Jo Ann Gora, the president of Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, has announced that she will step down at the end of the academic year on June 30, 2014. When she took office as the 14th president of Ball State in 2004, she was the first woman to lead a public university in the state of Indiana.
Before coming to Ball State University, Dr. Gora was chancellor of the University of Massachusetts at Boston and provost and vice president of academic affairs at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.
President Gora earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. She holds master’s and doctoral degrees in sociology from Rutgers University. She has published two books, The New Female Criminal: Empirical Reality or Social Myth? (Praeger, 1982) and Emergency Squad Volunteers: Professionalism in Unpaid Work (Praeger, 1985).