January 17, Alberto Pimentel Storbeck/Pimentel & Associates. Dear Alberto,

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1 January 17, 2012 Alberto Pimentel Storbeck/Pimentel & Associates Dear Alberto, Thank you for informing me I have been nominated by multiple individuals to serve as the next President of Westminster College and for our productive conversations about this opportunity. After careful consideration, I am delighted to submit my application materials. I hope the members of the search committee will concur with you that my administrative experience and accomplishments make this an excellent fit. I have completed a decade as Dean of the College of Humanities at the University of Utah, where I also have served as Associate Vice President for Interdisciplinary Studies and Special Advisor to the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs. Given our University s decentralized governance, I function in many ways through these roles as a president of a core college while also building bridges throughout the university community as a whole. The model I have promoted and successfully facilitated is that of a strong and innovative liberal arts college, committed to faculty and student excellence and involvement, community partnerships, and to creating new paradigms for learning which enhance our national profile. My interest in Westminster is an interest in devoting the next decade of my career toward leading an already fine college to increased stature and viability with significantly improved fiscal resources. This opportunity also addresses my preference to stay in Salt Lake City and to build on the relationships I have established here in a position that would fulfill my leadership ambitions within an environment conducive to my core principles. Your position description speaks to these principles and to my professional emphases as an academic leader. Your College-wide Learning Goals, to which I would add information and bio-literacy and a focus on problemsolving that blends professional and liberal arts education, coincide with the new directions in which I have been nudging undergraduate education at the U. Your portfolio concept parallels the signature experience idea I was instrumental in formulating here. I am committed to expanding resources, alumni outreach, strategic planning, civic engagement, and community building. Under my leadership, community partnerships and service learning have been elevated substantially, creating productive town/gown relationships and enhancing the overall philanthropic culture. I believe in a constructively integrated curriculum that addresses significant global issues from interdisciplinary perspectives and translates theory into practice. I have helped to transform our strategic planning processes so they are more inclusive, transparent, visionary, and tied to fundraising, budgetary planning and accountability. The promotion and attainment of diversity has been a hallmark of my administration. I recognize higher education is at a crossroads, with changing student demographics, economic constraints, disciplinary paradigm shifts, compelling curricular needs for information, bio- and global literacy, and a necessity to communicate its relevance to contemporary challenges and complexities. Its foundational contributions to an informed, just, and productive citizenry require more targeted articulation in a era of growing skepticism about the value of a liberal arts

2 education. Sustaining and broadening its influence necessitates a focus on innovation through visionary but prudent management. I consider this crossroads an exciting opportunity to solidify what is best and to provide vigorous leadership for future directions. Westminster s leadership must possess the ability to take initiative in the face of ambiguity and to place it ahead of the curve nationally as changes occur. I strongly believe presidents must be effective entrepreneurs. I have raised over $50 million since coming to Utah, including funds for new capital projects and improvements, endowed chairs, scholarships and internships, pedagogical innovation, faculty research, and programmatic support. Alumni giving in our College has grown from 2% to 23% since I became Dean with well over 2500 new donors, and development giving has increased an average of 300% annually. Our communications and branding strategies have made us the most googled college of Humanities in the country while markedly enhancing engagement in our programs and activities. I have spent a lot of time getting to know project directors at foundations and federal agencies, relationships I would bring with me. External grants have grown 1500% under my leadership. I also have partnered with TIAA-CREF to promote their socially responsible investment portfolio as an option for our donors and recently worked with their New York office on a national conference held in Salt Lake City about socially responsible investing. I was hired at Utah in part to heal a college suffering from moribund academic programs, fiscal difficulties, low productivity and tense community relations, and poor recruitment and retention of the best faculty and students. The College of Humanities is the second largest of the University of Utah s fifteen colleges, graduating over 20% of its undergraduates annually, with 230 faculty, 3500 undergraduate majors, and 400 graduate students. It includes the Departments of Communication, English, History, Languages and Literature, Linguistics, and Philosophy; the American West, Asia, Middle East, Endangered American Indian Languages, Humanities, and Writing Centers; and the Applied Ethics, British Studies, Documentary, Environmental Humanities, Environmental Communication, International, Latin American, Literacy, New Media, Peace and Conflict Studies, Comparative Literature and Culture, Religious Studies, Organizational and Interpersonal Healthcare, Conflict Resolution, and University Writing programs. Our Communication department has more majors than any other department on campus and the International Studies Program, which I started, is the fastest growing nondisciplinary major in the University. I oversee a substantial budget and endowment, and also allocate resources from research overhead funds, expendable revenue from endowments, and other revenue streams. I have been actively involved in focused and effective strategic planning, generating innovative academic programs, significantly elevated fund-raising, enhanced faculty and student recruitment and retention with an emphasis on quality and diversity, implementation of meaningful assessment measures, and fostering collaborations across campus and the general community. Internship opportunities for our students have increased substantially under my watch. As a result, the College is now widely perceived as the energetic and creative centerpiece of the University, a place with which other members of the community actively seek partnerships. 2

