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Presidential Prospectus
Beloit College is known for its innovative liberal arts programs that meet the needs of the moment. Our students are curious, courageous, and entrepreneurial, and here, they learn to lead, to succeed, and to build a future that works for everyone. The search begins for our next transformative leader.
Contents
- Who we are
- Vision & values
- Bits & pieces
- Spaces & places
- Alumni who make Beloit College proud
- Impact Beloit
- Ideal candidates & qualifications
- Contact
- The Beloit College Presidential Prospectus as a PDF
Who we are
There’s a huge difference between getting an education and being so immersed, so transformed, so enthralled with living and learning that your education never really stops. That’s Beloit College.
Beloit earns its designation as a college that changes lives. Just over 1,000 students from nearly every U.S. state and 42 countries converge to experiment, learn, live, practice, and collaborate, spurred on through their relationships with one another and a creative and committed faculty, staff, and alumni community.
Beloit’s focus on graduating resourceful students ready to bring multiple perspectives to solve problems in a complex world has deep roots. Starting with the Beloit Plan in the early 1960s and evolving into the Career Channels program and Impact Beloit, the college has an impressive legacy of deepening and strengthening learning through experience. Faculty advisors revel in their instrumental roles in students’ lives, tailoring their support and advice to them as individuals.
Beloit is known for its tight-knit residential community and its residents’ sense of belonging, an atmosphere where students build confidence as they begin their transformations. The campus is an inspiring proving ground where athletes, academics, and principled non-conformists celebrate creativity and unconventional thinking, and where the devotion to a quirky pseudo mascot (a turtle) speaks volumes about Beloit’s daring to be different.
In 2020, when a global pandemic presented a challenge like no other, Beloit administrators and student leaders drew strength from the college’s pioneering spirit and found ways to navigate through extraordinary difficulties. In response to the pandemic, the college launched the Beloit Action Plan, a five-part promise to current and prospective students. Meanwhile, student leaders stepped up with a Statement of Culture in which they owned the well-being of their campus community.
An ambitious five-year strategic plan unfolds at Beloit now through 2027, charting the college’s future. Against headwinds and uncertainty in higher education, especially liberal arts colleges, Beloit is differentiating itself in the marketplace for empowering students to be ready for careers through mentoring by talented faculty and staff who integrate their work through the entire student experience.
At a glance
#11
First-Year Experience — U.S. News 2023
#18
Best Liberal Arts College — Money 2022
#23
Best Liberal Arts College — Washington Monthly 2022
10:1
Student-to-faculty ratio
#33
Best Campus Diversity — U.S. News 2023
#30
Best Value Schools — U.S. News 2023
Vision & values
- to hire and retain more faculty, staff, and trustees of color
- to recruit, retain, and support domestic Black students
- to ensure all students, faculty, and staff engage with issues of race, sex, power, privilege, anti-racism, and anti-Blackness
- to expand safe, inclusive spaces for our Black students
- and to resist injustice through sound processes that address biased, racist, and discriminatory acts and that include accountability measures and restorative justice practices.
The Beloit Plan ignited the college’s strong experiential spirit, leading to current programs like Career Channels, which help students explore their interests through beyond-the-classroom experiences. Career Channels give students a chance to test their interests in a variety of fields, in the classroom and out, providing access to a professional community, including our 16,000+ alumni, to see what actually working in them would be like.
The list of Channels includes
- Arts
- Business & Entrepreneurship
- Curating & Communicating
- Health & Healing
- Justice & Rights
- Sports, Fitness & Recreation
- Sustainability
- Worldbuilding
Each Channel’s mentors and alumni advisors plan events and help students find jobs during the summer and school year, leading to opportunities beyond graduation.
Beloit’s entrepreneurship center, CELEB, is another example of the learn-by-doing mindset, offering students unparalleled opportunities, such as the chance to manage a student art gallery, create something new in its maker lab, and develop skills and insights to start their own businesses.
Impact Beloit is the college’s newest venture, centralizing and enhancing its experiential programs, community-based learning, and career readiness capabilities to benefit students. Through Impact Beloit, the college is building out a more robust and direct pathway from Career Channels to alumni and jobs while building stronger connections to the Beloit community. Impact Beloit will be housed in a newly renovated Robert H. Morse Library, made possible by a $9 million grant from the state of Wisconsin, coupled with a $1 million college investment.
When the college announced the plan a mere six weeks after sending students home in March 2020, it was the first in the country to have navigated the new normal of COVID-19. The actions aligned with Beloit’s overall approach: From modular course formats to the launching of an amped-up mentoring program, they placed students at the center.
