Vice President's Bio

Dr. William Franklin

william-franklin

Dr. William Franklin is an energetic, experienced, and accomplished professional with a proven record of intuitive and insightful leadership that fosters inclusion, team building, fiscal accountability, and dynamic problem-solving. He has been acknowledged throughout his career as a collaborative, transformative, and inspirational leader with a reputation for advancing diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. Dr. Franklin has the unique experience of serving students as an innovative Assistant and Associate Professor and accomplished Student Affairs administrator. He is a strategic thinker and adept at providing creative solutions to complex problems impacting first-generation students.

Dr. Franklin holds a Ph.D. in Psychological Studies in Education with an emphasis on Child and Adolescent Development from Stanford University. Before transitioning to Stanford, Dr. Franklin completed graduate studies in Educational Psychology and attained his Bachelor of Arts in Psychology at California State University, Northridge. His teaching interests include adolescent development, child development, the Black family, early childhood themes and life cycle issues, Black and Latinx males, teenage risk and resilience, juvenile justice, and positive youth development. 

Dr. Franklin is the Vice President for Student Affairs at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and is the former Associate Vice President of Student Success.  Dr. Franklin leads divisional planning, and policy formulation and collaborates with the broader campus community and the South Bay community on issues related to equity, access, student learning, assessment, retention, and graduation.  While at CSU Dominguez Hills, Dr. Franklin has secured over $50 million in federal, corporate, and private grants to design and implement student success initiatives for low-income, first-generation students of color. 

Dr. Franklin served as an Associate Professor in Child and Family Studies at California State University, Los Angeles, and Associate Professor of Human Development at the Center of Collaborative Education and Professional Studies at California State University, Monterey Bay. While there, he was also the Interim Director of the Liberal Studies Institute. He has also served as a lecturer at Santa Clara University and Stanford University. 

Dr. Franklin was honored in 2015 with The Wang Family Excellence Award. The award recognizes four outstanding faculty members and one outstanding administrator who, through extraordinary commitment and dedication, have distinguished themselves by exemplary contributions and achievements. Dr. Franklin was awarded the Outstanding Administrator out of the 23 campuses in the CSU. Dr. Franklin also received the NIMH Family Research Consortium III Post-Doctoral Fellowship and served as a Research Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Dr. Franklin's research focuses on risk and resilience in young African American and Latinx adolescents. He specifically examines individual variations in response to risk factors and the antecedents and correlates of healthy outcomes in individuals whose "lifespace" in low-income, urban environments pose heightened risks. For his work in this area, he received the Spencer Dissertation Fellowship. Dr. Franklin continues to explore risk and resilience factors in youth of color by examining family, school, and community factors. He is involved with several initiatives to increase college admission, retention, and graduation among youth in Los Angeles. 

Dr. Franklin founded one of the nation's most successful young men of color initiatives, called the Male Success Alliance. Community-based organizations, schools, juvenile justice facilities, and universities often call Dr. Franklin to give motivational talks and conduct workshops to encourage, inspire, confront, challenge, and move youth to a higher level. Dr. Franklin is also the founder and principal investigator of the California State University Young Males of Color Consortium. In 2017, the 23-campus consortium was established to explore young men of color's unique challenges as they move through the CSU and advance effective approaches to better support them. The Consortium is guided by the California State University Graduation  Initiative's mandate to eliminate all achievement/opportunity gaps. The Consortium is a unique and strategic network, endeavoring to advance a system-wide response to the urgent challenges young men of color face as they traverse academic and co-curricular pathways in the CSU. To date, he has secured close to $2M from the Community Futures Foundation, Angell Foundation, the Annenberg Foundation, California Community Foundation, and ECMC Foundation. In October 2022, he was honored to receive the Tackling Inequities in College Attainment Award from the Southern California College Access Network.