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David Potash

President
Wilbur Wright College-City Colleges of Chicago

David Potash, PhD, is president of Wilbur Wright College, an independently accredited open-access community college in Chicago and part of the City Colleges of Chicago system. Leading the institution since 2013, Potash has guided the 85-year old community college to significant increases in student success, new programs, and certificates, sustained efforts at equity, community service and civic engagement, career, workforce, and apprenticeships, serving the community’s growing Hispanic population, and the creation of a Center of Excellence in Engineering and Computer Science. Wright College received Campus Compact’s Eduardo J. Padrón Award for Institutional Transformation in 2020.

Prior to Wright, Potash served as Curry College’s first chief academic officer. Curry is a comprehensive master’s institution in the Boston area and one of the first colleges in the nation to create programming for students with language-based learning disabilities. Curry grew academic programming, assessment, and pedagogical development under him.

As associate Provost at Baruch College and at Hunter College, Potash worked for a decade in the CUNY system. He had many responsibilities, from reaccreditation to core-curriculum revisions, from enrollment management to first-year programs. Potash also worked at NYU, where he helped to reshape an interdisciplinary master’s program and assisted the Dean of GSAS in building graduate education.

Potash holds a BA from Rice University, an MA from NYU, and a PhD in history from Cambridge University. He has taught a variety of US history courses, with expertise on twentieth-century political history. He is active on social media and serves on several advisory boards.