Cardiac Death Survivor Resuscitates Paul Quinn College Through Corporate Work Program: Meet Dr. Michael J. Sorrell, Inclusive Leader Award Winner for Higher Education

In the days to come, we will be profiling the 2022 Inclusive Leader Award winners who will be honored at the opening dinner of GlobalMindED 2022 on June 22. Many will be given this year’s awards by the 2020 and 2021 recipients. Some of these luminaries will be part of the GlobalMindED 2022 conference on June 23-24. You can see the entire program and register below for the dinner and/or the conference.

Today's feature story of the series of fifteen winners is from the Higher Education category:

Dr. Michael J. Sorrell, President, Paul Quinn College

Paul Quinn College was founded in Waco 1872 by a group of African Methodist Episcopal Church preachers in Austin to educate freed slaves and their descendants. The college moved to Dallas in 1990. Its model is as unique as they come in the higher education world. In 2017, it became the first urban work college in the country — all residential students are required to intern either on campus or with a partner company through the college’s Corporate Work Program. In exchange, the student receives an a scholarship and cash stipend that helps reduce student debt and provide meaningful real-world work experience. Typically 75% to 80% of Paul Quinn students qualify for Pell Grants.

Dr. Michael J. Sorrell is the longest-serving President in the 150 - year history of Paul Quinn College. During his 15 years of leadership, Paul Quinn has become nationally celebrated for its ability to expand the boundaries of higher education to better serve the needs of under-resourced communities and their students.

According to an article written by D Magazine, when Sorrell took over as president at Paul Quinn College in 2007, he didn’t have a professional background in education. But back then, the school didn’t need an academic, it needed an advocate.

Paul Quinn is the oldest Historically Black College and University west of the Mississippi and, at the time, was a struggling institution. It was losing money and students and on the verge of losing its accreditation. The school needed a fixer, and in Sorrell, it got a great one.

A little more than a decade later, in 2017, Paul Quinn wasn’t just surviving but thriving. It was officially recognized as the ninth federally funded work college in the country—the first in Texas and the only historically Black institution on the list. In 2018, it expanded to Plano and broke ground on the first new building on its southern Dallas campus in 40 years. That same year, Fortune magazine ranked Sorrell No. 34 on its list of The World’s 50 Greatest Leaders, between JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and actress Reese Witherspoon and Time Magazine named him as one of the “31 People Changing the South”. Since taking over, he had improved the school in every metric while also reducing tuition costs and reducing student loan debt by almost $30,000. While Dr. Sorrell is one of the most celebrated college presidents in America, his most prized honor is having been named Father of the Year in the City of Dallas for his dedication to his two children, Michael Augustus and Sage.

Sorrell isn’t just experienced with professional challenges. He also has experience with overcoming personal hardships. In 2008 he survived a sudden cardiac death episode - an unexpected change in heart rhythm that kills about 325,000 adults in the United States every year. Sorrell says he had a 2 percent chance of living and regaining all of his faculties. He was, of course, one of the lucky ones, and it clarified a couple of things for him, as near-death episodes tend to do. One, it confirmed that Natalie Jenkins would be his wife. “When a woman saves your life, it definitely moves her to the top of the marriage prospect list,” he says. They were married a year later. And two, Paul Quinn was going to make it. “I sat there, and in that moment, I realized, ‘We’re going to win,’ ” Sorrell says. “ ‘We’re going to win at Paul Quinn because I should be dead.’ I thought, ‘The Lord doesn’t save you to humiliate you. If we weren’t going to win I would be dead.’ And that’s when I knew.”

In addition to his work at Paul Quinn, President Sorrell serves as the chair of the Board of Governors for the Dallas Foundation and is a member of the Executive Committees of the Board of Trustees for both the Hockaday School and College Track. He is a trustee for the American Council of Education, Duke University’s School of Law, the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, and EarthX. Michael is also a member of the advisory boards of GSV, Guild, Handshake, and Amegy Bank. He is a corporate director for Mainstay.

Meet inclusive leaders like Dr. Michael Sorrell at GlobalMindED June 22-24 in Denver. Registration information below.