William F. Howard
Of Counsel
Bill.Howard@academicsearch.org
William F. Howard joined Academic Search as Vice President and Senior Consultant in June of 2015, after serving as a Senior Vice Chancellor for the State University of New York system administration for four years. He now serves in the role Of Counsel for our organization.
Mr. Howard has over 25 years of experience in higher education and has worked directly with or for over 80 colleges and universities, at two diverse public systems and two large private research universities. While at SUNY, he was closely involved in the recruitment, selection, and onboarding of over thirty presidents and interim presidents, and he established an Office of Presidential & Leadership Initiatives. He also played key roles for the SUNY Chancellor in the search and recruitment of a Provost and a Vice Chancellor for Research, and he directly performed the search and recruitment function for several other senior executive positions, in areas including health affairs, university police, and law. Mr. Howard supervised the system-wide Office of General Counsel at SUNY, along with the offices of human resources, employee (union) relations, internal audit, compliance, university police, charter schools institute, and others.
Mr. Howard’s experience at SUNY–working for and with a central administrative office and 64 campuses, including two AAU universities, two health science centers, five specialized doctoral institutions, thirteen comprehensive masters institutions, seven specialized four year technical colleges, and thirty community colleges–built directly on his earlier experience serving a wide variety of fourteen public institutions in Maryland, including the state flagship campus and many other universities.
Mr. Howard complements his thirteen years of public experience with fourteen years serving distinguished private research universities and academic medical centers–Washington University in St. Louis, and The George Washington University in Washington, DC. His titles have included Secretary of the University, Senior Vice Chancellor, Vice Chancellor, Associate Vice Chancellor, General Counsel, Interim General Counsel, Chief Medical School Counsel, Deputy General Counsel, Deputy Chief, and Assistant Attorney General, and his roles at SUNY included Executive Leadership Development and Governance and Strategic Alliances. Mr. Howard has been a speaker or moderator at several national higher education conferences, including at the ACE Executive Search Roundtable in 2015.
He is a magna cum laude graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, and an honors graduate in economics of Michigan State University. He is a native of Ohio, and has lived in New York, Missouri, Michigan, and Maryland, where he currently lives in Baltimore City.
