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Voorhees Names New President to Lead South Carolina HBCU

Ronnie Hopkins
Voorhees College
Ronnie Hopkins

DENMARK, S.C. (AP) — One of South Carolina’s historically Black colleges has a new president at its helm.

Voorhees College in Denmark, South Carolina, announced Friday that its board unanimously tapped Ronnie Hopkins as the institution’s 10th president.

Hopkins previously served as interim president and has held other administrative roles at Voorhees, where he is also a tenured English professor. Before arriving at Voorhees, Hopkins also served as a dean at Benedict College in Columbia, South Carolina.

The board of trustees reviewed applications from more than 107 people and brought three finalists to campus before deciding on Hopkins, according to a statement.

The small, rural college was founded in 1897 as the Denmark Industrial Institute, modeled after the Tuskegee Institute. It is one of about eight HBCUs in South Carolina. The college’s prior president, D. Franklin Evans, left earlier this year to head a college in West Virginia.