College of Charleston Leadership

Bissell Anderson are a Director of IT Infrastructure Services at College of Charleston at College of Charleston and IT, Chief Engineering Officer at College of Charleston and are based in Charleston, South Carolina.

John F. Loonan is the executive vice president for business affairs and Chief Financial Officer at the College of Charleston. He began this position in June 2020.

In this role, Loonan provides leadership to the Division of Business Affairs, made up of the Budget and Finance Department that includes Payroll, Budget, Treasurer and Controller; the Purchasing and Contracting Department; Facilities Management; Office of Human Resources; Public Safety; Campus Services, which includes student residential housing and dining, parking services, real estate management and Sottile Theater, as well as internal audit operations.

Loonan holds a bachelor's degree in business administration - accounting, from Siena College in Loudonville, New York, and a master's degree in business administration from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.

Prior to joining the College, Loonan worked for Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania for seven years, serving as vice president for finance and administration. Before that, he served as vice president of finance and fiscal services at the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering, now SUNY Polytechnic, and president of Fuller Road Management Corporation, SUNY Poly's property and building management corporation.

Mark A. Staples (Ed.D., MBA) is the senior vice president and chief information officer at the College of Charleston and oversees the Division of Information Technology.

More than just a technology leader, Staples is a thought leader in the business of higher education. His ability to converge technology into the business of higher education creates a transformative impact on both revenue and operational efficiencies. He has also established a reputation for bridging the gap between technology and the rest of the institution, fostering a culture in which technology is thoroughly integrated with every aspect of the institutional mission, reinforcing rather than complicating institutional objectives.

His contributions to the field through publications and presentations span a broad range of topics, including IT culture and leadership, the impact of social media on knowledge management and communities of practice, organizational change and design, mobile technology, effective budgeting in higher education, and the digital revolution's impact on the teaching and learning mission of higher education. His doctoral research investigates the sustainability of higher education given the rapidly changing technological landscape, highlighting where technology has failed to live up to its potential and identifying the necessary cultural and fiscal steps required for a transformative use of technology in an educational context - becoming a digital university.

Staples is an adjunct faculty member in the D'Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University, teaching both in the classroom for the undergraduate MIS program and online for the executive MBA program. He was voted Favorite Professor in 2012. He was also a member of the Board of Trustees at the University of Toledo Alumni Association, serving on the communications and outreach subcommittees.

Away from work, Staples has been a radio personality, the producer of a weekly syndicated television program and has owned and operated a recording studio, producing and engineering music and voiceover production. He has also been a concert and music festival promoter and spent several years as a college and high school sports official for football, basketball, baseball and volleyball.

Paul Patrick is a Chief of Staff at College of Charleston.

R�nard Harris is the Vice President of Access and Inclusion and the Chief Diversity Officer at the College of Charleston (2016-present). His primary responsibilities are to raise the visibility of the institution’s diversity efforts by building collaborative relationships, unifying the campus by educating and highlighting the core essence and strengths of various identities, guiding diversity programs and workshops, and creating initiatives that improve the success of underserved students.

Harris has been at the College of Charleston since the fall of 2005. He began as a faculty member and was promoted to associate professor of teacher education in 2013.

Since his time at the College of Charleston and several years prior, he has explored multicultural education, diversity, equity, and inclusion, storytelling, the Blues as story, cultural responsiveness and bias. He is often called upon to serve as a keynote speaker, diversity facilitator and consultant for businesses and educational institutions.

Harris holds an Ed.D. in teacher education from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Tenn., where he completed his dissertation entitled An Interpretive Analysis of the Formative Period of Journal Publications Related to Multicultural Education, 1977-1987, under the guidance of chair Thomas Turner. He completed an M.S. in curriculum and instruction at the University of Tennessee and taught for five years at Alcoa Middle School in Alcoa, Tennessee.