Dr. Phil Cavalier was named the 13th president of Kutztown in Pennsylvania on April 30, 2025 and will begin his tenure on July 7th. For the previous seven years, he served as the provost and senior vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Tennessee at Martin. He also served as Interim Chancellor at the University of Tennessee at Martin from March to August 2023.

Some of Dr. Cavalier’s accomplishments during his tenure at UT Martin include leading the university in creating a strategic plan for 2025-30, developing a two five-year strategic enrollment plan, guiding the university to a record-high 77% retention rate for first-year students, adding several new academic programs, and building a UTM in Siena, Italy study abroad program.

Prior to his appointment at UT Martin, Dr. Cavalier served as the provost at two residential liberal arts colleges, Lyon College in Arkansas and Eureka College in Illinois. During the 2005-6 academic year, he was a Fulbright Scholar in Kyiv, Ukraine, where he taught American literature at two Ukrainian universities and delivered lectures throughout Ukraine as well as in Estonia and Egypt. He earned a Ph.D. in English from the University at Buffalo, an M.A. in English from Northeastern University, and a B.A. in Economics from Swarthmore College.

Maria Dykema Erb, M.Ed. is the Inaugural Executive Director of the Boston University Newbury Center which was established to foster the holistic development and success of first-generation undergraduate, graduate, and professional students. Maria has over three decades of higher education experience having worked at the University of Vermont, Elon University, Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and currently at Boston University. She has worked in a broad range of areas including Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging; student recruitment/admissions, enrollment management, academic advising, retention, and outreach; academic dean’s office and graduate/professional school program administration; and student affairs/life.

As a proud first-generation college graduate, Maria holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of New Hampshire and Master of Education degree from The University of Vermont (UVM).

As a higher education and student affairs practitioner, Maria has shared her scholarship through numerous presentations and book chapters. Most recently, she has chapters in: Know That You Are Worthy: Experiences from First-Generation College Graduates; A Handbook for Supporting Today’s Graduate Students; A Practitioner’s Guide to Supporting Graduate and Professional Students; and Fostering First Gen Success and Inclusion: A Guide for Law Schools (in press).

Anthony Abraham Jack, Ph.D. is the Inaugural Faculty Director of the Boston University Newbury Center and Associate Professor of Higher Education Leadership at Boston University.

His scholarship appears in the Common Reader, Du Bois Review, Social Problems, Sociological Forum, and the Sociology of Education and has earned awards from the American Sociological Association, American Educational Studies Association, Association for the Study of Higher Education, Eastern Sociological Society, and the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Tony held fellowships from the Ford Foundation and the National Science Foundation and was a 2015 National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellow. In 2016, The National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan named him an Emerging Diversity Scholar. In May 2020, Muhlenberg College awarded him an honorary doctorate for his work in transforming higher education.

The New York Times, Teen Vogue, Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Huffington Post, The Nation, American Conservative Magazine, The National Review, Commentary Magazine, The Washington Post, Financial Times, Times Higher Education, Vice, Vox, and NPR have featured his research and writing as well as biographical profiles of his experiences as a first-generation college student. The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students (2019) was awarded the 2020 Mirra Komarovsky Book Award, the 2019 CEP Mildred Garcia Award for Exemplary Scholarship, and the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize and was also named a finalist for the 2019 C. Wright Mills Award and a NPR Book’s Best Book of 2019. It is available in English and Chinese. His second book, Class Dismissed: When College Ignore Inequality and Students Pay the Price (2024), received a Starred Review from Kirkus Reviews, was named a finalist for the 2024 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for Education from Foreword Reviews, and earned the 2025 PROSE Award for Education Theory and Practice by the Association of American Publishers.

Ian F. McNeely is professor of history and senior associate dean for undergraduate education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A specialist in German history and the history of knowledge, he is the author of three books, including The University Unfettered: Public Higher Education in an Age of Disruption (2025).