I’m happy to share with you the news that, after a national search, Jon K. Dalager will join Academic Affairs on September 3 as our new system director for academic programs, succeeding Ron Dreyer, who retired in July.
Dalager comes to this position with considerable experience as both faculty member and administrator. He served as dean of natural and social sciences at Wayne State College, a comprehensive university in the Nebraska State College System, where he had oversight responsibility for 30 undergraduate and graduate programs as well as 25 pre-professional programs. His experience at Wayne State College included supervising program reviews; working with the faculty on revision of the math and criminal justice programs; and expansion of criminal justice offerings at The College Center in Sioux City, a joint venture with the Northeast Nebraska Community College. Dr. Dalager also served as dean of the graduate program for the Master of Science in Organizational Management, working with the graduate faculty to revise curriculum and online offerings.
As department chair of political science at Georgetown College in Kentucky for ten years, Dr. Dalager led an expansion of the curriculum and revision of the major to better prepare students for the requirements of graduate schools. He also achieved an academic partnership between Georgetown College and the University of Kentucky in which qualified seniors could take graduate-level classes at UK which applied to both their undergraduate degree and a UK master’s degree. Other work included collaboratively creating with the history department a new minor in security studies; and serving on and chairing the college’s curriculum committee.
A Minnesota native, Dr. Dalager received a diploma in radio-television broadcasting from Brown Institute, then went on to take a B.A. at the University of Minnesota in Morris and a J.D. from the University of Minnesota Law School. He worked as an intern at the Minnesota Legislature, and spent six years in private practice as an attorney. Since completing his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Dr. Dalager has been an active and accomplished scholar in political science who in 2013 received a Fulbright Scholars’ Award to teach and research at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He currently serves on the board of directors for the American Council of Academic Deans and is a peer reviewer and legal contract reviewer for the Higher Learning Commission.
Dr. Jon Dalager can be reached at jon.dalager@so.mnscu.edu
We are excited to have him join the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities, and he and his family are looking eagerly forward to a return to Minnesota.
Lynda Milne | Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs | Minnesota State Colleges & Universities | ofc 651-201-1887 | text 651-237-2133
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