At the same time, 19 student leaders came together to revise the students’ Statement of Culture, which included behavioral expectations during the pandemic and promoted the policy of “self-care is community care.” It was a resounding success. While campus had some cases of Covid, a large-scale outbreak was avoided.
The campus community is both globally aware and geographically diverse. In fall 2022, 20 percent of Beloit’s first-year students were international.
Over the last seven years, 34 percent of graduates had studied abroad at some point in their college career. Through Beloit, study abroad is intentional, immersive, and accessible financially, whether it is a semester or year-long independent experience or a shorter-term, faculty-led Global Experience Seminar held in summer.
Beloit’s long tradition of valuing international education dates to the 1920s when college leaders were early to put forth a vision and commit resources to becoming a global community.
- Faculty and staff collaborate closely with one another and our students.
- Through programs like Career Channels, which help students align their passions with their purpose in such fields as Business and Entrepreneurship, Health and Healing, Justice and Rights, Sports, Fitness and Recreation, Sustainability, the Arts or Worldbuilding.
- Career Works helps students navigate their pathways, from connecting with a Career Channel to pursuing an internship or a post-graduate job.
- Career Works also helps students develop and tell the story of what they can do and why, so that employers and graduate programs take notice.
Two groups’ roles are noteworthy:
- Faculty members, through the Academic Senate’s standing and special committees, exercise major legislative responsibility for assuring the quality of the academic program and the academic vitality and professional competence of those within its own ranks.
- Beloit is committed to student representation in administrative decision-making processes, based on the conviction that the college is better served by genuine and responsible student involvement. Students who serve as academic senators, on major search committees, and other administrative committees are called upon to represent the best interests of their peers and to act on behalf of the college’s welfare.
From anthropology to biology to economics and theatre and dance — every major and minor puts students on a path of purpose and lifelong learning.
Along with deep knowledge, Beloit students graduate with the core skills most attractive to employers, what we call integrated learning outcomes. Beloiters learn to be:
- effective communicators
- creative problem solvers
- productive collaborators
- intellectually and professionally agile.
The plan launches new initiatives and enhances recent innovation to make students aware of different career pathways and to weave their experiences in and out of the classroom into meaningful outcomes toward those paths.
This is accomplished in part by activating students’ relationships with faculty, staff, and alumni, but also through structures such as the Advanced Mentoring Program and student life opportunities.
At its core, the college’s strategic plan addresses increasing strategic enrollment and student retention through stronger positioning, admissions and marketing strategies, strategic resource allocation, and fundraising.
Bits & Pieces
In our most recent survey, 98 percent of students said at least one professor excited them about learning, while 93 percent said professors or staff care about them as a person. Over 80 percent said they had a mentor who encourages them to pursue goals and dreams.
Last fall, the class read, debated, critiqued, advocated for or argued against more than 1,000 submitted works, while choosing only 15 for publication. In the spring, students design and print the journal, assisting with layout, choosing cover art, and learning about their own creative writing as they assess the work of professional writers.
The Logan Museum of Anthropology, one of only two accredited academic museums in Wisconsin, houses approximately 350,000 ethnographic and archaeological objects from 129 countries and more than 600 cultural groups.
The Wright Museum of Art features five galleries, and a collection of about 6,000 works of art, including significant holdings of American Impressionism, modernist paintings, 19th century plaster casts, German Expressionism, and Japanese modern prints.
Colleges That Change Lives was early to question the assumption that name-brand schools produce a higher-quality education, instead exploring and profiling a select number of student-centered schools like Beloit where student experiences are transformative.
Spaces & Places
Built in part by families who arrived here during America’s Great Migration, Beloit College is in southern Wisconsin, 96 miles from Chicago, and an hour in different directions from Madison and Milwaukee.
Located right on the Rock River, this 120,000-square-foot facility features a cafe, theater, classrooms, and meeting spaces, along with a running track, eight-lane competition swimming pool, and plenty of other areas to work out and rest up.
Through several courses, students were involved in planning and researching aspects of this environmentally friendly building that features a vegetated roof, high recycled/reused content, water conservation features, natural landscaping, a rain garden, and more.
When he visited the college in February 2022 to award the grant, Gov. Tony Evers cited the college’s long history of educating citizens of the world.
“If we want to see our state’s families, communities, and economy succeed for years to come, we need to make investments that spur community outreach and economic development. There’s no better place to make that investment than at Beloit College.”
Campus is home to some of the city’s oldest and most noteworthy structures, including the college’s first building, Middle College, the cornerstone of which was laid in 1847. It is on the National Register of Historic Places.
