August 15, 2008

Dr. Steve Thomas, Midland College’s fourth President, has assumed his new position. He will take the Oath of Office at the next MC Board Meeting, scheduled for 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday, August 19, 2008. Dr. Thomas succeeds Dr. David Daniel, who has served as MC’s President for the last 17 years.

After the Board voted unanimously on June 30 to hire Dr. Thomas, he voiced his enthusiasm in assuming the new role, “I am deeply honored to be coming back to Midland College. I will work very hard with you and for you as the new president. I know we are going to do great things,” he said.

Though Dr. Thomas has served as the President of Vernon College in Vernon, Texas since 2000, he is no stranger to MC, having served in several positions during the College’s early years. He came to MC in 1976 as a part-time faculty member in the Department of Behavioral Science, and was promoted to full-time faculty in 1979. He left in 1984 to serve for a little over a year as an Administrative Intern at Austin Community College, before returning to MC for two more years, from 1986 to 1987. His last position at Midland College was Assistant to the Dean of Community Services. Thomas left MC in 1987 and served three years as the Dean of Academic Affairs at Lexington Community College in Lexington, KY. In 1991, he accepted the position of Dean of Instructional Services at Victoria College in Victoria, TX, serving for nine years before his Presidential appointment at Vernon College in 2000, where he has served as President for the last eight years.

Thomas earned a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology/Psychology from (then) Southwest Texas State University in 1970 before obtaining his Master of Arts in Counseling from UTPB in 1975. He completed his Ph.D. in Education Administration from the University of Texas at Austin in 1986.

During his long career in higher education, Thomas has been a member of over a dozen educational organizations and is currently a member of the Texas Association of Community Colleges. He has served in academic leadership roles on 33 educational committees and 31 community committees and boards.

Thomas has received several honors during his career, with the most recent being that of Distinguished Alumnus from UTPB (2004), as well as the Distinguished Graduate Award from the College of Education at the University of Texas at Austin (2004).