Cost, Drury, Gant and Richards elected
T he National Issues Forums Institute (NIFI) has announced the election of four new members of its board of directors, chosen at its semiannual meeting on Dec. 9: Hollie Cost, Sara Mehltretter Drury, Jon Gant, and Robert C. Richards Jr.
Cost serves as the Assistant Vice President of Auburn University Outreach and Public Service. Her personal and professional passion is work- ing collaboratively with com- munity members to develop a shared vision and implement needed change.
She began her public ser- vice as a Montevallo City Council member in 2004, completing two terms before being elected mayor in 2012. In her capacity as a university professor, she established four special education degree tracks, multiple outreach programs, and the Office of Service Learning and Community Engagement. Her community enhancement initiatives have focused on arts, sustainability, and edu- cation with an emphasis on youth engagement. Mehltretter Drury is Associate Professor and Chair of Rhetoric at Wabash College, in Crawfordsville, Indiana. She also serves as Director of Wabash Democ- racy and Public Discourse, an interdisciplinary initiative that partners with campuses and communities to foster dialogue and delib- eration on a range of topics. In this program, Drury trains undergraduate students at Wabash College to research and facilitate public dialogues and deliberations.
Drury has been a Visit- ing Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Stud- ies in the Humanities (201718) and an Indiana Humanities Action Fellow (2019- 21). She graduated summa cum laude with a BA from Boston College in communication studies and polit- ical science.
Gant is a leader in higher education who helps to make information and digital tech- nologies accessible for everyone. As professor and dean of the School of Library and Information Sciences at North Carolina Central University, Gant has helped to double enrollment to over 330 graduate students. This 80-year-old school is the only accredited graduate program in the field offered by a historically Black college and university.
Gant served as the Found- ing Director of the Center for Digital Inclusion (CDI) at the School of Information at the University of Illinois. Gant earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan and received MS and PhD degrees from Carnegie Mellon University.
Richards is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service, where he teaches courses in communication and public engagement and legal and ethical dimensions of public service. He is also an interdisciplinary affiliate at the Center for Communication Research at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and a co-investiga- tor on the Participedia Proj- ect, which studies citizen participation in governance around the world.
Richards holds a PhD in communication arts and sciences from Penn State University, a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law, an MS in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an MA in communication studies from the University of Iowa, and a BA in English from Yale University.