August 27, 2026

I appreciate this annual tradition, a time to welcome everyone to the new academic year. As this is my first fall welcome, I want to offer some insight into who I am, why I’m here, and share thoughts about Westminster’s thriving future. I’d like to begin with a bit from an essay I wrote about higher education, which was published last year in a book titled “The Divide between the Humanities and the Sciences: Why it matters and how it can be repaired.”

The piece is called “Educational Ecologies.”

There is a photograph by my desk of an adult female chimpanzee leaning up against a large termite nest. She’s holding a long, thin vine in one hand, and with her other she is pulling it through her mouth. Standing on top of the nest, looking down with great intensity is a small, young chimpanzee. By watching as his mother repeatedly inserts the vine into the nest opening, pulls it out and threads it through her mouth, he is learning how to fish and eat termites.

I keep this photograph in my line of sight because I live in the world of education and the photograph evokes, in the most elemental way, a critically important, long-standing question that we must ask ourselves. How do we educate the next generation?

Education is arguably one of the most fundamental aspects of the human condition. Our ability to learn is foundational to our success as individuals, as cultures, as societies, and ultimately as a species. As evidenced by the chimp story, education isn’t a uniquely human trait. We are not distinct or special in our ability to learn nor teach. Yet given our species’ extraordinary ability to manipulate and mold the world in ways that are both undeniably beneficial and destructive, the answer to this question about how we teach the next generation is exceedingly complicated, an answer that carries enormous, multi-dimensional implications for ourselves and the other millions of species with whom we share planet Earth.

How do we educate the next generation?

As an ecologist and a humanist who writes fiction, an adjunct instructor at Westminster (I taught Science and Society, and later a Nature Writing May term), a longtime admirer of this school, and now, as president, I believe that I am in the right place at the right time with the right people to deliberate on this question. Together, we will explore, and then implement well-informed and inventive strategies that create a differentiated, promising, and lasting future for what I’m calling–thanks to Interim Provost Lance Newman–the Westminster Way.

In the few short weeks that I’ve been on campus, I’ve appreciated the hospitality and support from everyone I’ve met. You’ve welcomed me warmly and openly. Thank you for that, and for the work happening across campus to support our collective transition into the start of a new school year and a new chapter for Westminster. I am especially thankful for your trust in the presidential search committee and for their labor. Standing here before you today, I am “over the moon” to be a part of this community that values rigor, the lessons we learn from challenges, and the rewards of teaching, learning, and student success.

At last week’s faculty retreat, I was asked how my background and experience as an ecologist inform my leadership. The question gave me permission to gush and rave about ecology, the study of the relationships between organisms and their living and non-living environments. Ecology is a framework that demands attention to detail and asks us to consider multiple scales, small and large, in both space and time. Yet for me, ecology is more than a biological field of study.

I have come to integrate the work of the French philosopher, Felix Guattari’s “Three Ecologies,” into my thinking. Guattari advocated for the expansion of the notion of ecology to include social, cultural, and economic ecologies, as well as mental and spiritual ecologies.

This multi-dimensional view of ecology is my go-to framework for asking and answering questions, one that requires an understanding of component parts as well as the functional systems that connect them. These principles, patterns, and practices are the deep roots of what an organizational leader needs to understand a living campus ecosystem: the shared habits that keep our community stable through seasons of growth and challenging cycles.

This is where I am today, but as a young adult starting college, and like many of our students, I didn’t have the intellectual or emotional maturity to articulate meta-cognitive understandings of disciplines or know how I would come to my way of exploring, asking questions, and finding answers for myself about the world.

I was fortunate in that I landed at Earlham College where faculty had thought about education in such ways that allowed them to create experiences that made me develop thinking and envisioning skills in both the sciences and the humanities, a place where they challenged and inspired me to integrate the two.

Now, some 30 years later, I draw on those experiences as well as the lessons learned from years of organizational leadership and academic collaborations designing educational models. More than ever, I am fully persuaded that the sciences, the arts, and the humanities need and rely on each other, in theory and practice.

Before developing my ideas further, I wish to note that I do not reject specialization per se because specialization allows us to make much desired, quick advances in fields. Yet, we also know that the best solutions to our most complex environmental, social, and economic challenges will only come from integrative approaches to problem solving.

We become experts by developing a mental framework for how to approach the world, but each framework creates blind spots. We need experts in other disciplines to look at and question the assumptions and methods of our disciplines. Science has its own tools, artistry, and aesthetics that benefit, in the global sense, from being pushed at by the tools, artistry, and aesthetics of the humanities. The same can be said of the relationship between art and science, and art and the humanities. All of these disciplines must continue to engage in highly focused inquiry. The point I’m making is that we must support their existence and progress while simultaneously rejecting their separation within educational institutions.

As some of you may know, I served as dean of the Honors College at the University of Utah for 11 years. Founded in 1972, the curriculum was intended to provide students with foundational knowledge in the humanities and thinking and writing skills to query, understand, and create their places in the world. At the start of my tenure as dean, I observed that the humanities foundation was strong but dated. The curriculum included few non-male, non-Western texts and therefore offered fewer opportunities for students to compare big questions across time and culture. Also, the program wasn’t explicitly bringing scientists, humanists, and artists together to investigate and explore complex issues that arise through interactions between humans, other organisms, and the natural environment, questions that were essentially ecological, or relational in nature.

