Committee to review children;’s issues from birth to age five. McPherson took a five month leave of absence as President of MSU in 2003 to serve as the Director of Economic Policy for the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq, where he reopened the countries banks, helped establish a central bank and helped put in place develop a new currency. In August 2004, McPherson was among five recipients presented with the Distinguished Service Award by U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow for his service in Iraq. Chairman of Dow Jones In February 2007 Dow Jones & Co. named McPherson chairman of the company during its annual shareholding meeting on April 18. McPherson replaced Peter Kann who earlier had announced his retirement. McPherson had served as an independent director of Dow Jones since 1998. As Chairman of Dow Jones & Co., McPherson was deeply involved in the negotiations with Rupert Murdoch over Murdoch's plan to purchase the ‘'Wall Street Journal’'. The Financial Times reported on December 13, 2007 that McPherson led the final annual meeting of Dow Jones where stockholders voted to approve the $5-billion sale of the 125-year-old company including the Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. "I know I speak for so many today when I say that this has been a difficult—and for many—a sad set of discussions," said McPherson, offering "great expectations and hopes" for the future. President of APLU McPherson served as president of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), the nation's oldest higher education association, from 2006 to 2022. During his tenure, McPherson has expanded the association's federal advocacy and worked on efforts aimed at boosting degree completion, enhancing transparency and accountability, strengthening university's research enterprise, and expanding community and economic engagement. He retired on September 1, 2022. McPherson spearheaded the creation of APLU's Powered by Publics: Scaling Student Success initiative, which launched in November 2018. The effort is convening 130 change-ready institutions within 16 “transformation clusters” – reaching 3 million undergraduate students, including 1 million Pell Grant recipients. The effort is aiming to increase college access, eliminate the achievement gap, and award hundreds of thousands more degrees by 2025. It represents the largest-ever such collaborative work. APLU is broadly sharing lessons from the collaboration to help spur student-centered transformation across the sector. McPherson has also championed a range of transparency and accountability efforts. In 2007, he led APLU's role