.jpg)
Wangdali C. “Wali” Bacdayan, a private investor and entrepreneur, and a current trustee of Washington and Lee University, was sworn in as the university’s 32nd rector on Feb. 10. The board unanimously elected him to this role at its meeting last October.
A 1992 graduate of W&L, Bacdayan has been a member of W&L’s board of trustees since 2019. While a student at W&L, he was a dorm counselor, co-chairman of the Student Recruitment Committee, and a member of the football and track and field teams and Sigma Chi fraternity. He received a bachelor of arts, summa cum laude, in economics and mathematics and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Omicron Delta Kappa.
As an alumnus, Bacdayan has served as co-chairman of his fifth and 25th class reunion committees, president of the Pittsburgh alumni chapter, an Alumni Admissions Program chair, and a class agent. He received the university’s Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2017.
Bacdayan earned an M.B.A. from the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University in June 1997. In addition to being a private investor and entrepreneur, he also serves as a venture partner for Delta-v Capital, a technology-focused growth capital fund, and is the principal investor and co-founder of Millie’s Homemade and Southern Steer Butcher. Previously, he was the co-founding partner of Incline Equity Partners, a partner at PNC Equity Partners and a financial analyst in the Mergers and Acquisitions Group of Dean Witter Reynolds Inc.
Bacdayan serves as a board director of The Aaron’s Company and is an investor and board director of several privately held companies, including Diamond Kinetics, Envirovac Holdings LLC, and FrontSteps Community. He is actively involved in philanthropic organizations and has served as a board member of several nonprofit organizations in the Pittsburgh area and his childhood hometown of Natchitoches, La.
He and his wife, Dr. Wendy (Neel) Bacdayan ’94, have three sons, Ben, William and Charlie.
Bacdayan succeeds Michael R. McAlevey, a 1986 graduate of Washington and Lee, who served on W&L’s board of trustees from 2013 to 2024 and as rector from 2020 to 2024.
As rector, McAlevely led the university through a global pandemic and an examination of its name and symbols.
During his four-year tenure, the university raised more than $168 million toward strategic priorities and campus improvements, including the DeLaney Center, universal Leading Edge programs for first-year students, the Houston H. Harte Center for Teaching and Learning, the Richard L. Duchossois Athletic and Recreation Center, the renovation of Elrod Commons, and new facilities for the Williams School of Commerce, Economics, and Politics and the Lindley Center for Student Wellness.
