Meet Provost Gingerich

Montclair State University Provost Willard Gingerich.

Provost Willard Gingerich, appointed in 2008, serves as the Chief Academic Officer for Montclair State University. Prior to assuming his position at Montclair State, Gingerich served as Provost, Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of English at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Before that, he served first as Dean of the Graduate School and then as Vice Provost for Graduate Programs and Research at St. John’s University.

A former Fulbright Scholar in American Literature, Gingerich received a BA in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo. His graduate studies took him to Mexico where he studied indigenous and colonial literary cultures at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia. His doctorate in English was conferred by the University of Connecticut where he was both an NDEA Fellow and an NDFL Fellow.

A short list of Gingerich’s wide range of administrative accomplishments includes the creation of a consortium of academic institutions accredited as NGOs by the United Nations; annual celebrations honoring and displaying faculty books and grant awards; strategic plan renewal – an update of strategic planning; the creation of retreats for department chairs and directors to share best practices; and the launch of online programs. He has participated in multiple Middle States re-accreditations, and worked collaboratively to develop master’s and first-time doctorate programs in History, Psychology, Education, Criminal Justice, English, and multidisciplinary studies in Bioinformatics and International Studies.