Dean of LR Online; Associate Provost for Regional Expansion and Strategic Growth

Location

This position requires the selected candidate to reside in the greater Hickory, N.C. community as a condition of employment.

Role Overview

The Dean of LR Online and Associate Provost for Regional Expansion and Strategic Growth serves as a senior academic leader responsible for advancing Lenoir-Rhyne University’s online, graduate and professional education portfolio, regional expansion strategy, and externally facing growth initiatives. The role integrates academic leadership, enrollment and market execution, and partnership development to ensure that academic offerings are coherent, responsive to workforce demand, and positioned for sustainable growth.

The position is designed to operate across colleges, locations, and delivery modalities, including responsibility for digital-first, hybrid, and low-residency models that enable scale, access, and regional reach, while providing institution-level coordination and preserving academic ownership within individual colleges. In addition to its academic leadership responsibilities, the role carries accountability for aligning marketing, admission, instructional design, and program launch activities in support of online, graduate and professional education.

Purpose and Rationale

Lenoir-Rhyne University’s online, graduate and professional portfolio plays a critical role in extending access, supporting workforce and community needs, and advancing the university’s mission beyond its traditional residential undergraduate core. As this portfolio continues to expand across locations, audiences, and delivery models, the institution requires a senior leader with responsibility for integration, execution, and accountability across academic, operational, and market-facing dimensions.

This role exists to ensure that online, graduate and professional education is managed as a coordinated institutional enterprise, one that connects academic strategy with enrollment outcomes, employer and community partnerships, and modern delivery practices while remaining grounded in shared governance and disciplinary expertise within the colleges.

Core Areas of Responsibility

1. Online, Graduate and Professional Education Leadership

The Dean and Associate Provost provides institution-level leadership for graduate and professional education across all colleges and delivery modalities. Responsibilities include:

• Coordinating strategy for the university’s graduate and professional portfolio, ensuring coherence, differentiation, and alignment with institutional priorities.
• Working collaboratively with Deans, program chairs, and directors to support program quality, curricular innovation, and continuous improvement.
• Identifying opportunities for program growth, consolidation, or launch in response to workforce demand and institutional capacity.
• Supporting accreditation, assessment, and compliance requirements related to graduate and professional education.

Programs remain housed within their respective colleges; the role is to align, coordinate, and support rather than to displace college-level academic ownership.

2. Enrollment, Marketing, and Program Execution

The role carries end-to-end responsibility for enrollment outcomes within the online, graduate and professional portfolio. In this capacity, the Dean and Associate Provost provides strategic leadership and coordination across key enabling functions, including:

• Online, graduate and professional admission strategy and recruitment planning.
• Market positioning, messaging, and marketing strategy for graduate and professional programs.
• Enrollment management and forecasting in partnership with institutional planning and finance.
• Instructional design, product development, and program launch execution to support new and existing offerings, including the design, launch, and scaling of online, hybrid, and digitally mediated graduate programs, ensuring instructional design, product development, and digital delivery are aligned with market demand and enrollment strategy.

The Dean and Associate Provost works in close coordination with undergraduate enrollment, marketing, and communications teams to ensure that academic strategy, market demand, and student recruitment operate as an integrated system, while respecting differentiated approaches for residential undergraduate programming.

3. Strategy, Growth, and External Partnerships

As a senior institutional leader, the Dean and Associate Provost advances growth-oriented initiatives that connect academic offerings to external partners and regional needs, with particular emphasis on employer and workforce partnerships and co-designed programs that leverage scalable, digitally enabled and hybrid delivery models.

Responsibilities include:

• Cultivating and stewarding employer, nonprofit, healthcare, education, and civic partnerships that support enrollment pipelines, experiential learning, and program relevance.
• Aligning graduate and professional programs with workforce and community demand.
• Supporting revenue-generating and margin-positive initiatives that strengthen the university’s financial sustainability.
• Representing the university in external-facing contexts where academic credibility, regional engagement, and institutional strategy intersect.

In this capacity, the Dean and Associate Provost functions as a primary operator responsible for translating institutional priorities into execution across multiple units and stakeholders.

