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MICHAEL T. BENSON President and Professor of Government Eastern Kentucky University 521 Lancaster Ave Richmond, Kentucky 40475 Tel

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MICHAEL T. BENSON President and Professor of Government Eastern Kentucky University 521 Lancaster Ave Richmond, Kentucky 40475 Tel MICHAEL T. BENSON President and Professor of Government Eastern Kentucky University 521 Lancaster Ave Richmond, Kentucky 40475 Tel. 859.622.2101 [email protected] https://president.eku.edu/ Michael T. Benson, D.Phil., is the 13th President of Eastern Kentucky University, a position he assumed on August 1, 2013. He also holds the rank of Professor of Government and teaches within the Department of History as well. In his current role at EKU, Dr. Benson is responsible for more than 17,000 students on three campuses, nearly 2,300 full-time faculty and staff, sixteen Division I athletic teams, and an annual budget in excess of $355 million. EKU enrolls more native Kentuckians than any other institution in the Commonwealth. In 2016, EKU had its highest enrollment ever, and, despite deep cuts to state appropriations, the university has achieved its four best fundraising years in the institution’s history during Benson’s tenure. Since 2013, significant increases in retention and graduation rates have also been realized, and EKU welcomed its best-prepared and most diverse freshman class to campus in fall 2017. The University has doubled its four-year graduation rate in the past eight years and awarded 4,154 degrees this past academic year—the most in its 145-year history. EKU is nearing the end of an aggressive $240 million campus revitalization which is being completed entirely with non-state-appropriated funds. Prior to his chief executive post at Eastern Kentucky, Benson was the 15th president of Southern Utah University, where he helped secure the designation for SUU as the state’s public liberal arts and sciences university; established the Hispanic Center for Academic Excellence; gained admission into the Big Sky Conference for all athletic teams; completed new residence halls, a teacher education facility, and a science and engineering center; and directed the development and implementation of SUU’s largest and most ambitious comprehensive fundraising effort. This drive, named the “Future is Rising Campaign,” raised a record $105 million for SUU. Central to this SUU campaign was an effort organized and launched by Dr. Benson which helped raise $38 million for the Beverley Taylor Sorenson Center for the Arts. A classically-trained pianist, Dr. Benson was named the “Administrator of the Year” by the Utah Music Educators Association. He continues to perform in various venues and has played with, among others, the Snow College Jazz Ensemble and the EKU Stephen 1 Foster Music Camp Orchestra. Dr. Benson holds the distinction of being the only university president to make two different colleges or universities “All-Steinway Schools” by raising over $1 million for each institution to purchase the instruments. Before his tenure at Southern Utah, Benson served as the 14th president of Snow College, where he helped raise more private money for the institution during his tenure than had been secured in the previous 115 years of the college’s history combined. Appointed president of Snow College at age 36, Dr. Benson was the youngest college president in the history of the Utah System of Higher Education. He is also the former chair of the Executive Committee for Utah State Campus Compact, part of a national coalition of nearly 1,000 college and university presidents representing over five million students, committed to fulfilling the civic purposes of higher education. Benson began his career in public higher education at the University of Utah, where he worked as special assistant to the president and secretary to the university, one of eight executive officers of the institution. During his tenure at Utah, Benson was named co-principal investigator (P.I.) of a $3.5 million grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts—the first such grant from Pew made to the University of Utah outside of the health sciences area—to study campaign finance reform. The research grant led to the establishment of the intermountain Center for Campaign and Media Legal Reforms at the Hinckley Institute of Politics. Born in Utah and raised in Texas and Indiana, Benson has worked and studied abroad for seven years in Italy, England, and Israel. He is fluent in spoken and written Italian. Michael earned his B.A. cum laude from Brigham Young University in 1990 with a major in Political Science and double minors in English and History. He completed his doctorate in Modern History from the University of Oxford (St. Antony’s College) in 1995, where he was a Rotary Foundation Scholar and recipient of the Oxford Graduate Overseas Fellowship. He also earned a master’s degree cum laude in 2011 from