Over Twenty-Four Years, Badenhausen Established Westminster’s Honors College as a National Leader in Honors Education
Dr. Alicia Cunningham-Bryant Named Interim Dean
Westminster University announced today that Dr. Richard Badenhausen, dean of the Honors College, will be departing from his role at the end of the Spring 2025 semester. Badenhausen, an accomplished academic and a leader in the national honors community, will step into a new role as the dean of the Montana State University Honors College.
“For twenty-four years, Dr. Badenhausen has been a visionary leader at Westminster University, transforming the Honors Program and subsequently the Honors College into a regional leader in Honors education and deeply impacting the lives of hundreds of students and faculty members,” said President Beth Dobkin. “We are deeply grateful for his many contributions to our university, and we wish him all the best as he begins this new chapter.”
“Westminster University is a special place where commitment to student-centered learning is deep and authentic,” said Badenhausen. “Collaborating with the university’s gifted faculty and staff over the years to help build that culture has been a true joy and an experience I will always cherish.”
A leader in the national Honors community, Dr. Badenhausen previously served as president of the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC), was a two-time member of the NCHC Board of Directors, and an editorial board member of HIP: Honors in Practice. He has served as an Honors consultant and reviewer at more than 20 colleges and universities around the country and co-chaired the task force that rewrote the national honors standards for the first time in 30 years in 2022.
Dr. Badenhausen has delivered over 70 national presentations on Honors education and regularly publishes in journals like JNCHC: The Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council. In 2011, he was named an NCHC Fellow; and in 2016 he received NCHC's Sam Schuman Award for Excellence at a Four-Year Institution.
Dr. Badenhausen has published widely on the work of T. S. Eliot and modernist literature, including T. S. Eliot and the Art of Collaboration (Cambridge UP). At Westminster, he teaches classes in the humanities, theories of place, and trauma studies. He is the 2014 recipient of the university’s Gore Excellence in Teaching award and two-time winner of Westminster's Manford A. Shaw Publication Prize. Dr. Badenhausen holds a doctorate and a master’s degree, both from the University of Michigan, and a bachelor’s degree from Colgate University.
Westminster University’s Honors College, one of only two Honors Colleges in Utah, is renowned for its distinctive course of study that offers one of the most comprehensive interdisciplinary, team-taught Honors curriculums in the country.
Current Honors College faculty member Dr. Alicia Cunningham-Bryant has been named Interim Dean. An award-winning teacher, Dr. Cunningham-Bryant holds the Kim T. Adamson Chair in the Honors College and directs the campus-wide Office of Fellowship Advising. Dr. Cunningham-Bryant earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of California, San Diego and her PhD at Yale University, where she wrote a dissertation entitled Engraved in Stone: The Role of Offering Tables in Meroitic Funerary Religion. She teaches courses on how food shapes and is shaped by human culture and behavior; art, architecture and the environment; and works to bridge the divide between the ancient and modern.
