A president's long journey to Oswego

Nwosu was named SUNY Oswego president in June and started at the position on Aug. 15.

“I have been everywhere, quite frankly,” Nwosu said. “I remember when I was interviewed, a member of the search committee saying to me, ‘you know that this is Oswego,’ and I said, what do you mean? And he said, ‘It’s cold, it’s not New York (City). I laughed and said to him, “You realize I’m not from New York, either.”

Though he’s been in many locations, Nwosu said he has made a home in each of his stops.

“I came as an immigrant, and I said if I can leave my country thousands of miles away and settle in the United States, with only knowing my sister here, I could make a home anywhere,” said Nwosu. “So when it’s cold I think, the last time I checked the people that lived there have not all died, you know,” he said with a laugh.

Nwosu credits his parents’ progressive attitudes for helping adjust to new scenarios.

“My parents were very cosmopolitan,” Nwosu said. “Growing up as a child we traveled through all parts of the country. It made it easier to adapt. Everywhere you went, you made it your home. They spoke three of the country’s major languages. That cosmopolitan approach to life has been one that has guided me.”

Nwosu grew up amid civil war in his home country. After gaining independence from Great Britain in 1960, Nigeria had to figure out how to represent the more than 300 ethnic groups contained within its borders.

“That was the beginning of the introduction of a military government in Nigeria,” said Nwosu. “After the British left, the civilian government lasted just six years, and there was a series of things that happened with the civilian government that left them unable to manage the affairs of the country, and so a military coup took place.”

After the coup, Nigeria’s citizens didn’t have time to catch their breath before a new government was installed, again.

“Six months after that military coup, a second one took place,” said Nwosu. “Both of them resulted in the deaths of many people. The second one led to the civil war.”

Nwosu grew up in the Christian part of the country in the southeast region. The north of the country was predominantly Muslim. Nwosu said that the northern region started to victimize Christians found there and in the east. The Biafra secession led by the Igbo ethnic group broke off and declared independence from Nigeria, because they felt that the federal government was representing only the interests of the northern Muslims.

“Ultimately we survived that experience, whatever survive means,” he said. “The elementary school had bullet holes riddling the outside. They fixed the inside, but the outside they left because they wanted us to understand that there’s no winner in wars and they leave scars.”

Wars can harden people and make them uncaring, but the Nigerian civil war seemed to have had the opposite effect on Nwosu. It helped fire up an interest in multiculturalism and openness to new ideas and experiences.

After graduating with a degree in mass communication and journalism from the Institute of Management and Technology in Enugu, Nigeria, Nwosu decided to further his education in the United States.

Nwosu quickly decided after graduation that rather than a journalist he wanted to be an educator.

“But I’ve alway said journalism is history in a hurry,” Nwosu said. “It allows you to see the bigger picture. We write them, and five-10 years later historians come in and they begin to look at accounts in newspapers and try to make sense of what happened.”

While attending Howard University in Washington, D.C., Nwosu was given his first glimpse into connecting people from different parts of the world.

“When I went to Howard University and was admitted into the communication studies program, I veered off once I arrived there,” Nwosu said. “I started focusing on what happens when people of two different cultures come in contact with one another. I got excited about that field.”

After graduating from Towson University in Maryland and Howard University, Nwosu had a decision to make: To stay in America or return to his home country.

“I debated on if I go back or not go back,” Nwosu said. “But we had a series of military governments. Nigeria is 60 years old, and in that time we’ve had 23 years of civilian government. Until the current government, which has been in power since 1999, it was a staccato series of military governments.”

While at Howard, Nowsu wrote a paper that was selected as the best student research paper and was shared at a conference. In the crowd of the conference was the head of the journalism program at California State University at Sacramento.

She asked Nwosu to have coffee after the conference and asked him to present his paper on her campus, he said.

“I said, sure where is it,” he said. Sacramento, she said. “I looked at it as a free trip and thought, what do I have to lose?”

That trip led to a job offer in Sacramento. Nwosu still had to finish his Ph.D. work on the East Coast and waited for nine months to accept the position.

“Then I moved to Sacramento and began teaching,” Nwosu said. “And created the bachelor’s and master’s programs in intercultural international communication, which was really what they were looking for.”

After moving to the Los Angeles area to work at another school in the California State University system, Nwosu was selected by the president of the school to participate in a leadership conference for the American Council of Education (ACE).

“That’s how I got to Nashville,” he said. “Part of the program is you shadow a president and you actually run that campus for a whole year.”

After that year in Nashville, Nwosu returned to California to work at California State Fullerton for a period, before moving on to Clark Atlanta University in Georgia, as the chief academic officer.

This was Nwosu’s first experience working at a private university, and he quickly saw the differences between public and private education.

“You learn a lot of things from them, because the pace of getting work done is faster,” Nwosu said. “Because they don’t rely on the government to support them. They rely on tuition to survive, so you have to make decisions as quick as possible or you lose students.”

After serving as the provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Lehman College, a City University of New York institution, Nwosu was selected to be just the 11th president in SUNY Oswego’s 162-year history.

Since officially starting in August, Nwosu has been busy. He’s met with alumni, state and city government officials, representatives of local businesses and, of course, his students.

In the first week of October, Nwosu announced his “vision 4040 initiative,” a plan to double the annual number of graduates from SUNY Oswego by 2040.

The Vision 4040 initiative plans to employ various strategies to increase graduation rates. These include increasing the number of transfer students, growing enrollment pipelines from population dense regions, increasing retention and completion rates among active students and increasing awareness, impact and use of the SUNY Oswego campus in Syracuse. In 2021, about 1,000 students graduated from SUNY Oswego, according to the school.

“The work has already begun,” Nwosu said.