Fort Hays State University — 2003–2017

Assistant Professor, then Associate Professor, then Professor of Political Science Director of Internships and Assessment (2007–2014) Graduate Studies Director (2009–2016) Chair, Department of Political Science (2014–2016) Director of Liberal Education (2015–2017) Interim Assistant Provost for Quality Management (2016) Interim Dean, The Graduate School (2016–2017)

Fourteen Years of Escalating Leadership

Fort Hays State University is where I became an academic administrator. I arrived in 2003 as an assistant professor with a newly completed Ph.D. and a set of substantive interests in state politics, campaign finance, and civic engagement. I left in 2017 as a former interim dean, former interim assistant provost, former Faculty Senate president, former department chair, and former director of two university-wide programs — having spent the intervening fourteen years accepting every opportunity to lead, learning from what worked and what did not, and building the administrative range that has defined my career since.

FHSU is a regional comprehensive university in Hays, Kansas, serving approximately 16,000 students — roughly 6,000 on campus and 10,000 online — with a distinctive mission oriented toward access, affordability, and distance education innovation. It was an institution with real financial constraints, real shared governance traditions, and real expectations that faculty who led would do so in addition to teaching, research, and service rather than instead of them. Everything I learned about leading within constraints, building trust across skeptical faculties, and managing institutional complexity I learned at FHSU.

The account that follows traces the roles in the order I held them, because the trajectory matters — each role built on the previous one, and the full fourteen years read differently as a narrative of development than as a reverse-chronological list of positions.

Faculty Member and Early Leadership — 2003–2009

I joined FHSU's Political Science department as a tenure-track assistant professor in 2003, earned tenure and promotion to associate professor in 2008, and began taking on administrative responsibilities almost immediately. In my first year I became the ADP Campus Coordinator, launching the campus civic engagement infrastructure that would eventually become the Times Talk program and the FHSU voter engagement initiative. By 2007 I had been appointed Director of Internships and Assessment, responsible for supervising all departmental internship placements, assessing student learning outcomes, and building the data systems that would eventually win the department a Closing the Loop Award from the institution for exemplary use of assessment data to improve program quality.

Those early administrative roles taught me something that has shaped my leadership ever since: that the most important administrative work is often invisible, done in the margins of a teaching load and a research agenda, and that doing it well builds the institutional credibility that earns you the opportunity to do more consequential work later. I was promoted to full professor in 2013 — a recognition of scholarly productivity maintained in parallel with growing administrative responsibility.

Graduate Studies Director — 2009–2016

In 2009 I was appointed Director of Graduate Studies for the Political Science department, a role I held for seven years. The department offered graduate concentrations in political science, public administration, and political management, and I was responsible for recruitment, advising, curriculum development, assessment, and the complete administration of graduate student progress from admission through degree completion.

When I took the role, the department had 38 graduate students. When I left, it had 217 — a 471 percent increase driven by the development of new program concentrations, the creation of a professional politics graduate concentration specifically designed to train campaign professionals and political staffers, revised assessment systems for comprehensive exams, and a systematic overhaul of how the department communicated with prospective and current graduate students. Over seven years I advised more than 400 master's students and supervised 62 master's theses — a mentorship investment that shaped careers and built the department's reputation as a serious graduate program at a regional institution that might not otherwise have been on graduate students' radar.

The Graduate Studies role also gave me my first sustained experience with program design at the graduate level — developing curriculum, building assessment systems, navigating graduate faculty governance, and making the case to institutional leadership for resources the program needed to grow. Those are skills that transfer directly to college-level administration, and I used all of them.

Internship and Assessment Director — 2007–2014

Alongside the Graduate Studies role, I served as Director of Internships and Assessment from 2007 through 2014, responsible for the department's required internship program and its full assessment infrastructure. I built a workbook for internship students to prepare them for the transition to professional environments, developed a rubric-based assessment system for intern performance evaluations, and improved overall assessments of intern performance by 0.2 points on a five-point scale between 2010 and 2013 — a modest-sounding improvement that represented meaningful growth in how well the department was preparing students for the expectations of their supervisors.

The data I collected through the internship assessment program became the foundation for the Closing the Loop Award I received from FHSU in 2015 — the institution's recognition for exemplary use of assessment data to improve academic programs. That award reflected a genuine commitment to what assessment is supposed to do: not generate documentation for accreditation reviewers, but generate knowledge that actually changes how you teach and what you teach.

Chair, Department of Political Science — 2014–2016

In 2014 I served as chair of the Political Science department, a role I held for two years before transitioning to the Liberal Education directorship and interim dean positions. The department I chaired had seven faculty members and approximately 250 students across in-person and online programs, including the graduate concentrations I had been directing since 2009.

As chair I revised the department's recruitment plan and materials, negotiated a 3+2 curriculum agreement with Emporia State University that accelerated access to FHSU's Master of Public Administration for Emporia State undergraduates, directed a complete curriculum mapping exercise, and led the department through the review of its existing assessment systems. The chair role was also the first time I was responsible for departmental budget management in a formal sense — making allocation decisions within a constrained budget while maintaining faculty travel support, course scheduling, and the operational needs of a department with a significant online footprint.

Director of Liberal Education — 2015–2017

In 2015 I was appointed Director of Liberal Education — a university-wide role responsible for overseeing FHSU's general education program, chairing the 25-person Liberal Education Committee, and leading a comprehensive review and redesign of the institution's liberal education framework.

General education redesign is among the most politically complex work in academic administration. Every department has interests in the general education curriculum. Every faculty member has opinions about what students should be required to learn. Every college has resource implications to manage when course requirements change. Leading a redesign process requires the ability to build broad consensus, manage competing interests without losing the thread of the institutional goal, and produce concrete outcomes — approved learning objectives, revised curriculum maps, new course approval processes — through a shared governance structure that can easily become gridlocked.

