College names new provost

Wheaton College President Ronald Crutcher announced that Linda Eisenmann, a scholar of higher education and an experienced academic administrator, has been named the Provost and will officially take office on July 1, 2009.  

In announcing the appointment, President Ronald Crutcher said: "The Provost Search Committee was unanimous in its choice of Linda Eisenmann from an extremely strong field of candidates for the Provost position. She is a distinguished scholar of the history of education and ...  she has a significant record of national service to the field of higher education." 

Eisenmann currently serves as the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. She also holds appointments as a professor of education and a professor of history at the institution. She was appointed to the post in 2004 and has led a number of initiatives aimed at strengthening academic quality at the university. 

Under Eisenmann's leadership, the college strengthened its academic programs through assessment of existing programs and establishment of new initiatives. She implemented comprehensive reviews of the college's academic departments and its First Year Seminar program to encourage collaboration through faculty learning groups. She also supported faculty in establishing new programs, such as a Leadership and Social Justice Learning Community. 

      A historian interested in the social context of education, Eisenmann's scholarship examines three areas of educational history: women's experiences, professionalization, and historiography. Within these, she has explored the history and impact of coeducation; the history of teacher training institutions; and professionalization in colleges and universities, especially the history of women faculty. Her recent book, Higher Education for Women in Postwar America, 1945-1965 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), explores the impact of cultural expectations on women?s collegiate experience in the postwar era.  Her edited volume, Historical Dictionary of Women's Education in the United States (Greenwood Press, 1998), offers a reader-friendly analysis of available research. Eisenmann has published widely, including in Teachers College Record, Academe, History of Education Quarterly, Educational Foundations, Metropolitan Universities, and Thought and Action, among other venues.

The Cleveland native is well acquainted with liberal arts colleges, and with New England. She earned her B.A. in English,ÿsumma cum laudeÿand Phi Beta Kappa, from Connecticut College in New London, Connecticut (1975). After earning a master's degree in American Literature at Georgetown University (1977), she completed a second master's degree (1981) and a doctorate in the History of Education at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education (1987).

      Prior to her tenure at John Carroll University, Eisenmann was professor of education and former director of the doctoral program in Higher Education Administration at the University of Massachusetts Boston, a program fostering change agency in colleges and universities and exploring connections between higher education and the schools. She has previously taught at Harvard University, Wellesley College, and Bowdoin College, and has held several administrative posts in higher education, including assistant director of the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College.

      Eisenmann is active nationally in several scholarly associations. She is past president of both the Association for the Study of Higher Education and the History of Education Society. She has also served as Vice President (in the division of History and Historiography) of the American Educational Research Association. For several years, she was Associate Editor of the History of Education Quarterly, and she co-chaired the editorial board of the Harvard Educational Review as a doctoral student. She has sat on the editorial boards of the Journal of Higher Education and, presently, the Journal of Educational Administration and History (U.K.).  Eisenmann also serves on the Board of Directors of St. Joseph Academy, the only all-girls' high school in the city of Cleveland.