the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame in Non-profit Administration, where he was the recipient of the prestigious Father Theodore Hesburgh Founder’s Award. Currently, Benson is pursuing a Master of Liberal Arts (MLA) at Johns Hopkins University and is on schedule to graduate in May 2021. Michael was a regular contributor to the Huffington Post as a featured voice on higher education and other issues for six years and his articles have appeared in various publications including the Jerusalem Post, the Kansas City Star, the Louisville Courier Journal, the Lexington Herald-Leader and Inside Higher Ed. His book, Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel (Praeger 1997), has been hailed as a landmark work in the research of American foreign policy and the U.S. presidency. Together with co-author, Hal R. Boyd, Michael wrote College for the Commonwealth: A Case for Higher Education in American Democracy (University Press of Kentucky 2018). Their work was recently nominated for the University of Louisville 2020 Grawemeyer Award in Education. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and former Rhodes Professor of American history at the University of Oxford, Daniel Walker Howe, wrote this about College for the Commonwealth: “Benson and Boyd present a convincing case for why higher education needs and deserves public support. From practical examples they demonstrate how investment in higher education enables a society to rise to the opportunities presented by the future.” 2 Michael’s next book, “Every Epoch Requires a Fresh Start”: Daniel Coit Gilman and the Birth of the Modern American Research University, is under contract with Johns Hopkins University Press to be released in 2022. Benson has worked as a consulting historian and essayist for both the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles and the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri. Governor Jon Huntsman appointed Benson to the Utah Appellate Court Nominating Commission in 2009 as one of two citizen members. He also fulfilled a two-year term on the Board of Advisors for the Center for Policy Analysis of the American Council on Education (ACE). Currently, he serves on the Council of Presidents of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (AGB) and on the Presidents’ Trust for the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). Michael is also a member of the Task Force on University Partnerships of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU), and has served as the presidential representative on several Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC) reaffirmation committees, recently chairing thre substantive change committees for universities in Georgia, Texas, and Florida. One of three higher education representatives on the Kentucky Rising Committee, Benson is former co- chair of the Higher Education Consortium for Bluegrass Tomorrow. At present, he serves as chair of the Advisory Conference of Presidents for all of Kentucky’s public colleges and universities. Dr. Benson was recently appointed to the 18-person KentuckyWorks Collaborative by Governor Matt. He is also engaged in business and community affairs, having sat on the regional boards of Wells Fargo Bank and Zions Bank and currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Richmond Chamber of Commerce and the Kentucky Law Enforcement Memorial Foundation Board of Directors. He has been an active member of the Rotary Club for twenty five years and is a Paul Harris Fellow. Active in intercollegiate athletics on the national and conference level, Dr. Benson completed a four-year term as member of the nine-person NCAA Honors Committee, the group charged with awarding the NCAA’s highest recognitions each year. He is also the past chair of the Presidents’ Council for the Ohio Valley Conference and has served in leadership roles for both the Summit League and the Big Sky Conference. Recently, he was elected as representative for the Ohio Valley Conference on the NCAA Division I Presidential Forum. Benson is an accomplished athlete and has completed several marathons, including the Boston Marathon, with his fastest time (2:41) winning his age division in the St. George Marathon and finishing just minutes shy of the qualifying time for the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials. As an undergraduate at Brigham Young, Benson was a member of the Junior Varsity Basketball Team. He has also participated in the world’s oldest collegiate rivalry, leading the Oxford Blues Basketball Team as a player/head coach over Cambridge University in the celebrated Varsity Match. Michael is an Eagle Scout and is active in various volunteer, civic, and church activities. He is married to Debi Woods Benson and is the father of five children: Emma and Samuel, both pursuing degrees at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah; and Truman, Tatum, and Talmage, all students at EKU’s Model
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