3 Our Title VI-funded Asia Center, Latin American Studies Program, Middle East Center, and International Studies Program report to me and, as Associate Vice President for Interdisciplinary Studies, I helped to coordinate and to fund collaborative research and teaching endeavors among University faculty who previously were unaware of each other s existence, let alone the overlap in their interests. In addition to establishing or enhancing programs in Bioethics, Disability Studies, Environmental and Sustainability Studies, Healthcare, Information and Visual Literacy, Values and Ethics, and Women s Health and Justice, I have been instrumental in the creation of an eminently usable faculty research database to help promote these interactions. In addition to coordinating and administering innovative curricular and pedagogical projects and international internships, I have funded interdisciplinary research seed grant projects and helped to increase external funding in this area. I also pioneered the country s first graduate program in Environmental Humanities and personally raised the endowment to sustain it while helping to launch our University s sustainability curriculum and efforts. My activities within the central administration leadership have steadily increased so that I now work on many University priorities. I advise the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs on our academic mission and have helped to spear-head our international and interdisciplinary emphases. I have helped to plan our nearly completed $1.2 billion capital campaign, chaired the searches for our new Vice President for Institutional Advancement and Dean of Honors, and helped to design the five-year campus master plan. As a member of the University s leadership team, I have helped to establish our priorities for our lobbyists and congressional delegation for state and federal support and interact regularly with trustees, government officials, and members of our national advisory council. I play a frequent and multi-faceted role as a representative of the University in the community. I also have been centrally involved in recruitment at all levels, revamping the Honors program, organizing new interdisciplinary curricular initiatives, building programmatic and external funding bridges, and consulting with our University endowment managers to expand options. In addition, I have piloted strategies that have enhanced our national profile. In other words, I frequently and increasingly have performed presidential-level roles. Some of my major administrative accomplishments in the past ten years include: (1) increasing development funding to the College by a 300% average annually for a total of over $50 million, and increasing alumni giving from 2% to 23% with broad-based donor satisfaction and alumni outreach programs; (2) increasing external grant funding by a 1500% average annually and establishing effective relationships with several foundations and federal agencies; (3) raising a $4.5 million endowment, the largest in the University s history for an endowed chair in British Studies, a $2.4 million endowed chair in Philosophy, and a $4.2 million endowment for the country s first master s program in Environmental Humanities; (4) securing substantial lead gifts for new endowed chairs in Brazilian and New Media Studies; (5) establishing several new interdisciplinary and international programs and centers with numerous campus, community, national, and international collaborators; (6) enhancing significantly faculty recruitment, retention, diversity (from 11% to 19%), salaries, and research support; (7) improving substantially public relations and marketing of the College and enhanced visibility in the 3

4 community; (8) conducting a successful first generation scholarship campaign that has elevated the level of student diversity on campus; (9) substantially expanding community, foundation, and corporate partnerships; (10) increasing undergraduate majors in the College by 15%; number of student credit hours earned by the College by 20%; student diversity by 30%; number of undergraduate degrees by 20% while improving quality and flexibility; (11) revamping College undergraduate advising and generating a College-wide advising constitution; (12) raising $17 million in private funds and securing legislative approval for a new Humanities building which opened fall 2008; (13) establishing successful donor groups and partnership boards to assist in fund-raising; and (14) establishing the first University Writing Center and securing funding for a community Family Literacy Center. In 2008, I was awarded the University s Diversity and Equity award for the person or unit contributing the most to advance these causes. Along with the Distinguished Teaching award I previously received, I am most proud of this achievement. I have worked in an administrative capacity at three universities and have managed to navigate their complexities effectively. I am committed to a vibrant administration that offers dynamic and innovative direction while dealing ethically with practical concerns. My management style is consultative and emphasizes shared governance, collegiality and thoughtful diplomacy, although I often have made the tough, lonely, and not entirely popular decisions that come to the top of the chain of command. I have learned the values of clear and careful communication, attention to detail, positive public perception, healthy partnerships and collaborations, and committed involvement of alumni and community. I try to be organized, visible, responsive, and responsible, and have learned these are qualities to which the academic and broader community reacts favorably. What I try to do most as an administrator is to be a realist while maintaining the idealistic energy that initially motivated my interest in becoming an educator. I consider myself highly adaptable and successfully sensitive to the cultural nuances of the various places in which I have lived and worked. In other words, I recognize that the forced imposition of an external agenda rarely succeeds, but that positive transformation occurs through a shared vision responsive to the specific mission and aspirations of the institution. This attitude has served me well in developing networks of supporters and in facilitating sustainable community responses. I believe a president in higher education serves as leader, facilitator and entrepreneur. The person in such a role must recognize that an intellectually alive academy has a diverse set of agendas and encourage its pluralism while also insisting on accountability and transparency. His/her vision should be one that pulls those agendas together in a complementary fashion so that cohesive identity, distinction, and consensus all are achieved. I also strongly believe that colleges should be actively engaged in and make a profound contribution to the communities in which they exist and that the President is the key liaison. I think I have been energetically responsive to these challenges in my present position, and trust my principles and experience would serve me well as President. In addition to being a productive literary scholar, with six published books in respected presses, numerous articles and reviews, I serve as general editor for a prestigious series with University of Virginia Press. My scholarship and teaching have been motivated by the same interests that 4

5 5 motivate me as an administrator. I see a necessary interdependence between the theoretical and the practical, and I am passionately committed to promoting the power and purpose of higher education as the cornerstone of a just and democratic society. Westminster is well-positioned to expand its impressive status and to help model the directions for effective 21 st century liberal arts education. Bridging Westminster s past and future seems a key task for the next president. Visionary and inclusive strategic planning will help distinguish it from other top liberal arts colleges, chart innovative directions that become national models, and lead to significant and successful fundraising. Raising Westminster s national and regional profile through innovative marketing and branding strategies will help present compelling reasons for top students to choose it and encourage alumni and foundation giving. To accomplish these goals will require nimbleness, energy, engagement, and broad-mindedness that put you ahead of the curve as changes occur. These attributes have characterized my own administrative experience, focus and accomplishment. After helping to transform Utah s College of Humanities over the past ten years, I am ready for a new challenge that builds from my passion to help facilitate and shape the future intellectual and educational directions of a fine college so they remain dynamic and resonant. My cv is attached and I would be happy to supply a list of confidential references at your request. Thank you for your consideration. Sincerely yours, Robert D. Newman Dean, College of Humanities Special Advisor to the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs University of Utah