Milton D. Glick

Milton Glick comes to Nevada after a long career during which he has become known as one of the most able and affable, tech-savvy and passionate administrators in public higher education.

Prior to becoming the 15th president of Nevada’s first university on August 1, 2006, he served 15 years as second-in-command of Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. Before that he spent three years as provost at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. He was interim president of Iowa State for the final eight months. His first senior administrative position was as dean of the College of Arts and Science at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Mo., in the mid-1980s.

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois in 1959 he went on to earn his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1965. Following a year of postdoctoral studies at Cornell University, he joined the chemistry faculty at Wayne State University in Detroit. He remained at Wayne State for 17 years. During that time he became a leader of the faculty senate and during his final five years served as chair of the chemistry department.

As dean of the Missouri’s College of Arts and Science, that university’s largest college, from 1983-88, he was responsible for many advances, including a writing-across-the-curriculum program that became a model for other universities. He attracted much attention by placing a networked computer in the office of every faculty member of the college, a revolutionary idea at the time.

During his tenure at Arizona State — first as senior vice president and, later, as executive vice president and provost — the university experienced a 20 percent improvement in its freshman retention rate, a 15 percent improvement in its graduation rate, and a doubling of the number of minorities enrolled. The Tempe campus became the largest in the United States in terms of enrollment, and the number of National Merit Scholars enrolled rose from about a dozen to more than 500. Funding for sponsored research tripled, and ASU recruited 10 faculty with prestigious national academy memberships and one Nobel Laureate. A fund-raising campaign announced with a goal of $300 million exceeded that goal by more than $200 million.

In the initial phase of his academic career, Glick was a noted researcher in the field of X-ray crystallography. His work was funded for 17 consecutive years by National Science Foundation funding and he published 99 research articles during that time.

Glick has been a technology consultant and is a senior fellow of the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research, which conducts research on the roles and implications of information technology in higher education. However, he describes himself as both a technophile and “technoskeptic” — optimistic about the possibilities of technology but pessimistic about whether higher education will utilize technology effectively.