William J. Frawley (2006 - 2007)
William John Frawley served as the seventh president of the University of Mary Washington from July 2006 to April 2007. A linguist and cognitive scientist, Dr. Frawley has held appointments at academic institutions in this country and abroad. He is an accomplished scholar, teacher, and administrator. In his most recent position as dean of the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences at George Washington University, Dr. Frawley had responsibility for more than 40 academic departments, including the School of Public Policy Administration, School of Political Management, and School of Media and Public Affairs. His annual operating budget of $65 million supported 400 full-time faculty, 300 part-time faculty, and 100 staff, in addition to academic programs for 6,000 undergraduate and 2,000 graduate students on three campuses.
His administrative experience included institutional fund raising. Dr. Frawley helped raise more than $45 million for George Washington’s College of Arts and Sciences, with individual donor gifts as high as $5 million. External funding from grants increased 28 percent during his tenure as dean, including multi-million dollar grants from the U.S. Department of Education and the National Science Foundation. He also developed collaborative partnerships with corporations and with state and federal agencies. Before joining George Washington University, Dr. Frawley served for 23 years on the faculty and administration at the University of Delaware. He was appointed to highest faculty rank, Professor, at the age of 32 and held a variety of administrative positions, from department chair to director of undergraduate studies for the institution.
At Mary Washington, Dr. Frawley served as Distinguished University Professor of Linguistics. His academic specializations in linguistics include meaning systems, cognitive and computational architectures for language, and discourse and text structure. He has worked in and on a variety of languages, including Spanish, French, Polish, Russian, and German. He has lectured and taught at academic institutes in Hungary, Poland, and Morocco, among others. Dr. Frawley holds a doctorate from Northwestern University and a master’s degree from Louisiana State University, both in linguistics. He graduated magna cum laude with a degree in English from Glassboro State College, now Rowan University. He has authored or edited more than a dozen books and has published more than 60 scholarly articles.
Dr. Frawley has served on the editorial board of numerous academic journals, including his role as editor of Dictionaries and as a member of the advisory board of Oxford University’s U.S. Dictionary Projects. He personally is the recipient of more than 10 major grants, including awards from the U.S. Department of State, the American Association of Colleges and Universities, the Chichester duPont Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. His students have nominated him many times over the years for university-wide teaching awards. In addition, Dr. Frawley has been on the board of the Center for Innovation in Public Service and represents the Linguistic Society of America on the Consortium of Social Science Associations. He also serves on the Dictionary Society of North America’s executive board.