Brad Carson

Brad Rogers Carson (born March 11, 1967) is the 21st President of the University of Tulsa.

Prior to his presidency, Carson was an American lawyer and politician from the state of Oklahoma.

He was officer-in-charge of weapons intelligence teams embedded with the U.S. Army's 84th Explosive Ordnance Disposal Battalion in the nine southern provinces of Iraq; the teams worked with EOD teams at seven bases and investigated bomb sites, caches, smuggling routes, and other activities related to improvised explosive devices.

For this work, Carson received, among other awards, the Bronze Star.

He attended the University of Oklahoma College of Law, graduating at the top of his class in 1994.

According to The Almanac of American Politics, Carson had originally intended to attend Yale Law School, only to change his mind while at Oxford.

After graduation from the University of Oklahoma, Carson took a job at a prestigious Oklahoma law firm, Crowe & Dunlevy.

In 1996, his firm was awarded the Exceptional Contribution to Legal Services Award by Legal Services of Eastern Oklahoma.

In 1997 Carson was selected as a White House Fellow, where he was assigned to The Pentagon as a Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense.

In 2000, he was elected as a Democrat to the United States House of Representatives from Oklahoma's 2nd Congressional District, located in the northeastern part of the state.

In the primary, Carson defeated long-term state representative Bill Settle, who was chairman of the Appropriations Committee in the Oklahoma House of Representatives.

A member of the Democratic Party, he served in the United States House of Representatives from 2001 to 2005.

He is the only person to have voted on the authorization of the Iraq War in Congress and to have subsequently fought in it.

After redistricting changed the political composition of his district to be much more favorable to a Democratic candidate, Carson was reelected in 2002 with nearly 75 percent of the vote.

During his tenure in Congress, Carson was generally seen as a moderate Democrat.

He was a member of the conservative Democratic Blue Dog Coalition.

He served on the Transportation Committee, the Natural Resources Committee, and the Small Business Committee.

On October 10, 2002, Brad Carson was among the 81 House Democrats who voted in favor of authorizing the invasion of Iraq.

In 2004, Carson did not seek reelection to the House, and ran for the open U.S. Senate seat that was being vacated by retiring Republican Don Nickles.

He easily won the Democratic primary, and after a tough campaign, lost the election to Republican Tom Coburn, his predecessor in the House.

Despite Carson's loss, election analyst Stuart Rothenberg called the Carson campaign the best-run campaign in the nation in 2004.

The Weekly Standard called him "The Perfect Democrat" After the election, Carson wrote an article for The New Republic which was the subject of much discussion.

He was succeeded in the House by fellow Democrat Dan Boren.

After the 2004 Senate election, Carson's term in the United States Congress expired on January 3, 2005; Carson was succeeded by Dan Boren.

Carson indicated that he had no immediate plans to seek political office, and, in January 2005, he accepted a semester-long teaching fellowship specializing in U.S. politics at Harvard University.

Upon leaving Harvard, he returned to his hometown of Claremore, Oklahoma, and worked as chief executive officer of Cherokee Nation Businesses, which is owned by the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma in Catoosa, Oklahoma.

As an expert in Indian law, Carson oversaw one of the largest businesses in the state, with thousands of employees, hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, and more than a dozen in-house lawyers who specialized in Indian and corporate law.

He served with the 84th EOD Battalion of the US Army in 2008–2009, earning a Bronze Star.

In December 2008, Carson left his post at Cherokee Nation Businesses to deploy to Iraq as an Intelligence Officer in the U.S. Navy.

He served as Under Secretary of the Army from 2014 to 2015 and as General Counsel of the Army from 2012 to 2014.

From 2015 to 2016, Carson was the Acting Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, where he initiated a number of notable reforms to include opening up all combat positions to women, open service by transgender service members, and new recruiting and retention practices.

From 2017 to 2021, Carson was a professor of public policy at the University of Virginia's Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy.

On April 5, 2021, the University of Tulsa announced Carson had been selected to be the 21st president of the university, effective July 1, 2021.

Carson was born in Winslow, Arizona.

His father worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

During Carson's childhood the family relocated a number of times, resulting in Carson being raised in several different Native American communities, including reservations in Nevada, Arizona, and Kansas, as well as the Eastern Band Cherokee Reserve in North Carolina.

As a teenager, Carson moved back to Oklahoma, where his family has roots in the Cherokee Nation, of which Carson is an enrolled member.

Carson studied at Jenks High School and Baylor University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

He became the first student at Baylor in 55 years to be awarded a Rhodes Scholarship.

As a Rhodes Scholar, Carson went to Trinity College, Oxford, and earned a second BA (which became an MA a few years later) in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics.