University Chaplain and Special Advisor to the President Adjunct Professor, Religious Studies

The Reverend William C. Gipson is Associate Vice Provost for Equity and Access at the University of Pennsylvania.Formerly, from 1996 to December 2007, Gipson was the University Chaplain and Special Adviser to the President of the University.

Rev. Gipson is faculty master at the W.E.B. Du Bois College House at Penn.  He is an adjunct assistant professor in the Religious Studies Department and teaches in courses on the topic of the role of religious communities in contemporary urban settings.

Before coming to Penn in 1996 Gipson was Associate Dean of Religious Life and of the Chapel at Princeton University for six and a half years.  Among his accomplishments at Princeton was the founding of the Hallelujah! Worship Service, a Christian non-denominational community of faith.  The worship service reflects the rich variety of the African American religious heritage and is open to all.

Gipson served as Interim Pastor at the New Salem Baptist Church, Trenton, NJ from February 2003- May 2004. He has also served as Interim Pastor of the First Baptist Church, Princeton, NJ from January 2001- November 2002.  He is an associate minister at the Triumph Baptist Church in Philadelphia where the Rev. Dr. James S. Hall, Jr. is the pastor.

In addition, Gipson has traveled internationally to include Poland, where he led an interfaith group of Penn students to some of the sites of the Nazi atrocities; Ghana and South Africa, where he participated with other U.S. clergy and laypeople in a Ford Foundation grant supported project to "re-imagine" the mission work of African American churches on the continent; and preaching in Puerto Rico.

A native of Louisiana, Rev. Gipson began his work in ministry after seminary as Assistant Pastor at the Memorial African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, an historic congregation founded in 1827 in Rochester, NY.   Memorial AME Zion is the church from whose basement Frederick Douglass published his North Star newspaper, and on many occasions suffragist Susan B. Anthony spoke from the pulpit there.

Gipson is a founding council member of Good Schools Pennsylvania; board member of the Association for Religion and Intellectual Life; a member of the Smith College board of trustees, where he serves chair of the committee on investor responsibility; a founding member of the Interfaith Center of Philadelphia and Vicinity; and a former member of the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations and the Princeton Regional School Board.

Rev. Gipson earned a B.A. degree in 1979 in journalism from the University of Louisiana at Monroe and a master of divinity degree in 1987 from the Colgate Rochester Crozer  Divinity School.