Part of the former Beloit Corporation foundry, Irontek features huge windows, open spaces, and the vibe of an urban shared workspace, with fast internet, coffee, craft beer, and the chance to rub elbows with other entrepreneurs. Beloit’s Chamber of Commerce is one of the building’s anchor tenants.
Alumni who make Beloit College proud
The achievements and character of Beloit’s alumni are the college’s ultimate measure of success. Beloit’s alumni community has thousands of inspiring stories to tell. These are a select few.
She recounts how a Beloit faculty member awakened her interest in history and pointed her toward her future career. She pays that favor forward in her own classrooms, dedicating time in each course to talk to students about the process of becoming a historian.
Brenna, who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, researches the relationships between social movements — especially the civil rights movement — the market, and visual culture. She is a rising scholar and speaker whose book, Represented: The Black Imagemakers Who Reimagined African American Citizenship, challenges conventional thinking about advancing civil rights by looking beyond well-known activists to the role of Black entrepreneurs and capitalists.
While still in his 20s, in 2017, he was selected to step into the shoes of iconic L.A. Dodgers announcer Vin Scully. He announced the 2022 World Series, and regularly calls college and NFL football games for Fox.
He credits Beloit for his meteoric rise. He arrived on campus knowing he wanted to play football and to become a broadcaster. He tapped people and programs to get the experiences he needed, announcing Beloit’s basketball games as an undergraduate, starting his own community access TV show in the college’s studio, and acquiring breathing and speaking tips from one of his theatre professors.
Looking back, he says he would have been crazy not to have come to Beloit. “So many people were willing to create opportunities and help me create those opportunities — that became the biggest benefit of all.”
She is a senior attorney in the Bronx Defenders’ legal department and former legal director of Still She Rises, which represents mothers in the criminal justice system. The Bronx Defenders is doing groundbreaking work, redefining public defense by radically transforming how low-income people in the Bronx are represented in the justice system.
Ruth’s commitment to social justice started at Beloit, where she began to recognize the nature and power of privilege. She studied political science, worked with low-income job seekers at the Rock County Job Center through the college’s Duffy Community Partnerships program, and interned with the Winnebago County Public Defender’s Office. She further prepared for a career of service by earning her law degree at Harvard Law School.
At Beloit, and later at Yale University, he prepared to analyze policy and engage with difficult issues, including terrorism and security, in his home region. He took full advantage of Beloit’s opportunities, with one internship at the Afghanistan embassy in Washington, D.C., and another at NATO while studying abroad in Brussels, Belgium. He was one of Beloit’s first Weissberg Scholars, majoring in international relations with a focus on human rights.
Today, he has fulfilled predictions by faculty that he would become a major player in advocating for Afghanistan. He is the country’s ambassador to the United Arab Emirates and holds a non-resident fellowship with the Atlantic Council, a noted non-partisan American think tank in the field of international affairs.
Impact Beloit
Through Impact Beloit, students will build practical professional skills to increase their career readiness and discover career pathways tied to their professional passions. As a result of Impact Beloit, more students will get internships during college and secure good jobs after graduation.
Impact Beloit accelerates our signature core capabilities by redeveloping existing strengths and building new pathways to increase the number of students having high quality internships. Specific tactics include:
- Expanding the community partnership model where students intern in the community (Duffy Partnerships)
- Developing co-op or fellowship models
- Building high-quality on-campus internship experiences in campus offices
- Providing strong mentorship for students to find their own off-campus internships
The college’s Executives in Residence Program also will expand, as the college pilots alternative models of length and responsibility, and recruits executives who work in the arts, humanities, and nonprofit management in addition to business.
Impact Beloit launches skills-building instruction through Certificates and Credentials. Such programs are a logical extension of the college’s emphasis on career-readiness. While meeting market demands of both students and employers, these programs also will allow students to take on more robust internships (and get more out of them), open up more job opportunities, and hit the ground running on their first job. Introducing a C&C program will give students the best of both the liberal arts and experiential learning and vocational skills.
Ideal candidates & qualifications
Beloit College’s key differentiator among liberal arts colleges is a personalized, student-centric approach, rooted in deep student-faculty and student-staff relationships that leave a lasting imprint. With an emphasis on learning by doing, Beloit graduates are well-prepared and passionate about their futures, connected to the college and each other for a lifetime.
Qualifications
It is preferred that candidates hold a terminal degree and have a demonstrated record of excellence in the following areas:
- Sharing the Beloit vision in a way that excites donors.
- Harnessing both the intellectual capacity of faculty and staff talent.
- Acknowledging, illuminating, and leading the process of dismantling structures at Beloit that perpetuate inequity and privilege a few.
