A storied career in higher ed

Chancellor, professor and playwright have been among Jeff Elwell’s many roles

Por California State University, Bakersfield

25 de August de 2021

This is the second in a series of stories about the four new members of the CSUB Alumni Association Board of Directors.

Jeff Elwell has taught at and led a long list of universities big and small during his more than three decades in higher education and is currently settling in as the new vice president for academic affairs at the University of the Ozarks in northwest Arkansas.

He’s also the author of 36 plays, many of which have been produced by amateur or professional theatres in the United States and abroad. But Elwell may be best known for serving as the first chancellor of the three-campus Eastern New Mexico University System from 2018 to 2020.

Elwell, 64, grew up in the San Fernando Valley and finished out his last year of college at CSUB, earning a bachelor’s degree in English in 1979. He was a sports editor, sports photographer and political columnist at the student newspaper, played club soccer, worked as a student assistant in sports information and took 69 quarter hours to graduate on time.

“I kept very busy,” he said, laughing.

He was greatly influenced by professors Marla and Solomon Iyasere, among others, and feels that a lot of his success is a result of the influences of faculty and staff he worked with at CSUB.

Elwell went on to earn his master’s in communication/theatre at the University of Southwestern Louisiana in 1982 and doctorate in speech communication/theater from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale in 1986.

Knowing few playwrights make a good living without a big hit, Elwell pursued a career in academia. He started out teaching theatre at private liberal arts colleges in the South and Midwest before becoming a tenured full professor at Mississippi State University and then chair of the Department of Theatre Arts at Marshall University in West Virginia and the University of Nebraska.

Elwell was the founding dean of the College of Fine Arts and Communication at East Carolina University and provost at Auburn University at Montgomery before becoming dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

Then he was appointed the 10th president of Eastern New Mexico University in 2017 and the first chancellor of the three-campus Eastern New Mexico University System a year later. Elwell is most proud of working with the legislature to secure the most state funding the system had ever received and establishing the Greyhound Promise scholarship to graduate more teachers.

“The first cohort was 34 students who didn’t have to pay tuition or fees for four years and would teach in the public schools,” he said. “…It was great. We had people who wanted the product and we had a good product, people we could give an incentive to because being a schoolteacher isn’t what it used to be. They have to deal with a lot.”

Elwell briefly retired after leaving Eastern New Mexico in 2020 due to health issues. Following successful twin corneal transplants at Duke University, he decided to return to work at the University of the Ozarks, where he’s also dean of humanities and fine arts, returning to his roots educating students at a small, private, religiously affiliated institution.

Elwell’s creative activity includes 23 plays produced in New York and another eight produced overseas including in Australia, Sweden and Canada. They include historical dramas, romantic comedies and farces, “depending on the subject and how I think it needs to be expressed.”