Cathy Cox

Cathy Cox became the 12th president of Georgia College & State University, the state’s public liberal arts university in Milledgeville, Georgia, in the fall of 2021, leading the university to year-over-year record enrollment levels since rebounding from the pandemic. She previously served as dean of Mercer University School of Law and, for a decade prior to that, as president of Young Harris College.

Cox was a practicing lawyer and litigator in Atlanta and her hometown of Bainbridge, Georgia, before her entry into higher education, and remains an active member of the State Bar of Georgia. She was elected twice to the Georgia House of Representatives and twice as Georgia’s Secretary of State, becoming the first woman in Georgia’s history to serve in this Constitutional office. While her tenure as Secretary of State did not garner the notoriety of the current Georgia Secretary of State, her evaluation of Georgia’s hodge-podge of voting equipment following the 2000 Bush-Gore presidential election led to a year-long study of voting equipment and the legislative adoption of her recommendation that Georgia move of all of its counties to the first uniform touch-screen electronic voting equipment in the U.S. in 2002, a transition which Cal Tech/MIT said transformed Georgia from one of the worst voting accuracy states to one of the four best. Cox has subsequently taught Election Law at both the University of Georgia and Mercer Law Schools and she continues to follow improvements and impediments to Georgia’s voting processes and voting rights.

Cox is an honor graduate of Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College, the University of Georgia’s School of Journalism, and Mercer Law School, where she served as Editor-in-Chief of the Mercer Law Review. She has been recognized annually as one of the 500 most influential Georgians by Georgia Trend Magazine, and in 2025 received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Chief Justice’s Commission on Professionalism at the Georgia Supreme Court.