I set out, with the faculty, to create curricula that exposed students to ecological, relational pedagogies that would simultaneously help them integrate across disciplines. We organized a set of integrated minors, which fulfilled general education requirements, around three big themes: Ecology and the Environment, Global Health, and the third was called Human Rights and Resources. All three had local and global versions as well as intensive field components. Students responded positively to the structures we created to develop and strengthen the practice of inquiry—not necessarily what to think but how to think—and to help them develop tools that would allow them to observe more, ask better questions, and see both complexity and connections. My years as dean were dynamic, collaborative and highly rewarding.

Desiring to expand my own journey of learning and discovery led me to my first presidency at College of the Atlantic, on Mount Desert Island in Bar Harbor, Maine, a school where all students earn a Bachelor of Arts in Human Ecology. Founded in 1969 as a “bold experiment” in the liberal arts, there are no departments, no majors, and no set curriculum. Each student navigates a self-directed education, which must include a 440-hour internship, with the help of mentors, teachers, advisors. Students culminate their studies with a significant senior project. College of the Atlantic is a rare educational model where students think and do with their minds and with their hands, and they leave and get hired because they know how to think hard about things and make hard things come to life for themselves and for the greater good. I learned a great deal as president.

Yet, when I learned the presidency of Westminster would open, my heart leapt because I believe that Westminster University inhabits one of the most exciting spaces in higher education, possessing the best elements of both of my former institutions. This school has the right mix of options for students—disciplinary majors and interdisciplinary work on the one hand—and a faculty and staff with individual talents as well as a collective, open-minded willingness to innovate. These qualities, coupled with a community-based, relational approach to education, are exactly what students need and want. That is why the work each of you does here matters so much.

Being here at Westminster University feels as if my everything in my life has come full circle.

I have extraordinary confidence in this institution, in its people, and in what we can accomplish together. And there is plenty to be proud of. Let me share just a few of examples that Cabinet members have shared with me these past few weeks:

  • The Great Salt Lake Institute is the state's only research center dedicated exclusively to Great Salt Lake.
  • Newsweek and Gender Fair named Westminster as one of America’s Best Colleges for Women 2026
  • Also in 2026, US News and World Report, ranked us a best college for Veterans in the nation.
  • Now in its 23rd year, Westminster is home to the only McNair Scholars Program in the state.
  • In 2026, our L.S. Skaggs Integrated Wellness Center, a fully solar-powered home for student wellness, was named the nation's Best Higher Education Project by Engineering News-Record.
  • Through the Community Clinic and Training Center, graduate students in our CACREP-accredited counseling program provide free mental health care to those who need it most. That program holds an 8-year accreditation, the gold standard in the field.
  • Westminster’s Tax Clinics, which serve over 1,000 community members each year, provide free tax preparation and advocacy to low-to-moderate income families, older adults, service workers, military members, and taxpayers for whom English is not their first language.

These institutional highlights convey who Westminster is: interdisciplinary, engaged with our community, committed to access, and willing to experiment. Our students also give us reasons to be proud: our first-year retention is 86%; our four-year graduation rate for the Fall 2021 cohort was the highest in Utah; three-quarters of our graduates remain in the state; and 90% report finding employment within three months. Behind every one of those numbers is a student whose life was changed by Westminster.

These highlights occur alongside many challenges facing higher education as a sector, including the stark realities about the narratives questioning the value of a college education, particularly in relation to cost. There is increased competition for students as well as rising operational costs, inflation, and federal funding uncertainties. The multiple pressures are neither abstract nor temporary. The landscape in which we currently operate has been disrupted and, as an ecologist, I’d say, it is now disturbance driven. In evolutionary speak, sometimes long periods of stability are interrupted by rapid bursts of transformation, driven by sudden environmental shifts. In this new disturbance driven reality, institutions that survive will not simply refine models. They will clarify who they are today and, most importantly, build cultures and systems that allow for adaptation in response to the moment, so they can intentionally evolve to shape their futures.

Westminster, having just celebrated its sesquicentennial last year, stands at a consequential moment that bridges its past with its future. We have evolved and changed many times in the past 150 years and will continue to do so in response to the world today.

I don't pretend to have all the answers. In fact, I don't think any one person should. My first responsibility is to listen, learn, build relationships, and understand this ecosystem. I look forward to spending time listening and learning from you.

Listening and sharing will lead us into the work of building a new strategic plan: one that reflects our ambitions, our values, our responsibilities, and the realities of the moment, and then create our future self.

As I conclude, I return to the question I asked at the start: How do we educate the next generation?

Remember the photo of the chimpanzees? The image asks me to stretch my thinking toward another, better framework for education. Like chimps, we transfer knowledge from generation to generation. We model behavior from old to young.

The young chimp learns by watching what the adult chimp does. But, humans can do something more: we can ask whether what we inherited is still useful, whether it is true, what it leaves out, and what might be possible instead.

Our students can and should learn from the past, but they must also learn to question it and connect it to something new.

This is what I believe Westminster can do exceptionally well.

Together, I am certain, we can teach students not merely how to navigate the world they’ve inherited, but how to imagine, and then build, the just futures they want.

As educators, we will look forward, with an eye to the lesson of history; we will look outward as often as we look inward. We will be visionaries who can move beyond the basic elements of our individual egos, and think not in just in disciplines, but in new ways that integrate and extend beyond the short term.

The Westminster of the future will be known for providing and education worthy of the talents of our youth as well as the breadth and severity of modern challenges they will face. We will be known for our educational systems that allow for the creation of new systems; in essence, an institution and education that results in a rebuilding and bettering of our world.

And that, to me, is our Westminster Way Forward.