Difference between revisions of "Vincent Marsala"

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Vincent John Carmelo Marsala (October 7, 1935 – December 13, 2017) was a historian and administrator for forty-five years at Louisiana State University in Shreveport, Louisiana, a branch campus launched in 1967 of the flagship Louisiana State University in the capital city of Baton Rouge. Marsala capped his career as the university chancellor upon his retirement in 2012.^[2]

He was one of two sons of an Italian-American couple, Vincent Marsala and the former Rosalie Cecelia Parrino (1911-1998), who lived in north Louisiana. Marsala learned to hunt and fish about Bayou DeSiard in Monroe. He graduated from St. Matthew's High School in Monroe and attended LSU in Baton Rouge. He was pledged to Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity.  He transferred to the University of Louisiana at Monroe, then known as Northeast Louisiana University, where he became an ROTC cadet and met his future wife, the former Carol Ann Goodrum. He earned his bachelor's degree in general studies with a focus on political science and history and continued his military service at Fort Benning, Georgia, at which he became a second lieutenant in the United States Army. He returned to Baton Rouge to earn a master's degree in 1962 in government and sociology. For a time, he taught political science at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then known as the University of Southwestern Louisiana. He continued graduate studies and received his Ph.D. in Latin American Studies from LSU. He and his wife spent three months in Jamaica while he completed his historical dissertation, "Sir John Peter Grant, Governor of Jamaica 1866-1874: An Administrative History," a treatise that was subsequently published.^[3]

In 1967, Dean Donald Shipp was appointed chancellor to head the new branch of the LSU System in Shreveport. Shipp invited Marsala to become a founding faculty member, the start of a 45-year academic career at the institution. Marsala was a professor of Latin American and Louisiana history and government and an administrative dean of the colleges of General Studies and Continuing Education and Public Service. In 1995, he was named the LSUS chancellor, a post he filled for seventeen years. He was one of three authors of a 1992 essay collection that explores the sources, style, and quality of leadership of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln.^[4] He also researched U.S. Senator Joseph E. Ransdell of Louisiana, and the history in Louisiana of the Roman Catholic church.^[3]

In 1994, Governor Edwin Edwards named Marsala to serve on the Governor's Higher Education Commission for the 21st Century. He also received a Fulbright Award for a group study project to Costa Rica entitled, The Social Context of Crisis in Central America. In 2012, Vincent and Carol Ann received the LSUS Alumni Association's Loyalty Award given to retiring faculty or staff who played a strategic role in the advancement of LSUS.^[3]

Marsala contracted breast cancer and died in Shreveport at the age of eighty-two. In addition to his wife, he was survived by a daughter, Shawne Christy Marsala, and a brother, Dr. Andrew James Marsala and his wife, Renee. He is interred at Forest Park East Cemetery in Shreveport.^[2]

References