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Secretary Margaret Spellings named Leonard L. Haynes III—a veteran of many top education posts—as executive director of the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities on Oct. 22, 2007. In this position, he implements Executive Order 13256, which supports the work of the nation's Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). He also serves as an adviser to the secretary and is the executive branch's liaison to these institutions, working closely with the President's Board of Advisers for HBCUs and more than 30 federal agencies that award grants and contracts to HBCUs in support of their operations.

HBCUs account for more than 100 public and private two- and four-year postsecondary institutions from 20 states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands. In the fall of 2004, total enrollment was 308,939 students, about 2 percent of all postsecondary students nationwide and about 12 percent of all African-Americans enrolled in postsecondary education. During 2004-05, HBCUs awarded 30,287 bachelors' degrees or 22 percent of the bachelors' degrees earned by African-Americans nationwide. During 2004-05, these schools also awarded 9,024 masters', doctoral and first-professional degrees or about 14 percent of these degrees earned by African-American students.

Prior to being named executive director, Haynes led the Department's Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) for four-and-a-half years. Two recent successes for FIPSE under his leadership were the 2007 CONAHEC Award of Distinction given to the Program for North American Mobility in Higher Education. Additionally, in FY 2007, FIPSE's Comprehensive Program successfully funded the priorities outlined in the secretary's 2006 commission report, A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education.

Born in Boston, Mass., where his father, a Methodist minister and college professor, was earning his doctorate in theology, Haynes grew up in Louisiana and graduated from high school in Baton Rouge. There, he earned his bachelor's degree in history from Southern University in 1968. He attended Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh on a fellowship and completed his master's there in American history in 1969. After a year of teaching history for Southern University, he continued his graduate studies at the University of Illinois and subsequently was selected as a fellow for the Washington Internship in Education. He in the first group of WIE Fellows assigned to the Illinois Department of Public Instruction in Springfield. Following his WIE experience, he began his doctoral studies at Ohio State University in higher education administration, finishing in 1975. Prior to leaving Ohio State, Haynes served as assistant to the provost for the university.

From 1976 to 1979, he was director of the desegregation unit supported by the Ford Foundation at the Institute for Services to Education in Washington, D.C. From 1979 to 1982, he served as director for the Office of Public Black Colleges at the National Association of State Land Grant Colleges before returning to Louisiana in 1982 to become executive vice president for the Southern University System in Baton Rouge for three years. From 1985 to 1988, he returned to the history faculty at Southern University before being named assistant superintendent of the Louisiana Department of Education in 1988.

In 1989, Haynes returned to Washington to serve as President George H.W. Bush's assistant secretary for postsecondary education for two years. The former U.S. Information Agency named him director of academic programs in 1991, and in 1993, he began serving on the National Education Goals Panel. In 1994, he was a visiting scholar at the University of Maryland and, from 1994 to 1995, he was senior assistant to the president at American University. After American University, Haynes went to the private sector for two years and became the Washington representative of the Fine Host Corp. based in Greenwich, Conn.

From 1997 to 1998, he served as acting president of Grambling University, returning to Washington in 1999 to work in the D.C. Public Schools for the District of Columbia Control Authority.

In 2001, former Education Secretary Rod Paige named him as a special adviser, a post he held until being named director of FIPSE in 2003.

Ohio State has twice honored Haynes: in 1990, with an honorary doctor of laws degree, and again in 2006, with a John Glenn award for excellence in public service.

Father of four and grandfather of two, Haynes and his wife, Mary, live in Silver Spring, Md.