Dr. Steven Moser, the University of Southern Mississippi’s current Senior Vice President and Provost of Academic Affairs, recently announced that he will be retiring next summer.
Moser, who will officially retire next June, has worked with Southern Miss for over thirty years. He started out as a professor in Southern Miss’s School of Music in 1990, also serving as the Director of the Pride of Mississippi’s marching band.
In 2012, Moser was named Dean for the College of Arts and Letters. Dr. Denis Wiesenburg, the Provost of Academic Affairs before Moser, spoke highly of Moser just before he took over.
“Dr. Moser is an accomplished academic administrator. He embraces our vision of shared governance and distributed decision making, works well with his faculty colleagues and strives to facilitate the realization of their shared goals,” Wiesenburg said.
This foundation of academic administration would prove especially useful once Wiesenburg returned to the Department of Marine Science in May 2015. That same year, Moser was named Interim Provost as the university searched for a replacement candidate. Ironically, Moser told the Hattiesburg American that he was uninterested in remaining as Academic Provost beyond the interim of Wiesenburg’s departure.
“It’s a very short appointment,” Moser said. “My president has asked me to step in, and I am doing that.”
That “short appointment” turned permanent in Nov. 2015. An official press release from the University said that Moser’s appointment was in large part due to the significant organizational overhauls he helped implement to Academic Affairs during his then-four month tenure. Said overhauls not only helped improve enrollment rates at the university but also improved communications both interdepartmentally within and between the Hattiesburg and Gulf Park campuses.
Moser continued his improvements to Academic Affairs as its official Provost. He worked to diversify the campus both on a student and an administration level by combining previous expertise with newer analytic techniques. Moser was incredibly involved with adjusting tuition costs and creating scholarship opportunities for students at the university, allowing more students to be able to attend. He also helped expand the Center for Faculty Development, including the creation of Faculty First Week, a program designed to help newer professors learn the ropes of university life.
“Dr. Moser has served as Provost during what I consider to be one of the most transformative periods in recent institutional history,” University President Rodney Bennett wrote in an Aug. 6 email. “His leadership has shaped the University in countless ways as he has advanced critical initiatives across every category.”
Moser’s work as Provost proved especially vital during early 2020, as COVID-19 unexpectedly halted university functions. He was one of the main people responsible for expanding fully online class programs from the university, which helped thousands of students remain in school during the pandemic.
Even with his impending retirement, Moser still hopes to streamline university procedures with the Vision 2020 program, making it so the school’s growth can remain stable over a long period of time.
“Provost Moser will be tremendously missed, but as his expansive body of work demonstrates, his upcoming retirement is certainly well-deserved,” Bennett said.
There is currently no Interim Provost that will take over for Moser, and, as of writing, little is known about the procedure to pick the next Academic Provost.
