José Bowen, dean of the Meadows School of the Arts, will be leaving SMU to become Goucher College’s 11th predsdent, effective July 1.
Bowen, also a professor of music and the Algur H. Meadows Chair, is an outspoken advocate for innovation in higher education.
“I am excited about using the framework of interdisciplinary education not only transform individual students’ lives,” Bowen said in a press release. “But to help change the way people think about value and uses of the liberal arts.”
Bowen will succeed Sanford J. Ungar, who became Goucher’s president in 2001.
“I believe that he and the magnificent, successful place that is Goucher are an excellent match for each other,” Ungar said a press release. “And I know that this community looks forward to his arrival with great enthusiasm.”
The Board of Trustees unanimously approved Bowen as the college’s next leader, after a search committee headed by Trustee Florence Beck Kurdle selected Bowen.
“We believe Dr. Bowen is the right candidate who has come along at the exact right time to build on Sandy’s legacy and lead our college into its next phase of excellence,” said Norma Lynn Fox ’76, chair of the Board of Trustees, in the press release.
Goucher, a women’s college until 1986, now has about 2,200 students. The school requires all undergraduate students to participate in study abroad. Bowen, along with his wife Kimberly their dogs, Chloe, Molly, and Daisy, and their 18-year-old cat Latte will be living on Goucher’s campus.
During Bowen’s eight years at SMU, Meadows’s academic test scores and rankings rose. He also added the fashion media, creative computing and arts entrepreneurship/management majors and minors.
“Things are very, very good at SMU, very good at the Meadows school,” Bowen, 52, said Wednesday in an interview with The Dallas Morning News.
His book “Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning” is a winner of the 2013 Ness Award for Best Book on Higher Education from the American Association of Colleges and Universities.
“It’s very nice to know that other people at other universities are trying this method,” Bowen said in a recent phone interview. “It’s a very rewarding feeling. My goal is colleges focus on student success.”
His second book “Transforming the University: Learning for Change,” due 2015, discusses the cognitive improvement that college adds and how to maximize that improvement.
“What are the things that help students change?” Bowen said.
Bowen has been a jazz performer for 35 years and performed all over the world. He currently performs with the jazz collective Jampact.
Bowen, who has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, contributed to Discover Jazz and is an editor of the six-CD set “Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology.” Bowen a founding member of the National Recording Preservation Board for the Library of Congress, is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) in England.
Bowen holds a Bachelor of Science in chemistry, a Master of Arts in music composition, a Master of Arts in humanities, and a joint Ph.D. in musicology and humanities from Stanford University.
