Provost Office - Academic & Student Affairs

Dr. Matt Cecil

Interim Provost and Vice Chancellor of Academic and Student Affairs

Dr. Matt Cecil is from Brookings, S.D., with over 25 years of experience in higher education, including 16 years of administrative experience in roles ranging from school director to provost. Most recently, he served as Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic and Student Affairs at Northern Kentucky University, a 16,000-student regional public university with an annual budget of $280 million. Before that, he served as Dean of the College of Arts & Humanities and then as Interim Provost at Minnesota State University, Mankato. Other administrative roles included serving as the Elliott School of Communication Director at Wichita State University and as a South Dakota State University department administrator. He began his academic career as a faculty member at Purdue University and then the University of Oklahoma.

Cecil is a nationally-known scholar who studies media history, critically examining the Federal Bureau of Investigation's communication strategies under Director J. Edgar Hoover. Cecil is the author of three books and more than two dozen articles on that topic. His 2014 book, Hoover’s FBI and the Fourth Estate was named History Book of the Year by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. He earned a B.S. from South Dakota State University, an M.A. from Minnesota State University, Mankato, and a Ph.D. in Mass Communication from the University of Iowa.