Arthur Cole, PhD '74

Arthur Cole, PhD, recently retired from the federal government after more that thirty years of service. Cole's positions included director of the Department of Education's training and development office that served 5,000 staff; deputy director of the White House Initiative for Historically Black Colleges and Universities; service in the United States Peace Corps as director for the Kingdom of Lesotho, an independent nation inside South Africa, where he led over 100 volunteers who assisted some of the lowest income residents on the continent in education, agriculture and health projects; and he was responsible for overseeing more than twenty federal programs in the areas of technical assistance, public school choice, teacher education and educational equity, as director of School Improvement Programs.

In 2003, Cole joined the University of Oklahoma as senior advisor in the Public Service Institute. There he continues to address the challenges of education, poverty and communication for the most impoverished citizens of the world through the institute's partnership with the Observatory for Cultural and Audiovisual Communication, a non-government organization accredited by the United Nations, and based in Milan, Italy.