ALUMNI PROFILE
A road less traveled Alumnus overcomes humble beginnings to pursue his passion by Daniel Funke As a son of South Georgia sharecroppers, nothing has ever come easy for Robert Jones (MS ’75). But that didn’t stop him from making his way from the cotton and peanut fields of the Peach State to becoming the president of a major research university. Jones grew up in Dawson and knew from an early age that he wanted to be a scientist. He was able to find an outlet for his innate curiosity by studying agronomy at Fort Valley State University, but his background proved to be a formidable obstacle to receiving an education. “It was not an easy transition because my father was a sharecropper and my mother was a domestic and clearly they didn’t have the resources to send me even to an undergraduate school,” he says. “So I had to work a fulltime job during my junior and senior year [of high school] in order to save enough money to pay for my education at Fort Valley my freshman year.” After getting his first taste of higher education, Jones was hooked. He earned a master’s degree at UGA and a doctorate at the University of Missouri—both in crop physiology—and landed his dream job as a professor of agronomy and plant genetics at the University of Minnesota. But Jones felt alienated from the community. In order to better connect with other African Americans, he began singing with the Grammy Award-winning choral ensemble Sounds of Blackness. “I joined essentially out of a sense of isolation, because there were very few African Americans in the Twin Cities that I was acquainted with,” he says. “And I joined primarily as a way [of] connecting back to the AfricanAmerican community through music.” Jones says his experience with Sounds of Blackness gave him perspective on his role in higher education, and today he strives to promote policies that encourage research expansion and greater involvement in the sciences by underrepresented communities. “I’d like to see people from more underserved backgrounds, particularly women and students of color, pursue these disciplines because I think the future of science and technology depends on that,” he says. After nearly 35 years at the University of Minnesota— serving in key administrative leadership positions during the last 15—Jones left to become the president of the
Robert Jones
MARK MCCARTY, UNIVERSITY AT ALBANY
University at Albany, State University of New York. “In a lot of ways the job is similar,” he says. “Developing a compelling vision of where the university is going in the future and how … we move to the next level of excellence. That’s what I find most gratifying and most exciting about my role here as president.” He’s a long way from South Georgia, and Jones hasn’t forgotten the journey that brought him to where he is today. “It’s a road less traveled, it was difficult, but nothing has ever been easy for me in this life,” he says. “I’ve always been able to make the best of it.”
DECEMBER 2014 • GEORGIA MAGAZINE
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