Biography

Since Walter Harrison’s appointment as the University of Hartford’s fifth president in 1998, the University has experienced a period of energy and momentum unmatched in its history. He has overseen dramatic improvements in academic quality, finances and fundraising.

President Harrison serves on many boards in the Hartford area, including Hartford Stage, Saint Francis Hospital and Medical Center, Girl Scouts of Connecticut, The Connecticut Science Center, Achieve Hartford!, World Business Capital, The Hartford Consortium for Higher Education, and he is the treasurer of The MetroHartford Alliance. He is also active nationally: he chairs The National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Committee on Academic Performance, serves on a number of other NCAA committees, and is a member of the Hillel Foundation Board of Directors and the President’s Council of the Association of Governing Boards.

President Harrison is a scholar of American literature and culture. A native of Pittsburgh, he graduated from Trinity College in Hartford in 1968, and then earned a master’s degree from the University of Michigan in 1969. After an interim of three years to serve as captain in the United States Air Force, President Harrison earned a doctorate from the University of California – Davis. His doctoral dissertation, “Out of Play: Baseball Fiction from Pulp to Art”, was one of the earliest scholarly treatments of baseball and its place in American life.