Matriculation Convocation
Jill Beck, President of Lawrence University
“The State of the University: Challenges and Opportunities”
Thursday, September 17, 2009, 11:10am
Jill Beck was appointed Lawrence University’s 15th - and first woman - president in January 2004 and assumed office on July 1. A nationally recognized authority on arts education, she is a scholar and a practitioner of dance and choreography, has written extensively in those fields, and has directed ballet and modern dance repertory.
She has taught on the faculties of the City College of New York, The Juilliard School, Connecticut College, Southern Methodist University, and the University of California, Irvine, where she was dean of the Claire Trevor School of the Arts. As dean, she established the da Vinci Research Center for Learning Through the Arts, an interdisciplinary research center focused on learning across disciplines.
As president, Beck has focused on strengthening Lawrence’s commitment to individualized instruction, increasing collaborative and complementary activities between the fine and performing arts and the traditional liberal arts and sciences and encouraging more active community engagement by Lawrence and its students. In 2008, she was invited to join the Wisconsin Task Force on Arts and Creativity in Education as well as the Wisconsin Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) Leadership Council.
Under her leadership, Lawrence established an innovative postdoctoral teaching fellowship program in 2005 that has since brought 25 recent Ph.D.s to campus for mentoring, teaching opportunities and research collaborations. President Beck established a partnership with the Posse Foundation in 2006 that brings 10 “Posse Scholars” from New York City to campus each year, and organized an international conference on tutorial education that Lawrence hosted in the spring of 2007.
President Beck is the founder of ArtsBridge America, a national outreach program that offers hands-on experiences in the arts by placing university students in K-12 classrooms as instructors and mentors. In 2005, Lawrence University became the first private institution to join the program, which now has 22 participating institutions in 13 states and Northern Ireland.
A native of Worcester, Mass., President Beck earned her B.A. in philosophy and art history from Clark University, an M.A. in history and music from McGill University, and the Ph.D. in theatre history and criticism from the City University of New York.
This is her sixth matriculation convocation address as Lawrence University's president.
