Tweet

Carl Moses is looking to his past education career as he looks forward to stepping onto campus as Grand View’s new provost.

Moses’s love for higher education began at an early age as he grew up on different college campuses with his father, who was a professor. Despite being surrounded by academics, Moses never saw teaching in his future.

“Like most teenagers, I guess, I was a little bit rebellious, and I certainly never imagined that I’d intentionally follow in my father’s footsteps,” Moses said. “It turned out that as I was going through college, I liked being a student.”

After graduate school in 1987, Moses went on to teach at Lehigh University as an instructor of geological sciences. From there he continued to climb up the academic ladder, and in 2010, he was offered the provost and dean of faculty position at Susquehanna University.

Moses accepted the job and spent the next few years working to improve the school for both faculty and students. As provost, Moses was in charge of the academic success of the students. It’s a task that often requires difficult decisions to be made. Moses said one of toughest decisions was to eliminate one of three deans of the school. He did this to create another position in the career center focused on internships for current students. After three years as provost, Moses stepped down and returned to his previous position as a professor of earth and environmental science.

“I felt that this was an environment that was not conducive to the best expression of my strengths as an academic administrator or leader,” Moses said. “It just felt right to me to just step aside and let the president appoint someone else to the job here, and meanwhile I would teach.”

Moses applied for Grand View’s provost positions this past fall after looking at a few other colleges. After a campus visit during which he went through interviews with administrators, faculty and staff, Moses was offered the job as Grand View’s newest provost.

Moses said he plans to ease into the position, allowing himself to get to know the school through the many people who attend and work here.

Although he wants to get to know the school before making any large changes, the new provost said he already knows that shared governance will be one of the first topics he looks into. Moses defines shared governance as the “overlapping spheres of responsibility” held by faculty and administration. He said that while the board of trustees is ultimately responsible for the financial state of a university, under shared governance they leave academic matters to the professors. He said that the academic community comprises a bunch of smaller communities and that communication with these communities is key.

Paul Brooke, an English professor at Grand View, said shared governance is supposed to give faculty a voice in decisions that affect them. Currently, Brooke said, there isn’t a good system for communication between faculty and the board of trustees, so the board consequently doesn’t know many of the issues facing faculty.

The current system is one in which the whole faculty votes on issues. Brooke said this system is inefficient and doesn’t lend itself to creating a line of communication to the administration. Therefore, he and his colleagues are working on a proposal for a faculty senate model. The senate would be made up of a certain number of elected faculty members who would represent the whole faculty to the administration, Brooke said.

“When the faculty as a body, the whole faculty, has good morale and people are excited to come to work, I think the students sense a different kind of learning environment from the environment where the faculty is cranky,” Moses said. “I think it really matters if the faculty has good morale and is enthusiastic about their work.”

Moses’ work begins July 1.