AUP’s search for a new provost is scheduled for Fall 2017. In the interim, we are very fortunate to welcome Dr. Henry (Hank) Kreuzman to AUP to serve in an interim provost role beginning in August 2017. Hank has served the College of Wooster for the past eight years as Dean for Curriculum and Academic Engagement and comes highly recommended by the two presidents to whom he reported. He is well known to those of us at AUP who have participated in the Global Liberal Arts Alliance (GLAA) events. Prior to serving as Dean, during which he led all curricular renewal at Wooster, he served 10 years as the Chair of the Philosophy Department. During his tenure as Dean, Hank restructured the advising process for new students and created a comprehensive advising program--ARCH (Academic Registration and Creative Horizons)--the purpose of which is to guide students to develop intentional long-term educational plans starting in their first semester. This advising program was developed in conjunction with the launching of Wooster’s learning commons - APEX (Advising Planning and Experiential Learning). The core idea of APEX is to provide better support to students through the co-location and cooperation of seven offices (i.e., Advising Center, Learning Center, Registrar, Experiential Learning, Off-Campus Study, Entrepreneurship, and Career Planning). In addition, the Writing Center was restructured so that its focus was more closely aligned with the College’s mission. All these changes resulted in a doubling of students using the services and, more important, a closer collaboration between staff and faculty around student learning.
To strengthen Wooster’s liberal arts core, Hank worked with faculty, staff, students, and alumni to develop the College’s Graduate Qualities index which defines the personal and intellectual capacities that the College aims to cultivate in each student. This work has been closely aligned with and is guiding the ongoing process of reshaping the College’s core requirements (general education). In addition, he has helped to reshape Wooster’s departmental curricula. Working with faculty from the foreign language, history, and literature departments, he guided the College to the development of new programs that focus upon global regions in the world, such as, Latin American Studies, East Asian Studies, South Asian Studies, Middle Eastern and North African Studies. To further the College’s goal of enhancing students’ global engagement, he worked to improve semester long off-campus study opportunities and the development of short-term faculty-led study trips. He also worked with the Noble Foundation to support a collaboration between Wooster and Ashesi University College in Ghana. This partnership facilitates global learning through student, staff, and faculty exchanges that take place during the regular academic year and summer. He has collaborated with colleagues at Oberlin, Denison, Kenyon, Ohio Wesleyan, and Allegheny on a “Faculty Planning & Curricular Coherence Grant” from the Teagle Foundation to deepen students’ understanding of expected learning outcomes. He was also the campus leader on a collaborative assessment grant funded by the AAC&U and the Sherman Fairchild Foundation to develop rubrics for course-embedded assessment and evaluate their impact.
Hank Kreuzman is a philosopher holding a doctorate from Notre Dame, who works in the fields of epistemology and philosophy of science. At Wooster, he taught courses on "Jurisprudence, Law and Society," "Environmental Ethics," "Ethics, Justice and Society,” “Scientific Revolutions and Methodology,” and a range of philosophy courses. He is described by both of his presidents as an invaluable member of their leadership teams, someone who held the trust of his faculty through periods of profound curricular change.