Office of the President

Watch President Hall's 2009 Faculty/Staff Convocation address (53 min.)

Committed to Student Success

On Aug. 1, 2007, Timothy Hall became the ninth president of Austin Peay State University. Before assuming this position, Hall was associate provost and associate vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Mississippi, Oxford, Mississippi.

Hall received a B.A. in Philosophy, summa cum laude, from the University of Houston in 1978. He followed this degree with two years of graduate work in the religious studies department at Rice University in Houston, Texas, before attending law school and receiving his juris doctorate, cum laude, from the University of Texas Law School in 1983. While in law school, he served as articles editor of the Texas Law Review and was selected for membership in the Order of the Coif, the nation’s leading legal honor society. Following a year as a judicial clerk to the Honorable Will Garwood, U.S. Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit, Hall joined the firm of Hughes & Luce in Austin, Texas, where he practiced trial law for five years.

In 1989, Hall and his family relocated to Oxford, where he joined the faculty of the University of Mississippi School of Law, primarily teaching constitutional law, legal ethics, and law and literature. He was tenured in 1995 and promoted to full professor in 2001. While a junior faculty member, he held the Mitchell, McNutt Lectureship in Law, created to recognize and support the achievements of an outstanding young law professor. After promotion to full professor, he held the Jessie Puckett Lectureship in Law.

In the mid-1990s, Hall became involved in academic administration and undergraduate education when he assumed the position of director of the University of Mississippi’s first-year orientation program. For seven years, he supervised roughly 50 sections of the first-year orientation course, which served annually more than 2,000 students. He also wrote a text ultimately used by all sections of the course, titled Entering the University (Pearson Custom Publishing, 2d ed. 2001). During the same period, Hall was involved in the creation of key undergraduate initiatives at the University of Mississippi, serving on the committees that created the Sally Barksdale Honors College, the Lott Leadership Institute and the First Year Seminar program. He taught pilot sections of the First Year Seminar after it was launched in 1999. In 2001, Hall added to these responsibilities service for two years as the director of a summer legal program at Downing College, Cambridge, England, sponsored by the University of Mississippi School of Law.

In 2002, he was named associate provost and associate vice chancellor of academic affairs at the University of Mississippi, with responsibilities focused on the undergraduate programs. He chaired the undergraduate council, the body responsible for consideration of undergraduate policies and programs, as well as the sabbatical leave review committee and the academic suspension and dismissal appeals review committee. He also had primary responsibility for overseeing budget affairs for the Provost’s Office.

In 2005, Hall was asked to assume additional duties as executive director of the Law School Campaign. This new position included responsibility for leading efforts to raise $60 million dollars for the law school, the primary goal of which was to build a new law school facility. At the time of his departure from the University of Mississippi, the campaign had raised $30 million in private funds toward this goal and secured a commitment of $10 million from the state of Mississippi toward construction of the new law school. This success led the chancellor and provost at the University of Mississippi to ask Hall to assume leadership of another capital campaign to raise $25 million dollars toward the construction of several residential colleges.

Both during his years as a law teacher and later as an academic administrator, Hall was active as a legal scholar. He has written numerous articles and books, most of which have concentrated on church-state relations and American religion. He is the author of several well-known books, including Separating Church and State: Roger Williams in America (University of Illinois Press, 1998); Supreme Court Justices: A Biographical Dictionary (Facts on File, 2001); American Religious Leaders (Facts on File, 2003); and Religion in America (Facts on File, 2007).

He and his wife, Lee Nicholson Hall, celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary in the fall of 2007. They have two children: Ben, a graduate of Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas currently pursuing a masters in English at Austin Peay, and Amy, an undergraduate at Austin Peay.