Aaron Kleist Email & Phone Number

La Mirada, CA, US

Los Angeles County, California, United States

• Drawing on academic experience in nearly a dozen nations, provided insight into international best practices to clients in four countries;
• Conducted needs assessment with management, faculty, students, and staff in the areas of admissions, marketing, student services, library resources, instructional technology, pedagogy, and academic programming;
• Presented on such subjects as higher education in the digital era; improving student service with technological tools; innovation, creativity, and sustainability; effectively managing marketing and increasing.
• Developed online and blended business curriculum according to international best practices, training faculty in advanced digital pedagogy;
• Advised senior leadership regarding comprehensive communication systems, student information systems, learning management systems, organizational structures, human resource policies, departmental budgets, community.
• Engaged Board members on issues of governance, committee structures, succession planning, presidential selection, and fundraising.

Greater Los Angeles, California, United States

• Second-largest academic division, with approximately 50 full-time and 50 part-time facultycovering 8 programs with over 800 students and 40% of General Education (33 units). Responsible for
• Building internship placement programs integrated with academic curriculum, and
• Leading Academic Program Reviews (five-year assessment) across 7 programs.

• Coordinate conversations on faculty policy (such as promotion criteria) between administrators, personnel committees, departments, and individual faculty;
• Promote consistency in coaching and advising faculty on promotion across all levels;
• Implement industry best practices to tailor individual faculty development plans;
• Oversee and promote faculty professional development, including processing travel requests, administering faculty travel budget line, and partnering with chairs to support faculty scholarship;
• Support collaborative research among faculty, across disciplines, and involving students;
• Train faculty in strategies for securing internal and external grants;

• Sponsored innovation rooted in historical commitments to whole-person, liberal arts education;
• Identified best practices regarding faculty load and compensation, using data from a wide range of private liberal arts and public U.S. institutions;
• Identified best practices for structuring academic administration, as defined by 30 provosts and presidents nationwide; and
• Drafted the executive profile and Board brief for the Dean of the new School of Sciences, Technology and Health.

• Educated executive leadership, faculty, and staff about disruptive market forces in such areas as transformative technologies, unbundled educational alternatives, micro-credentialing, and affordability;
• Designed university responses to such factors as competency-based education, emerging freelance markets, shifting demographics, and non-traditional student needs;
• Established regular communication and collaboration between the Provost’s office, deans, and senior directors of non-academic divisions;
• Mapped and integrated workflows in support services such as Marketing and Enrollment Management;
• Built evaluation and implementation processes for new programs with input from academic leadership, Enrollment Management, Facilities Planning, Finance, Financial Aid, IT, Marketing, and the Registrar;
• Improved processes and development plans through input from Advancement, Digital Learning, Information Technology, Library, Student Services, University Assessment, and University Planning;

• Developed integrated Fall and Spring courses involving over a dozen professors from as many disciplines;
• Coordinated curriculum and programming with IRIS Inquiry and IRIS Online (below).

• Built teams to design, teach, film, edit, market, and assess interdisciplinary, integrated curriculum with high production values crafted for digital markets;
• Supervised assessment of courses using both IRIS and departmental PLOs;
• Increased gender diversity with 4 female staff leaders (of 6 full-time hires);
• Built team consisting of Operations Manager, Coordinator of Online Learning and Assessment, Logistics and Recruitment Coordinator, Marketing and Communications Strategist, Production Manager, Lead Editor, Audio-Visual.
• Coordinated with Digital Learning, University Communications & Marketing, Finance, and academic departments to advance strategic university goals.

• Launched interdisciplinary, team-taught core curriculum program integrating faith and learning across numerous fields with application to daily life;
• Coordinated curriculum with some 6 deans and 13 chairs for interterm, semester, and summer classes, using traditional, blended, and online delivery;
• Grew program from 7 to 12 integrated interterm courses involving over 30 professors in 16 disciplines serving over 1,000 students from 40 majors;
• Consistently received outstanding student qualitative and quantitative feedback (averaging 4.91/5.0).

• Led academic futurist think-tank comprising 12 faculty leaders;
• Developed 29 proposals for institutional advancement, including modular trimesters, offerings for non-traditional students, 3+1 degrees, and a four-year graduation guarantee.

La Mirada, CA

• Supervised 11 full-time faculty and 29–35 adjuncts;
• Secured funding for three new faculty and staff positions;
• Developed concentrations in Honors Graduate School Preparation and Global and Ethnic Literatures;
• Founded and led the off-campus Biola Shakespeare program for 12 years;
• Facilitated research programs for faculty and students at Downing College and Tyndale House, Cambridge, U.K.
• Founded departmental and regional student conferences;

• Established a consortium for the study of medieval sermons, securing a National Endowment for the Humanities’ Collaborative Research Grant, a NEH Fellowship, a CCCU Initiative Grant, and institutional funding for.
• Supervised a team of 42 faculty and students at 15 institutions in 5 countries, editing texts from primary manuscripts in 11 international libraries;
• Used digital enhancement and TEI/XML encoding to edit Anglo-Saxon homilies.

Doctor Of Letters (Litt.D.), Old English Literature

Doctor Of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Old English Literature

Activities and Societies: Concentrations: Medieval and Patristic Theology; Digital HumanitiesClare College; Department of Anglo-Saxon.

Master Of Arts (Ma), Comparative Literature, Summa Cum Laude

Activities and Societies: Concentrations: Classics and Medieval Studies

Literature, Graduated First In Class Of 368, Summa Cum Laude

Activities and Societies: Minors: Psychology and Biblical Languages

High School

Activities and Societies: Speech & Debate, Model United Nations, Cross Country, National Honors Society