MAC ALDP Fellows

Maarten Vonhof is a Professor of Biological Sciences and Environment, Geography, and Sustainability at Western Michigan University. He is an ecologist by training and studies the ecology and conservation of animals (primarily bats, birds, and turtles). He has been teaching at WMU for 22 years, having taught the incoming freshman Biology course for many years, as well as a variety of courses focused on ecology, evolution, and conservation biology for both majors and non-majors. He took part in the MAC ALDP program in 2017-18, and went from that directly into administration serving as the Director of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at WMU between 2018-2022

That first round of working in administration provided him many opportunities for professional and personal growth, and highlights included overseeing major overhauls of all undergraduate program curricula, shepherding the unit through the Covid pandemic, and working collaboratively with several other units and programs on campus to merge into the School of Environment, Geography, and Sustainability (SEGS), which formed officially in the 2023-24 academic year. After going back to faculty for a number of years, he has stepped back into administration and now serves as the Director of SEGS. The School acts as the hub of interdisciplinary education, research, and outreach on environment, sustainability, and spatial sciences, and also includes programs in Global and International Studies, Climate Change Studies, and Tourism. The school encompasses seven majors and five minors for undergraduates, a Master’s program in Geography, and two graduate certificate programs (one in Geographic Information Science and the other in Geospatial Applications of Unoccupied Aerial Systems). He loves his current role with its focus on interdisciplinarity and opportunities for collaborative work and partnerships with numerous other academic units on campus.

The MAC ALDP program was an illuminating and highly rewarding experience for me. The ALDP program provided me with an extremely valuable opportunity to visualize myself as a future administrator and to educate myself about how to become an effective leader. We regularly met and talked about the various facets of being an administrator, from developing a better sense of our leadership style, to how to tackle many of the challenges we may face to better understanding how our institutions work and where to go for help. That regular focus allowed me to get a better sense of what is involved in being an administrator and to develop my leadership skills. I also really enjoyed the opportunities to interact with other ALDP fellows and administrators from other institutions - I learned so much about how other universities work, and how they frame and approach the common challenges we all face. For example, at the first joint meeting I attended (at Kent State University) I was particularly struck by the effectiveness of the exercises used to engage our group in thinking about implicit bias (a newer topic at that time), and I was particularly interested in the systematic attempt at cultural change. It was clear to me that the change in tone and practice must come from the top, overlay all relevant aspects of the functioning of the university, and be clearly communicated to all constituencies on campus in a coordinated fashion. For me this was the first of many moments at the workshop when I found myself imagining myself in the shoes of an upper-level administrator and imagined how I might effect change at my institution and this example underlines the value of the program - we regularly had our eyes opened to new and complex issues and ways of thinking about them, and were armed with new knowledge and skills to tackle them.