2023 Recipient
Remembered and honored for her contributions to UNO, Dr. Mary Mudd is recognized with 2023 CCSGE Legendary Leader Award. During her time at UNO, Mary served our campus in a variety of roles and made lasting impact with her work in student affairs, Project Achieve, campus housing, and more.
With an already accomplished career as an elementary school teacher and with the Women’s Job Corps, Mary arrived on UNO’s campus in 1969 as a counselor and instructor for undecided and undeclared students. She became Director of New Student Orientation in 1977.
After earning her doctorate in higher education administration from UNL in 1984, Mary moved back to her hometown of Atlanta, accepting a position as Dean of Students at Morris Brown College while caring for her ailing mother. By 1988, Mary returned to Omaha and UNO as Coordinator of Counseling and University Division and soon became Assistant Vice Chancellor of Educational and Student Services. In this role, Mary pioneered the Project Achieve program, a program still active on campus today. Project Achieve is an access and retention program that provides personalized support to first- generation, low-income, and/or disabled individuals, and it was Mary who authored the grant to secure the federal funding for this program in 1993.
In the late 1990s, Mary also served as Vice Chancellor of Student Services and Enrollment Management and took on a final administrative role serving as Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs from 1988 to 2003. During this time, Mary led the effort to develop student housing on UNO’s campus thanks to her leadership, University Village, UNO’s first on-campus housing, was established in 1999.
In 2003, the same year as her retirement from UNO, Mary was honored by the Durham Western Heritage Museum for the African American Leadership Award in Education from the Urban League of Nebraska. Outside of UNO, Mary continues to be and has always been committed to causes of equity in her community. She has served on the board of directors for Girls, Inc., Butler-Gast YMCA, United Way of the Midlands, and the Visiting Nurses Association. She is also active in several community organizations and roles, such as Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc., the National Coalition of 100 Black women (Omaha chapter), the National Council of Negro Women (Omaha section), Omaha’s Salem Baptist Church (former Education Council Chairperson), and the Trustee Ministry at Mount Moriah Baptist church in Atlanta Georgia (Co-Chairperson). In her retirement from UNO, Mary has found passion for yet another career—this time in real estate, which she sees as a role that draws naturally on her strengths as an educator and engaged community member.