On March 13, 2024, it was announced that Dr. Jeff Frederick will be Drury University’s 19th president. Frederick is currently the provost at Wingate University, a small university in North Carolina. Working his way up in his academic career, Frederick served as an assistant professor, associate professor and professor before moving to department chair, then to the dean and finally to provost.

In an interview, he expressed his excitement about becoming a part of Drury as president and meeting Drury students, staff and faculty. Before he is officially inducted as president on June 1, 2024, he will be making a few trips to our campus to talk with us and familiarize himself in his new role. 

He will be here April 14-April 16 and April 24-April 27 where there will be opportunities to see him, talk to him, get to know him better through campus conversations and have lunch with him by RSVPing for events. On April 26, he will be in the FSC Commons from noon to 1 p.m. to exclusively talk to the student body. 

Can you explain your education background from going to undergraduate school for Business then switching to going to graduate school for History?

It’s crazy, isn’t it? I have three college degrees. I have a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration. Marketing was my major from University of Central Florida. I have a Master of Arts in History, also from the University of Central Florida, and I have a PhD in American History. My primary field is Southern History, the History of the American South, and I had that from Auburn University in Alabama. 

Why didn’t you go back to school for Business and what was the reason for choosing History? 

I think for me in the time between my undergrad in 1987 and when I came home one day from work and told my wife I wanted to go back to school, to study History, I had done a lot of thinking. I had done a lot of my own supplemental reading. I was pondering some of what I thought were the more interesting questions about the South and a variety of other things. I don’t think I was only thinking about History, but I wanted to study something and think about something to where I never felt like I could get ahead of it, not that I was getting ahead of it in Business, but in the line of work I was doing, I felt like I was saying a lot of the same things every day to a slightly different group of people. And in thinking about whatever it is, my purpose was, why I was on this planet, call that locational assessment or calling, I kind of felt like there was some stuff that I wasn’t doing that maybe I should have been doing. And that was more in the line of writing and teaching and thinking aloud about some of these interesting things, particularly about the South as I started a Master’s degree and then a PhD. I didn’t have, as your question indicates, I didn’t have the background in History, so I sort of came in as a bit of a probationary graduate student. 

How was that? 

It was interesting because that same semester we had our first child. When we had started preparing to have a family while we were both working pretty big jobs and then we were, it wasn’t working for whatever reason, and then of course as soon as I quit my job to go back to grad school immediately, my wife Melinda got pregnant. So, it was a really interesting semester. She gave birth to our first child, and I was in my first real semester in grad school, kind of on a probationary status, but I do think for students and for anyone who’s asking those kinds of questions: what’s my purpose, what’s my calling, what’s my vocation, what am I supposed to be doing, I was given a few things, am I really using them in the way I should of? 

I mean I think it’s a testament to say we should constantly be thinking and striving and figuring that out. I credit my undergraduate degree with those kinds of lifelong learning and thinking skills. I think all of us, after we walk across the stage, something happens or changes or you start thinking about something and you don’t stop and say, ‘that was that intro to Psychology course I took in my second semester.’ But really all of these ideas about how to use tools in our own mind, I think those are kinds of things in me continuing to think about what it is that I wanted to devote the second chunk of my career to; it really emanated from some of the skills and thinking and reading and work that I had done as an undergrad. It kept that conversation going in the back of my head. 

So when it was time to jump in to get a Masters degree from ‘96 to ‘98 and then to go work on a PhD from ‘98 to 2003, I felt like I wasn’t leaving Business, I wasn’t abandoning any of the things that it had taught me, both in the classroom as an undergrad and in practice in a career, but I was taking them and developing them and turning them into different ways.

In the end, I sort of feel like my combination of History and Business has really served me well as both as a professor and then as a leader, trying to wrestle with budgetary decisions and connecting with community members who don’t come out of a higher ed (education) experience, and so I would say it’s a really long winded answer to a question about constantly using the things a college experience teaches you, even if you don’t always know that you’re using them. 

What goals do you have for Drury and for yourself as a president? 

Here’s what I would say: my goals, I think, would start off with a kind of leadership perspective. First of all, I want to be a good listener and next time we meet, I hope you’ll let me ask more of the questions, so you can tell me a little bit more. I try to be honest, because I think that’s not only the right thing to do, but it’s the only thing you can do to keep everybody informed. 

I try to be practical, I think Drury strikes me as a very practical place, where we want students and professors to work together to do meaningful things together. We want to talk about theory and want to work on theory, but we want to do practical things. We want to have really interesting artifacts that come out of the learning experience. Those are sort of some of the things I’m intending to bring into my work at Drury. 

The last thing is that I intend to be positive, and I think you have to. I mean there’s an awful lot of things that have happened that caused someone maybe to look around society and see it changing too quickly or see people talking in certain ways, at each other as opposed to talking to each other, and I think it’s easy to be negative, but I teach every year, I get to know students, and I work with them. 

The world is in good hands with the next generation. They’re not exactly like the previous generation, and that’s cool. That’s fine. So as as long as we’re willing to give students a chance and meet them as often on their terms as we ask them to meet on ours, people are going to be blown away about how prepared your generation is. It’s our job to coach you up a little bit on some of the things that you need, and it’s our job to learn a little bit from you as well. That’s a pretty exciting thing. It’s too soon for me to walk in and say here’s some sort of plan that I’ve orchestrated. Let’s start by listening and being practical and being honest and being positive and then the rest of things will be clear to us. 

Featured image courtesy of Drury University