During his 17 years at Saint Mary's, Sindt provided exceptional academic and administrative leadership, serving as program director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing, the associate dean of the School of Liberal Arts, the dean of the Kalmanovitz School of Education, the vice provost for graduate and professional studies, and the vice provost for academic affairs. He has led initiatives in several areas, such as career and professional development, community engagement, educational effectiveness, faculty development, institutional research, international studies, sponsored research, and student success. In 2011-2012, he was selected as an American Council of Education Fellow, the nation's premier training program for university administrators. He currently serves as chair-elect of the Board of Directors of the Council of Graduates and Vice President of the Board of Directors of the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. Sindt earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of California, Los Angeles, and his master’s and doctoral degree in English from the University of California, Davis. Sindt has been honored with numerous awards and fellowships for his poetry, including the James D. Phelan Award and fellowships at the MacDowell Colony and the Blue Mountain Center. He is the author of two collections of poetry, The Bodies, and most recently, System and Population. In addition to poetry, his research interests include the literature of California and environmental literature.
“Usually those types of emergencies happen very quickly; they’re weather-related or event-related. This one, even though it felt very, very fast. We had a little bit of warning for, because it [was] a slowly growing outbreak, or at least, initially it was,” said Provost Dr. Christopher Sindt. “And then it felt when things moved to our area, the Chicagoland area…it did rapidly escalate in terms of the way universities were responding to the outbreak….”
“Barb’s dedication and commitment to bettering the graduate school community is evidenced in many ways including the implementation of a suite of graduate student and alumni surveys designed to inform program improvement and transparency regarding graduate outcomes,” said Christopher Sindt, provost of Lewis University and chair of the CGS board of directors.
“I would say a significant aspect of our mission is related to sophisticated, professional preparation that includes a lot of emphasis on experiential learning and community-based learning.”
“We follow the CDC guidelines and did not require testing at the beginning of the term, although we did target many different populations such as NCAA Athletes, international students coming and students coming from Chicago or state that have a larger frequency of positivity than ours, and quarantine those students and then targeted testing towards those students, and that has been a big part of the initial approach.”