2023 Recipient

Christopher P. Long, College of Arts and Letters and Honors College

Dr. Christopher P. Long is a Michigan State University Foundation Professor and dean of two colleges: the College of Arts and Letters and the Honors College. He is committed to the transformative power of a liberal arts education and is a leading advocate for public scholarship, community-engaged participatory research, and a values-enacted approach to academic life. 

Under his leadership, several advances have been made to help raise the College of Arts and Letters’ international reputation including the creation of the Center for Interdisciplinarity, the Citizen Scholars program, the Critical Diversity in a Digital Age initiative, and the Excel Network. 

Long has successfully established the College of Arts and Letters as a catalyst of innovation and collaboration at MSU through signature partnerships with the MSU Libraries to create the Digital Scholarship Lab, and with the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources and the College of Communication Arts and Sciences to advance a holistic approach to food research.

He has over $7 million of funded research projects, including the Andrew W. Mellon funded Less Commonly Taught Languages Partnership with the Big 10 Academic Alliance, a participatory research initiative and teaching framework developed in reciprocal partnership with Indigenous communities, including Indigenous faculty and language instructors.  With this grant, MSU will partner with other universities, tribal colleges, and tribal communities to establish a larger community that connects and sustains Indigenous language work at institutions.

Additional projects include the Public Philosophy Journal, an innovative online publication for accessible scholarship that deepens our understanding of publicly relevant issues; HuMetricsHSS, a values-enacted initiative committed to transforming higher education by aligning indicators of academic excellence with core personal and institutional values; and the Charting Pathways of Intellectual Leadership initiative designed to empower staff and faculty to align their core values with the processes of promotion and advancement that shape their academic lives.