Charles W. Manning, Chancellor 

Charles Manning joined the Tennessee Board of Regents (TBR) as chancellor in April 2000 after serving for 10 years as chancellor of the university system of West Virginia.   Manning's eight years as TBR's chancellor have been marked by a range of accomplishments in improved innovation, efficiency, and responsiveness to the needs of students.  Underlying all these accomplishments is an emphasis on collaboration among TBR's institutions.

In the area of innovation, TBR's outstanding accomplishment under Manning's leadership is the Regents Online Degree Program, which launched in fall 2001, after just a year of planning and development, offering 32 courses toward three associate’s and two bachelor’s degrees to just under 2,000 students—four times the projected initial enrollment. In fall 2007, RODP offered 259 courses toward 11 degrees to just under 15,000 students. In only seven short years, the student body of the Regents Online Degree Program equals that of a medium-sized university. RODP is truly a collaborative among all of TBR's universities, community colleges, and technology centers, and the program is an object lesson in how a system can produce results greater than the sum of its individual parts.

As a result of the system's multi-year re-engineering effort called "Defining Our Future," which Manning oversaw, many efficiencies, large and small, were achieved. One of the most significant was the reduction of the number of hours required to receive an associate's degree to 60 and a bachelor's degree to 120. There are exceptions for programs in which professional accreditation standards require a greater number of hours, but the vast majority of students can graduate with only 60 or 120 hours, saving themselves--as well as the state of Tennessee--significant amounts of money.

Two items stand out in terms of increasing the system's responsiveness to the needs of students during Manning's tenure. First, a common 40-hour general education core was created and approved, and is now offered at all TBR universities and community college. This core is fully transferrable within the TBR system, so students are no longer required to re-take core courses because they change schools. Second, the system is continuing its work on articulation, focusing both on improving articulation with the University of Tennessee system and on making transfer of non-core courses within the TBR system easier, so that more courses in a student's major will be accepted if a student transfers to another TBR institution.

Manning also presided over the successful conclusion of the 38-year-old Geier lawsuit, which had put public higher education in Tennessee under federal oversight for being racially segregated. The Consent Decree agreed to during Manning's tenure resulted in the dismissal of the suit in September 2006.

Manning earned his B.A. in chemistry from McDaniel College and his Ph.D. in analytical chemistry from the University of Maryland and has done post doctoral work in chemistry at the Institute for Anorganische und Kkernchemie, Johannes Gutenberg Universitat.