I developed a two-year, three-phase implementation plan for the redesign and completed the first phase — Faculty Senate approval of proposed learning objectives and goals — within a single academic year. That is a genuinely fast timeline for this kind of institutional change, and it reflected both the quality of the stakeholder engagement process I designed and the political work required to move a diverse faculty toward consensus on contested curricular questions.

The Liberal Education role also included an in-person and social media-based outreach campaign to solicit stakeholder input from students, faculty, staff, and community members — a public engagement component that positioned the redesign as a community conversation rather than an administrative mandate, and that produced better outcomes as a result.

Interim Assistant Provost for Quality Management — 2016

In spring 2016 I was appointed Interim Assistant Provost for Quality Management during a period of personnel transition in the provost's office, serving as the institution's chief accreditation and assessment officer and primary liaison with the Higher Learning Commission. In that role I provided strategic guidance on the institution's AQIP quality improvement initiatives, managed HLC communication and reporting, and maintained the continuity of the institution's accreditation relationships during a sensitive transition period.

The interim provost appointment is the clearest signal in my FHSU record of the level of institutional trust I had earned — being asked to serve as the university's primary HLC liaison during a leadership transition is not a role given to someone the institution is uncertain about.

Interim Dean, The Graduate School — 2016–2017

The FHSU chapter culminated with a year as Interim Dean of the Graduate School — my first formal experience in a dean-level role and the one that confirmed my readiness for senior academic administration.

The Graduate School I led had seventeen graduate assistants, a staff of four, and programmatic responsibility for graduate education across the institution. The scope of the role — overseeing graduate student recruitment, admission, advising, records, degree completion, and academic integrity across every graduate program at the university — required the same kind of systems-level thinking and multi-unit coordination that college-level deanship demands.

During the interim deanship I accomplished several things that went well beyond routine management. I successfully advocated for the adoption of the Workday enterprise resource planning system and supervised the institution's transition to it — a major operational undertaking that required coordinating across academic and administrative units and managing the disruption that any ERP transition produces. I reallocated savings from the ERP transition to fund improved onboarding and support processes for adjunct faculty and graduate teaching assistants. I created the university's first formal orientation program for graduate assistants. I developed a new recruitment system for graduate students that integrated print, web, and social media. I added five new faculty to the Master of Liberal Studies core. I coordinated with the Nursing department to launch FHSU's first doctoral program — a Doctor of Nursing Practice — navigating the program approval, faculty credentialing, and accreditation implications of that launch. I led efforts to seek naming rights for the Graduate School in partnership with the alumni and development offices. And I created a Graduate Council of all departments with graduate programs — a governance innovation that gave graduate program directors a structured forum for communication, coordination, and collective input into graduate education policy.

That list is not exhaustive. It is representative of what a year in an interim dean role looks like when you take the position seriously and treat every day as an opportunity to leave the institution better than you found it.

Faculty Senate and Shared Governance

Running in parallel with all of the administrative roles above was a sustained investment in faculty shared governance that represents a dimension of the FHSU years not captured by any of the position titles. I served as Faculty Senate President from 2011 to 2012, having served as President-Elect the prior year. In that role I presided over the institution's primary faculty governance body, managed the Senate's committee structure, and navigated the relationship between faculty governance and administrative leadership during a period of significant institutional change.

I also served on FHSU's AAUP chapter bargaining team — an experience that gave me a direct and unfiltered understanding of how faculty experience administrative decision-making, what grievances accumulate when communication breaks down, and what genuine respect for faculty governance looks and feels like from the other side of the table. That experience made me a better administrator. Knowing what it feels like to be faculty in a negotiation with administration — the sense of information asymmetry, the frustration with opaque processes, the desire for genuine rather than performative consultation — shaped how I have led departments and how I intend to lead colleges.

Civic Engagement and Times Talk

The civic engagement foundation of my career was built at FHSU, beginning with my appointment as ADP Campus Coordinator in 2004. I founded the Times Talk program in that first year — a weekly brownbag discussion series conducted in partnership with the New York Times that brought faculty, students, and community members together to discuss current events, practice civic dialogue, and model the kind of informed, engaged citizenship that the American Democracy Project exists to cultivate.

Times Talk ran for fourteen years. I left FHSU in 2017. The program continued until 2017, outlasting my departure — evidence that what I built was institutional infrastructure, not a personal project that required my continued presence to survive. That is the standard I hold community-building to, and it is the standard the Times Talk record meets.

I also hosted Talking Democracy, a public affairs television program that earned the Kansas Association of Broadcasters Award for Best Public Affairs Program in 2011 — extending the department's civic engagement work into the regional media landscape and building the public commentary practice that has become a significant dimension of my professional identity.

Scholarly Recognition

The FHSU years produced consistent scholarly recognition alongside the administrative record. I received the President's Distinguished Scholar Award in 2015–2016 — the highest scholarly honor the institution awards annually to a single faculty member — and was a finalist the prior year. I held the Master's II Faculty Designation, FHSU's highest recognition for graduate faculty scholarship, during the 2010–2013 and 2015–2018 academic years. I was a four-time finalist for the Pilot Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Maintaining a productive scholarly record across fourteen years that included a Faculty Senate presidency, an interim deanship, an interim provost appointment, two directorships, a department chair, and the founding and operation of a civic engagement program is not something every administrator can point to. It reflects a genuine commitment to the full range of what academic life requires, and a conviction that administrative leadership should not come at the expense of the scholarly identity that gives it credibility.