WCU Stories      January 5, 2023

Western Carolina University alum Preston Blakely will be the keynote speaker for the Chancellor’s List Award Ceremony.

The event, celebrating students who made the chancellor’s list during the fall 2022 semester, will be Tuesday, Feb. 7, at 5 p.m. in the Bardo Arts Center Performance Hall.

At 27, Blakely is the youngest mayor elected in Fletcher and the youngest serving mayor in North Carolina. His first year in office has been tracked and covered by news entities across the state, including WLOS, Blue Ridge Public Radio, The Mountain Express and The Urban News, and the Citizen-Times. He was recently featured in the fall issue of WCU Magazine.

Blakely is well known to the Western Carolina University community as someone from a long lineage of local leaders who are future focused and community oriented. Upon graduating in 2019 from WCU with a master’s degree in public affairs, he was named “Outstanding Public Affairs Student in Public Management.” Blakely has now served his first year full as mayor, while also managing his family’s Asheville-based business, Quality Janitorial Group.

Blakely has consistently invested in his education and community presence with pride and purpose. At WCU, he was the graduate assistant in the Public Policy Institute. As part of his capstone project, he created performance metrics for the city of Hendersonville’s Public Works Department. As a resident of Fletcher, he has both volunteered and served on nonprofit boards. Now, as an elected official he hopes to inspire other young people in leadership and active citizenship.

Qualifications for Chancellor's List Award:

• Student must be an undergraduate
• Student must have achieved a 3.8 GPA or higher during the previous semester
• Student must have retained full-time status (12 credit hours or more) for the entire semester
• All students’ grades must have been finalized by the end of the term (no incompletes given)

Student recipients of the Chancellor’s List for fall 2022 semester will receive an RSVP email in December and January for the Chancellor’s List Award Ceremony in Spring 2023.

For more information on the Chancellor’s List, visit transition.wcu.edu or visit site now.