Born in
Baton Rouge, Dolores Richard attended public and parochial schools in that city and, still in her home city, went on to
Southern University from which she earned her B.S. degree in mathematics in 1957. Also at Southern she met her future husband, Hermon Spikes. Spikes continued her education at the
University of Illinois in
Champaign-Urbana where she earned a master of science degree in mathematics and then returned in 1958 to
Louisiana where she married Spikes and began teaching high school science in
Mossville, a small, mostly black community near
Lake Charles. In December, 1971 (with a dissertation titled "Semi-Valuations and Groups of Divisibility") Dolores Spikes earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from
Louisiana State University. In the 1980s at
Southern University Spikes moved into various administrative positions—starting in 1982 as Assistant to the Chancellor and, in the late eighties, she served as
Chancellor for both the
Baton Rouge and
New Orleans Campuses of Southern University—in fact, she was the
first female chancellor of a
Louisiana Land Grant University. In 1987 she was appointed to the board of
Harvard University's Institute of Educational Management. In 1988 Dr. Spikes accepted the position of president of the Southern University and A&M College System.-- she not only was the first woman to lead a public college or university in Louisiana, she also was the first woman in the US to serve as chief administrator for a university system. ==References==