a helpful addition to the tons of books about corporate leadership and culture.  Understanding ourselves and our emotions is at the center of what it means to be human for Brené Brown and being vulnerable is a core characteristic of relating to others in any context, including corporate organizations.  This book focuses on vulnerability as a leader, the importance of clarifying one’s own personal values, building trust within the community you lead, and finally rising from and overcoming failure.  What I like most about the book is its confident conviction that leadership is not solely a matter of the head, but of the heart.

Michael Lewis is another of the authors I regularly read.  “The Fifth Risk” is his hymn to the beneficial powers of government, especially the federal government.  It is a rebuke of Trump-style anti-government sentiment.  Lewis gives detailed examples of government programs and processes that address some of the larger problems of our national life, problems incapable of being sufficiently addressed by local action.  The weakness of his one-sided account is that it doesn’t turn the power of his journalism to the cases where large-scale government action can weaken the bonds of civil society or the cases where more localized solutions to public issues, such as state actions embraced by the principle of federalism, out to be preferred.  But for our particular political moment, this is an important book.

I read “Delivering Happiness” in preparation for a visit I made to Zappos, the online shoe company, toward the end of 2018. I traveled with a number of other college presidents interested in discovering what we might learn from such a company about service to our students. We weren’t interested in studying this kind of service because we thought of our students as “customers.” The tendency to think of every one in every context as a “customer” is one of the unsavory consequences of the “consumerification” of society. It will be a sad state of affairs if it ever happens that the only vibrant notions of service we can come by are those requiring the exchange of money. Colleges have a special word to describe the objects of their service: we call them “students.” Unlike customers, they aren’t always right, but they deserve the best that we can offer them in terms of service. Inadequate service to our students can derail their higher education dreams. Tony Hsieh’s emphasis is on the kind of culture which produces extraordinary service, a culture I was able to witness first hand when I visited Zappos. For example, after new employees at Zappos finish their orientation period at the company, a period in which they learn the core values the company stands for, they are offered the chance to walk away from their jobs with a $2,000 check. Such is the company’s focus on building a community of people who share its values. Tony also described how customer service calls at Zappos are not viewed as irritations to be disposed of quickly, but opportunities to expand the company’s relationship with a particular caller through delivering extraordinary service to its callers. The first half of the book is interesting, in that it describes Tony Hsieh’s journey on the way to becoming the CEO of Zappos.  For readers in a hurry to discover what makes Zappos successful, though, I recommend jumping immediately to the second half of the book.

One of my favorite books I read in 2018 was "Educated" which tells the story of a young woman from a dysfunctional family overwhelmed by mental illness, who first sets foot in a classroom at the age of 17. She eventually goes on to earn a doctorate from Cambridge University. Her journey of learning is full of moments from which I wanted to look away but which celebrated the power of education to transform a human life. I know of no more powerful demonstration that life is more than just living, but learning.