Letter from the President: Provost Selected!

By Janet Morgan Riggs

Dear members of the campus community,

I am delighted to announce the appointment of Christopher Zappe as Gettysburg College’s next provost, effective July 6, 2010. Chris is currently Dean of Arts and Sciences at Bucknell University, where he has also been a faculty member in the Management Department. Chris emerged from a rich applicant pool of highly qualified candidates; I am confident that he will have great success in leading the faculty and the academic division of Gettysburg College.

At this time I want to take a moment to thank the members of the provost search committee, who represented Gettysburg College so well to our candidates, and who worked so hard to assure a successful conclusion to our search: John Commito, Chris Fee, Becca Fincher-Kiefer, Lynn Holuba, Bruce Larson, Nathalie Lebon, Tom Mottola, Lisa Portmess, and Sharita Jacobs Thompson. I am especially grateful to Bruce Larson, who did an outstanding job as co-chair of the search committee, and who put a tremendous amount of time, energy, and effort into this process. Our search consultants, Shelly Storbeck and Susan VanGilder of Storbeck/Pimentel, did an extraordinary job of facilitating this search.

I would also like to thank those of you in the Gettysburg College community who played an important role in the scoping process early in the fall semester and during our finalists’ campus visits. Every finalist remarked on the outstanding quality of our community and of the College. That conclusion was a direct reflection of their interactions with all of you. I also thank you for providing input about the candidates to the search committee. We read all of the evaluations you submitted, and they played an important role in our decision-making process.

Finally, though there will be other opportunities to thank Jay White for the important role he has played and will continue to play over the next few months as Interim Provost, I would like to say how grateful I have been and will continue to be for his willingness to step in and lead the academic division so capably during this interim period.

I know you will all join me in welcoming Chris and his family to the Gettysburg community.

Sincerely,
Janet Morgan Riggs

To read a little more about Christopher Zappe, click here.