Dr. Suzanne Shipley is president of Midwestern State University. She assumed office in August 2015. Growing up in the Texas panhandle, Dr. Shipley early learned the powerful impact that universities have on a rural community. She participated in campus performances, athletic events, and summer programs for children at nearby Texas Tech University, from which she would later gain a bachelors and a master’s degree. That closeness to her alma mater turned into a lifelong affiliation with universities, with an academic career beginning at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio. Dr. Shipley worked at universities in Arizona, Maryland, and West Virginia before coming to Midwestern State.
Dr. Shipley is an American Council on Education Fellow with degrees in German from Texas Tech and the University of Texas. Her research into the lives of German-Jewish women emigrants, funded by a postdoctoral fellowship at Hebrew Union College, resulted in translations of several previously unpublished diaries from the Holocaust. Dr. Shipley chaired the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission’s Council of Presidents and led a statewide initiative in adult learning. She is president of Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges.
