Melville Peter McPherson[1] (born October 27, 1940) is president emeritus of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities.

His public service career began as a Peace Corps volunteer in Peru, where during 1964 and 1965 he spent 18 months in Lima running a food distribution program and setting up credit unions.

It's just a matter of asking people what they want to get done, finding out what the formal and informal rules are and figuring out ways to do things differently, while doing practical work in that environment.

He joined the administration of fellow Michigander Gerald Ford in 1975 as special assistant to the President and Deputy Director, Presidential Personnel Office.

With UNICEF, he and USAID led the worldwide effort to deal with diarrhea and dehydration, then the biggest killer of children in the developing world.

This involved massive increase in the use of Oral Rehydration Therapy (ORT) and saved millions of lives: "At AID, you learn the process of deciding as a group large issues," McPherson said.

He chaired the U.S. banking industry committee that advised the U.S. government on the negotiations of NAFTA, the trade agreement between the U.S., Mexico and Canada.

He developed the idea and was a leader of the Michigan Life Sciences Corridor that provided grants for research and commercialization of intellectual property.

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 country's banks, helped establish a central bank, and helped put in place develop a new currency.

[16] 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.

[18] McPherson spearheaded the creation of APLU's Powered by Publics: Scaling Student Success initiative, which launched in November 2018.

The effort is aiming to increase college access, eliminate the achievement gap, and award hundreds of thousands more degrees by 2025.

USU works with these institutions to pilot, refine, and share the most effective practices to accelerate innovation across higher education.

Its work is centered on recruiting, admitting, retaining, and graduating high‐need, traditionally at‐risk students while reducing costs, reexamining campus business models, and fostering mutually beneficial campus‐community engagements.

APLU established the Peter McPherson Lifetime Achievement Award at the end of his tenure to honor an individual whose career has been dedicated to the service and leadership of public and land-grant universities.

[26][27] McPherson was appointed in 2002 by President George W. Bush as the chairman to the Board for International Food and Agricultural Development (BIFAD).