About Chapman

I am a political scientist, a civic educator, and an academic leader who has spent more than twenty years building things — programs, departments, assessment systems, civic infrastructure — at regional public universities whose missions I believe in deeply. That work has taken me from a faculty position at Fort Hays State University to department chairs at three institutions, an interim graduate deanship, a directorship of civic engagement, and a growing body of scholarship and public engagement that connects my research to the communities my universities have served.

The Citizen-Leader Idea

The concept that has organized my thinking about teaching, leadership, and civic education for my entire career is one I call citizen-leadership. A citizen-leader is not defined by title or position. It is an individual who, regardless of where they sit in an organization or a community, chooses to think and act in ways that improve the world around them — who speaks at the city commission meeting, communicates with their elected officials, engages in the collective work of governance, and encourages others to do the same.

In an academic context, citizen-leadership looks like shared governance practiced with genuine engagement rather than reluctant obligation — faculty who helm strategic initiatives, offer honest critique to administration, and work collectively to build institutions that serve students well. My role as an administrator, as I have come to understand it, is not to make decisions for my colleagues but to subsidize their capacity to make good ones — providing the information, the context, and the encouragement that allows faculty to participate confidently in the governance of the institutions they have committed their careers to.

That framing draws on a tradition of scholarship I encountered in graduate school and have returned to ever since. Robert Putnam's work on social capital and civic decline, and Samuel Popkin's research on how citizens process political information, both point toward the same conclusion: engagement is not a natural condition that institutions can take for granted. It has to be cultivated, structured, and sustained. That insight shapes how I build programs, how I run departments, and how I think about the purpose of higher education at the institutional level.

Leadership Through Evidence

Citizen-leadership without accountability is aspiration. What gives it traction is a commitment to evidence — to measuring what we do, understanding whether it works, and being honest enough to change course when it does not. That commitment has expressed itself throughout my career in assessment work, accreditation leadership, and data-informed program development. The enrollment and retention gains I have achieved at every institution I have led were not accidents of circumstance. They were the results of systematic attention to what students needed, what the data showed, and what changes in curriculum, advising, and departmental culture would close the gaps.

I am also a believer in continuous quality improvement as an organizing principle for academic administration — not as a corporate import but as a genuine intellectual commitment to the idea that what cannot be measured cannot be improved, and that the best academic leaders are the ones who build systems that make honest self-assessment possible and act on what those systems reveal.

Trust as the Foundation

None of the above is possible without trust, and trust in academic leadership is both the hardest thing to build and the easiest thing to lose. My approach to leadership is deeply collaborative — I do not accomplish my goals by issuing directives but by earning the confidence of the people I work with, consistently doing what I say I will do, and demonstrating through repeated action that my decisions are guided by the collective good rather than individual interest or institutional convenience. Every interaction with a faculty member, a student, a staff colleague, or an external partner is an opportunity to either deepen or diminish that trust. I try never to forget it.

Why Regional Public Universities

I have spent my entire career at regional public comprehensive universities, and that is not an accident of geography or opportunity. It is a considered commitment. These institutions — accessible, mission-driven, embedded in their communities, serving students who are often the first in their families to pursue a degree — are among the most consequential in American higher education, and among the most undervalued. The transformative power of higher education that I believe in most deeply is not the power of the elite research university to produce Nobel laureates. It is the power of the regional comprehensive university to change the trajectory of a first-generation student's life, to strengthen the civic and economic fabric of the community it serves, and to model what it looks like for an institution to take its democratic responsibilities seriously.

As Fischman and Gardner argue in The Real World of College, the most important thing a university can do for its students is cultivate a transformational rather than a transactional mindset — one oriented toward intellectual curiosity and lifelong growth rather than credential acquisition and minimal engagement. Everything I do as a faculty member and an administrator is aimed at building the institutional conditions in which that transformation is possible: for students, for faculty, and for the communities our universities exist to serve.