A Council Grove educator, who is a former department chairman at Emporia State University, is the new dean of the Kansas State University College of Human Ecology in Manhattan.
Virginia Moxley of Council Grove was chosen for the position in December after a nationwide search. She has served since January 2006 as interim dean of the college and has been an administrator at Kansas State for 21 years.
Moxley was chairman of ESU’s division of sociology, family science and anthropology and before that had been chairman of the department of home economics at ESU, according to information from K-State.
“I’m an accidental administrator,” Moxley said with a chuckle. “I think it all started when I came to Emporia State.”
For four years, Moxley was doing research at K-State with families with mentally ill children. Some “low-level administration” was involved with that position. At Emporia State, Moxley was looking for a job on the faculty.
Instead, she was hired as head of the department, with a considerable amount of teaching involved, too. She stayed 13 years.
“I call it my first real job. ...So, I’ve always been in administration,” she said. “Now, I have taught, I do scholarship, but I’ve always been a department head or an associate dean and now a dean.”
The College of Human Ecology consists of three departments, a school, several institutes and centers and a museum of historic costumes and textiles.
“I think what people don’t often think about is the fact that we have speech pathology and audiology, personal financial planning, athletic training, pre-med, and then apparel, interior design, hotel restaurant management, dietetics ... so it’s a broad range of majors.”
Moxley has identified two major initiatives that will be priorities.
“One is internationalizing the curriculum,” she said, adding that goal also is at the top of the agenda for the Board of Regents and university president.
“All of our students end up in careers where they need to speak a second language, where they need to understand other cultures,” she said. “Many of them ... haven’t been abroad at all.”
A substantial amount of Moxley’s time also will be devoted to fundraising for two buildings, one for classroom and student services and one for research. Current buildings for the College of Human Ecology were planned for 1,000 students. Now, they hold 2,000 undergraduates and about 300 graduate students.
“So we’ve outgrown our space,” she said. She will work closely with the university’s development officer in the fundraising effort.
“It’s certainly not easy,” Moxley said. “I must say in this year that I’ve been interim dean I’ve been enormously impressed with the generosity of donors.”
The majority of Moxley’s new job, however, “is making it possible for the department heads to get their work done, and that means managing the budget fairly and understanding the faculty priorities and making them all mesh,” she said. “Certainly there’s some leadership to move an entity forward, but a whole lot of it is just managing limited resources to your best advantage.”
Moxley has been closely involved with higher education partnerships with other universities around the country, and that has broadened her perspective beyond her home university.
Moxley holds a bachelor of science in clothing and textiles, a master of science in family counseling, and a doctor of philosophy degree in education, all from Kansas State University.
She also has been senior associate dean for scholarship and research in the college. In 2005 she was named senior associate dean and administered a $12 million research program.
Moxley is co-director of K-State’s Institute for Academic Alliances, which she founded with Sue Maes in 2004.
She is a founding member of the Great Plains Interactive Distance Education Alliance (Great Plains IDEA), an 11-university alliance that sponsors inter-institutional graduate programs, shares distance education programming, and develops model distance education policies and practices. She served from 2002-05 as a board member and chairman of the group.
Moxley also serves on the Morris County Development Corporation board of directors and on the Council Grove Area Foundation Board. In 2003, Moxley was designated a Fellow of the Kansas Health Foundation.
Moxley is married to Tom Moxley, a rancher who recently was elected state representative from the 68th district. They are parents of two daughters, Amy Westfahl of Manhattan and Angela Moxley of Kansas City, and two grandchildren, Eden, 2, and infant Cade Westfahl of Manhattan.