Larry Rodgers

Larry Rodgers has had a 35-year career as a faculty member and senior university administrator. He served from 2008 until the summer of 2024 as the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and continues as Professor of English at Oregon State University in Corvallis. He was Executive Dean of OSU’s Division of Arts and Sciences from 2009-2016.

As Dean, Dr. Rodgers oversaw a wide-ranging transformation of the College of Liberal Arts that included creating seven new Schools, three PhD programs and a range of innovative on-campus and online masters degrees. From 2018 on, College Choice ranked his college as #1 on its list of 25 Best Online Liberal Arts Colleges in the United States. He’s been keenly interested in elevating admissions and completion rates for students of all backgrounds and abilities, which has included implementing a liberal arts 4-year graduation guarantee. His capstone achievement has been to oversee the fund-raising, vision, and design of the 70 million dollar Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts (known as PRAx), which opened in April 2024, featuring a performance hall, black box theater, art gallery, and university garden. He led a team that created a 49,000 sq foot building that is architecturally distinctive, acoustically extraordinary, and formed around a vision for musical and artistic spaces aimed toward K-12 and university students, cultural neophytes, and seasoned artistic and musical audiences alike.

Dean Rodgers received his PhD in English with a minor in American history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also holds an Honors BA in English from the University of Oklahoma and an MA in English from the University of Iowa. Prior to joining OSU, he served on the faculty of Kansas State University for nineteen years where he also served as head of English and associate dean of Arts and Sciences. As the author and editor of half a dozen books, he’s a well-known scholar of multicultural and regional American literature.

He is married to Susan Jackson Rodgers, a fiction writer and professor of creative writing at Oregon State, and they have three grown children, including two in Chicago, one of whom is a University of Chicago alumnus.