- Using bold tactics to expand fundraising, creating new avenues and opportunities.
- Exploring new ways of operating to improve the college’s financial standing.
- Expanding the college’s influence and reach with the kind of thought leadership that brought national attention in the early 1960s with the Beloit Plan and in 2020 with the Beloit Action Plan.
- Clearly represent the college’s vision to a diverse community.
- Foster transparency, discussion, and collaboration in building consensus.
- Display emotional intelligence through optimism, courage, honesty, and humility.
- A highly visible leader who strengthens relationships on campus and between campus and the city of Beloit.
- One who champions school spirit and pride among students, recent grads, and seasoned alumni, all while attracting and retaining the next generation of students.
- A diplomat who builds understanding and consensus on common goals through debate, discourse, and listening among all constituent groups.
Innovating Today and Tomorrow
The president will be a wise steward of the college’s resources and develop an enhanced business model that increases traditional revenue sources (enrollment, tuition, fundraising, and endowment growth) in conjunction with inventive new practices for financial stability.
Key leadership priorities include the following:
- Championing the value of a liberal arts education and Beloit’s commitment to producing graduates who are prepared for successful futures and meaningful lives.
- Continuing Beloit’s history as one of a select group of Colleges That Change Lives by bolstering the student academic experience, campus life, and student outcomes that lead to internships, jobs, and career opportunities.
- Directing the recruitment of high-quality and diverse students, while also maintaining net tuition revenue.
- Developing strategies to counter the challenge of recruiting among fewer high school graduates.
- Embracing the Beloit Action Plan that explicitly connects a college education to a successful career.
- Expanding Impact Beloit, which brings together the college’s community-based learning (CBL) and career-readiness capabilities to develop the next generation of leaders, innovators, entrepreneurs, thinkers, and activists — and contributing to the wellbeing of the city of Beloit.
- Committing to an aspirational effort to become an anti-racist institution and supporting the work of anti-racism and equity on campus, in the community, and nationwide.
- Honoring the college’s long-standing commitment to global education by ensuring that Beloit students have opportunities to study abroad and continuing to welcome international students.
- Successfully completing the $54 million Be All In campaign.
- Enhancing Beloit’s reputation and recognition by highlighting the college’s innovation, distinction, and unique contributions.
- Being an active and enthusiastic leader in outreach to prospective Beloit students and their families.
- Engaging Beloit’s devoted alumni to meet and exceed fundraising goals while also deepening their connections to their alma mater.
- Maintaining strong relationships with leaders in the city of Beloit and at the national, state, and local levels.
- Working closely with Beloit’s partner institutions in the Associated Colleges of the Midwest, the Midwest [Athletic] Conference and the Wisconsin Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, enhancing partnerships and efficiencies that benefit the college.
- Valuing a culture of open communication and transparency that respects the ideas, innovation, and creativity of staff, faculty, students, and administrators toward making thoughtful decisions that achieve measurable outcomes.
- Fostering a strong, open, and collaborative relationship with the trustee board, sharing information and identifying prospective board members.
- Supporting the attraction, professional development, and retention of outstanding faculty, staff, and administrators.
- Investing appropriately in Beloit’s future while also building the endowment for future generations through visionary and responsible financial and operational management.
- Supporting the institutional commitment to becoming more diverse, equitable, and inclusive.
The Administrative Role of Beloit’s Next President
The president reports to the Board of Trustees, while leading, managing, and inspiring a wide community of stakeholders. The president will manage an experienced senior leadership team and collaborate with a dedicated faculty and staff who care deeply about Beloit students and the college’s future.
The senior staff reporting to the president includes the following positions:
- Provost and Dean of the College
- Vice President for Enrollment Management
- Vice President for Human Resources and Operations
- Vice President for Finance and Planning/Treasurer
- Vice President for Advancement
- Chief of Staff and Secretary of the College
- Senior Director of Strategic Research and Initiatives
Contact
Because equity and inclusion are central to our students’ liberal education and vital to the thriving of all members of our residential learning community, Beloit College aspires to be an actively anti-racist institution. We recognize our aspiration as ongoing and institution-wide, involving collective commitment and accountability. We welcome employees who are committed to and will actively contribute to our efforts to celebrate our cultural and intellectual richness and be resolute in advancing inclusion and equity. We encourage all interested individuals meeting the criteria of the described position to apply.
Beloit College seeks to accommodate all people with varying abilities. If you receive a request for an interview and require auxiliary aids, services, or other accommodations for the interview, please communicate that to search representatives at beloit@russellreynolds.com.