Though he isn’t from Franklin County, it has a sense of familiarity for Ferrum College’s new president Joseph “Jody” Spooner.
Spooner, who is coming to the college from Yale University, was raised on a farm in Florida, so he feels right at home in the rural community where the small, private liberal arts college is located.
As a teenager, Spooner said, he was “just desperate to get off the farm and desperate to go other places.” But now that he’s older and wiser, he’s seen the value in rural communities. It’s something to which he and his wife, Nicole Gelfert, wanted to return.
“When we started thinking about the next stages in life, we knew we wanted to be closer to our families in Florida, but also more importantly just closer to the spirit of the kind of communities that we were born into and really have benefited from our entire lives,” he said.
