A provost needs to make a connection between students and administrators, the final candidate for Ball State University's provost position said.
"What I would like to do as a provost is to be advocate for faculty, students and the university as a whole," Bjong Wolf Yeigh said.
Yeigh will answer questions from faculty, staff and students at 3:30 p.m. today in Bracken Library Room 225. He will face tough questions about his past positions and his views on shared governance.
He is currently director of the Center for Science, Technology and Engineering Policy at Saint Louis University and has worked at other universities such as Yale University, Oklahoma State University and Princeton University.
"My experiences are very varied, and I think they all prepare me to work at Ball State University," he said. "I've been a faculty member, an administrator and a dean."
He would like to come to Ball State because he sees the institution as being the defining comprehensive university of the 21st century, Yeigh said.
"I really look at Ball State to have exciting times ahead," he said. "I want to participate and play into that."
If chosen as provost, Yeigh said he would work to address salary issues, empower faculty and work closely with students.
"With students, I'd really like to gather opportunities for students - experiential and immersion opportunities," he said.
Like the other two candidates, Yeigh comes from an engineering background, but he said he didn't think that would affect his ability to be a good provost.
"I was educated as engineer, but my research and scholarship have been very diverse," he said.
Joe Losco, treasurer of the Ball State chapter of the American Association of University Professors and chairman of the political science department, said he had several topics he would like to ask Yeigh about.
Yeigh's view on shared governance is unclear, Losco said.
"We've spoken to people from the faculty senate back at his home institution, and we had gotten mixed responses, so we're going to probe that," Losco said.
Losco said he also planned to ask Yeigh about why he left the position as dean of Parks College of Engineering, Aviation and Technology at Saint Louis University. When Yeigh left the position, he left a $3.4 million budget deficit, Losco said.
"We want to ask him how he tried to reduce the deficit and if it was the inability to solve [the deficit issue] that ended his time in that position," he said.
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