Date: May 24, 2013
After a highly competitive and global search, the A.U.K. Board of Directors has selected Dr. Winfred Thompson as the new A.U.K. President. Dr. Thompson is a highly experienced university leader. He graduated from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville with high honors in history. After two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Philippines, he attended the University of Chicago under a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and earned a master’s degree in history. Subsequently he earned two degrees in law at George Washington University and returned to the University of Chicago to complete his doctorate in history.
After several years working in the legislative and executive branches of the federal government in Washington, DC, he returned to Arkansas and practiced law for two years. He then began his career in higher education, serving in a variety of administrative positions in universities including as President of the University of Central Arkansas, for nearly 14 years, Chancellor of the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates and most recently President of the American University in Kuwait.
Doctor Thompson’s appointment coincides with A.U.K.’s 10th anniversary of its creation. Having started as a two story villa with only 57 students in 2003, A.U.K. is proud of where it is today. With a student body of 624 and a high-caliber faculty and research body of 46, A.U.K. has become the leading institution of higher learning in Kosovo and the wider region. A.U.K.’s growing reputation is manifested by its many students who hold executive and administrative positions in business, industry, and government; its successful participation in the Harvard Model United Nations representing Kosovo; the frequent attendance at the World Model United Nations conferences in Thailand, Singapore, Canada, and this year in Australia, and the highly successful Moot Court Vienna competition of the past two years. Most recently, the A.U.K. Charity Club won the prestigious FIDES award for philanthropy in Kosovo. These achievements clearly indicate A.U.K.’s international outlook and community spirit, as well as signaling its presence as a young, dynamic, future-oriented enterprise.
A.U.K. is Kosovo’s only private, not for-profit institution of higher education where every penny earned is used for, and reinvested back into A.U.K. to enrich our students’ experience. In addition, A.U.K. is the only Kosovo institution of higher education using English entirely as the language of instruction; this helps us attract students from every community nationally as well as students from 17 different countries around the world. And it is the only institution which awards a genuine American degree that is recognized world-wide. That degree comes with the name of A.U.K.’s American partner, the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in New York, one of the top ten engineering universities in the U.S. and one of the top ranked universities in the world in the field of information technology. A.U.K. delivers the same excellent standard of American higher education that students receive at RIT – the same degree, the same syllabus, the same exams and grading standards – taught by many of the same faculty members. In addition to delivering a diploma that is fully recognized in the United States, A.U.K. most recently also successfully completed the accreditation process with Kosovo’s Accreditation Agency becoming thus one of the first private educational institutions to have been accredited.
“I am very much looking forward to join the dedicated staff and faculty of A.U.K. What makes this undertaking very exciting is that A.U.K. is a private not for profit institution that is run by a Board comprised of very passionate individuals who donate their time and assets to A.U.K. just so it can produce the highest quality education in the region,” said Mr. Thompson. The current Acting President Mr. Shaun Byrnes states: “The Board, of which I am a member, is proud to welcome Dr. Thompson, a distinguished educator with a proven record of success in leading universities forward to greater success, and a friend of President Bill Clinton, with whom he served when Clinton was Governor of the great state of Arkansas.”
Dr. Thompson, acting President Shaun Byrnes and other A.U.K. board members will hold a press conference today, Friday May 24 at 15:00 in the main A.U.K. Campus, Str. Shpëtim Robaj.
Contact: Lavon Bajrami
American university in Kosovo