4. Regional Strategy and Place-Based Innovation

The Dean and Associate Provost provides leadership for Lenoir-Rhyne’s place-based and regional academic initiatives, with particular emphasis on graduate and professional education. The Dean and Associate Provost is responsible for:

• Establishing and overseeing a graduate-first, urban-embedded professional hub that advances LR’s mission in Western North Carolina.
• Positioning Asheville as an experiential learning and innovation environment where applied projects, partnerships, and modern delivery models are embedded in academic programs, using digital and hybrid modalities to connect place-based learning with broader regional and national audiences.
• Launching and scaling a targeted portfolio of graduate and professional offerings aligned with regional workforce and community needs.
• Developing a replicable model for regional engagement that may inform future market-based or place-based initiatives, with Asheville serving as a laboratory for applied learning that can scale responsibly across regions and audiences.

Initial Goals and Measures of Success

In the first 18 months, the Dean and Associate Provost will be expected to:

• Establish clear institutional governance, operating and growth model for graduate and professional education.
• Demonstrate enrollment growth and improved enrollment performance across graduate and professional programs, particularly through digitally enabled and hybrid program models that support responsible growth.
• Launch or redesign programs aligned with documented workforce and market demand.
• Formalize anchor partnerships that support enrollment pipelines, experiential learning, and regional impact.
• Operationalize the Asheville presence as a visible and effective regional platform for graduate and professional education, including a relaunch and re-branding.

Reporting Structure and Authority

The Dean and Associate Provost reports to the Provost for academic matters related to online and graduate education, curriculum, and faculty engagement. This role serves on the Provost’s Dean Council. This role will collaborate with the Division of Admission on graduate admission strategy and goal setting.

Functionally, the Dean and Associate Provost is accountable to the President for the execution of institutional priorities as set by the President. The role maintains a dotted-line relationship to the President to support close alignment, responsiveness, and coordination with the university’s senior leadership team.

Minimum Qualifications

• Earned masters degree from a regionally accredited institution in a discipline relevant to the university’s academic portfolio.
• Significant progressive leadership experience (typically 7–10+ years) in higher education, including service at the dean, associate dean, associate provost, or equivalent senior academic leadership level.
• Demonstrated leadership in online, graduate, and/or professional education, including experience with digital-first, hybrid, or low-residency program models.
• Proven track record of enrollment growth or performance improvement in graduate or professional programs, with direct accountability for outcomes or close partnership with enrollment, marketing, and admission functions.
• Experience working collaboratively across colleges and academic units, respecting shared governance while advancing institution-level strategy and execution.
• Strong interpersonal, communication, and executive-level collaboration skills, with the ability to lead through influence across academic, operational, and external stakeholder groups.

Preferred Qualifications

• Earned doctoral degree from a regionally accredited institution in a discipline relevant to the university’s academic portfolio.
• Senior academic leadership experience that includes institution-level responsibility for online, graduate, or professional education across multiple colleges or delivery modalities.
• Direct experience integrating academic leadership with enrollment management, marketing strategy, instructional design, and program execution, particularly in online or hybrid environments.
• Demonstrated success developing and stewarding external partnerships
• Experience launching or scaling regionally embedded or place-based academic initiatives, particularly in urban or workforce-aligned contexts.
• Financial and business acumen related to revenue generation and sustainable growth models for graduate and professional education.
• Familiarity with market research, competitive analysis, and data-informed decision-making to guide program strategy and portfolio management.
• Experience representing an institution externally with credibility across academic, industry, and community audiences.
• Experience with accreditation, assessment, and regulatory compliance relevant to graduate, professional, and online education.

About Lenoir-Rhyne University

Lenoir-Rhyne University is a co-educational, private, comprehensive liberal arts institution founded in 1891, with its traditional campus located in Hickory, North Carolina, a city of more than 40,000. The university has additional graduate centers in Asheville, N.C., and Columbia, S.C. Situated in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Lenoir-Rhyne is less than an hour’s drive from Charlotte, and the Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton Metropolitan Statistical Area has a population of about 365,000. The university now offers more than 45 undergraduate and 20 graduate degree programs to approximately 2,400 students. Lenoir-Rhyne University seeks to liberate mind and spirit, clarify personal faith, foster physical wholeness, build community, and promote responsible leadership for service to the world. Affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), Lenoir-Rhyne is open to people from all religious and non-religious backgrounds.