When the University of South Alabama’s Board of Trustees selected Josiah Robins (Jo) Bonner Jr. as the school’s fourth president in November 2021, the choice raised an obvious question: what does a 28-year Washington career — six terms in Congress, the House Ethics Committee chairmanship, a university system vice chancellorship, and a stint as chief of staff to the governor of Alabama — have to do with running a Mobile university?
Five years in, the answer is visible across campus, and it starts with a lesson Bonner absorbed in Camden, the small Black Belt town in Wilcox County where he grew up.
The Camden School of Leadership
Camden has produced a remarkable share of Alabama’s public figures — Jeff Sessions, Governor Kay Ivey, and Bonner’s own sister Judy Bonner, who became president of the University of Alabama. Bonner’s father left a successful law practice in 1969 to serve as Wilcox County’s probate judge and juvenile court judge; his mother was the county health nurse. Young Jo, tagged “Little Jo” by Ivey and his older brother Jim when they rode horses together, watched his father take a phone call at home from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the height of the civil rights movement.
“My father was all about keeping the peace in our community,” Bonner says. “Those were turbulent times in the late 60s across several fronts.” His father died of a massive stroke when Jo was thirteen, leaving behind a creed the son still quotes: do things the right way, with integrity, and make a positive difference. “That’s what inspired me to get into politics.”
Callahan’s Protégé
At the University of Alabama, Bonner studied journalism, political science and history, and interned for U.S. Representative Jack Edwards. After graduation he helped run Sonny Callahan’s campaign to succeed Edwards, then became Callahan’s press secretary and chief of staff. “Jack Edwards and Sonny Callahan were two of the most respected people in public life in Alabama,” Bonner says. “I was honored to give the eulogies at each one’s funeral.”
When Callahan retired in 2002, Bonner ran for the seat — and won his first of six terms that November at age 42, taking office January 3, 2003. In Congress he served on the powerful House Appropriations Committee and chaired the House Ethics Committee, where he and the ranking Democrat agreed to keep every vote unanimous, keeping politics out of ethics. His TARP vote in 2008 — deeply unpopular at home, defended on principle since — remains the vote he calls most difficult. And in 2010, with a governor’s race within reach, a deer hunt with his 12-year-old son Robins ended the campaign before it began. “‘No, Dad,’ he said. ‘Because I’m with you.’ I made the decision then and there to get out of politics. I had already missed too much time with my family.”
Tuscaloosa, Montgomery, Mobile
In 2013, an out-of-the-blue call from Dr. Robert Witt brought Bonner to Tuscaloosa as the University of Alabama System’s vice chancellor for government relations and economic development. Five years later, his Camden roots and close friendship with Kay Ivey took him to Montgomery as her chief of staff, at a moment when the state’s leadership had been hollowed out — a removed chief justice, a speaker convicted of a felony, a resigned governor. Ivey steadied the state, passed the largest road and infrastructure bill in its history, and — Bonner notes — presided over more than 100,000 new jobs and $69 billion in investment.
When Dr. Tony Waldrop retired as South’s president in 2021, Bonner was encouraged to apply despite lacking the terminal degree most university presidents carry. The trustees bet on the other résumé: economic development experience that helped recruit Airbus and ThyssenKrupp to Alabama, and 28 years of relationships across the First District. He asked skeptical faculty to “meet me halfway before passing judgment.”
What the Bet Has Bought
The campus Bonner now leads counts over 14,000 students from all 50 states, 58 countries and all 67 Alabama counties, with nearly 4,000 living on campus and about 12,000 employees including the USA Health System. It took South 61 years to reach 100,000 graduates — Auburn needed 121. Thirty-one percent of the recent class are first-generation graduates. The flagship projects are transformative: Airbus moving its engineering center to campus, a $290 million medical school under construction on University Boulevard that will grow class size from 80 toward 120, a new shallow-water lake on Three Mile Creek for the Stokes School of Marine and Environmental Sciences, and the state’s largest nursing school, whose graduates pass the licensing exam on the first try at 99 percent.
A $400 million capital campaign — “Where Bold Begins” — is underway, alongside a 10-year plan Bonner jokes he won’t be around to see finished. The cultural artifact he may be proudest of is smaller: The USA Way, a creed born from a phrase he kept hearing in his interviews, codified by a team he convened with provost Dr. Andi Kent — in everything, do things the right way.
It is, of course, the Camden lesson. The boy who watched his father keep the peace now walks a 1,200-acre campus, picking up litter as he goes, serving pizza to College Republicans and College Democrats in the same room and listening as they discover they worry about the same things. “Our differences aren’t that far apart,” he tells students. At a university whose motto might as well be that sentence, it sounds less like a political sentiment than a job description.