Westmont Provost Joins Lilly Fellows Board

Mark L. Sargent, provost and dean of the faculty at Westmont since 2012, has been elected to a four-year term on the National Board of the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts. The program, founded in 1991, strengthens the quality and shapes the character of church-related institutions of learning. It focuses on offering postdoctoral teaching fellowships, supporting young adults considering church-related careers, and collaborating with church-related colleges that sponsor activities and publications.

“I am honored to work with the Lilly Fellows,” Sargent says. “The program has done so much to support some of the most talented younger scholars in the nation and to nourish an intellectually vibrant faith.”

Prior to his arrival at Westmont, Sargent worked in higher education for more than 30 years and the past 16 as provost of Gordon College in Wenham, Mass. Previously, he was vice president and chief academic officer at Spring Arbor University in Michigan and the associate dean at Biola University in La Mirada, Calif. He has previously been honored with the National Chief Academic Officer Award by the Council of Independent Colleges and with the Whitehill Prize in Early American History for his research. A former Fulbright scholar in American Civilization at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, Sargent currently serves on the advisory board for Scholarship and Christianity at Oxford.

Lilly’s network includes more than a hundred member schools that represent a diversity of denominational traditions, institutional types and geographical locations. Westmont has been a member since 1998.