Introducing our New Dean & CEO – Peter Temes
Northeastern University has appointed Peter Temes as the new regional dean and CEO here at the Seattle campus. Temes joins NU-Seattle following an incredibly successful stint at the Innovation in Large Organizations Institute (ILO), which he founded and served as President for over 10 years. The ILO Institute is a membership organization for larger institutions, focused on bringing the best practices in innovation to both the private and public sectors.
Prior to founding the ILO Institute in 2005, Temes served as President of Antioch New England Graduate School for three years. His love for innovation and education made him a great candidate for the job at NU – Seattle.
Temes has led research initiatives for a variety of renowned companies in the technology, financing and consumer marketing sectors, including Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, and Disney. When he’s not deep in conversations about business and technology, he’s got his head in a book. Literature was Temes’s first love. He is one of the founders of the Great Books Summer Program, a summer residential program that brings together middle and high school students from across the world to read, discuss and debate selections from the greatest works of literature.
He is the founding editor of American Letters and Commentary and the founding publisher of The Common Review as well as an author and editor of several books including Teaching Leadership, The Just War, and Against School Reform.
Temes will undoubtedly bring a wealth of multifaceted experience that will prove invaluable to the ongoing growth and expansion of our campus.
So, what will the future hold for NU-Seattle with the new ideas and energy from our new dean? Here’s a sneak peak.
Welcome to NU-Seattle! We’re very excited you have joined the team. What originally brought you to Seattle?
I’m excited to join Northeastern-Seattle! I moved here from Los Angeles about a year ago. We decided to move after my youngest son was admitted to university. It wasn’t a huge move though, as our path from upstate New York to Boston, Chicago, and Connecticut had led us just down the coast from Seattle.
We were very fortunate in planning this last move a year ago; we had the option to move wherever we wanted to. We narrowed it down to three cities: New Haven, New Hampshire, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania or Seattle. We considered each location, but after a lot of thought and exploration, we moved to Seattle and we’ve never looked back. It’s such a beautiful city.
Seattle ultimately won out over the other potential locations as we wanted to live in a place with a great intellectual and business culture, as well as a nice family culture. It’s a bonus that Seattle is also more affordable – at least for the moment – than vibrant cities like New York, San Francisco, Paris and London. My daughter also teaches out here, so that influenced our decision too.
It wasn’t an ideal start – I fell into a pond immediately after moving here and injured my leg, but other than that, it’s been wonderful. We have a beautiful home, lovely neighbors and now I’ve got the best job in town.
We are happy beyond all expectation here in Seattle.
What drew you to our campus?
I was immediately drawn to Northeastern University in Seattle because it has a very unusual mix. It is a creative, ambitious enterprise, as well as an established research university with a deep intellectual history. It’s a very rare combination. NU-Seattle is not a business, it is an enterprise. We’re going to make a lot of decisions that are not based on monetary gain, but on furthering education. NU-Seattle’s mission is absolutely about doing what is best for the students here. That has been our mission and it will remain as such. This has to be on the forefront of the mind going forward.
The Seattle campus has is consistently expanding at a rapid rate. What do you hope to achieve in your role as Dean at NU-Seattle?
I would definitely like to showcase Northeastern University-Seattle more. I would like to see us all more engaged in the civic of the city and our communities. We’ll leave a bigger footprint around the South Lake Union area, and in the public life we all share here in the community. We’re already working on increasing our social and civic presence, so that when issues that affect the community arise, we’re involved and go deeper. We’re really jumping into that this year. I would also like to see a broader range of intellectual work in future, including more presence from the university’s programs in education, law and diplomacy, and digital ethics.
What do you value most about the culture and vision here at NU- Seattle?
Two things are very clear to me. The staff and faculty genuinely care about each other and the students. You would think that you would find that at every university, but there’s a special level of community and concern here that’s genuinely unusual.
NU-Seattle also has a very interesting blend of knowledge and creativity. This is evident amongst staff and students. We’re learning and teaching, but also creating new knowledge, and new understanding.
What do you enjoy doing in your free time?
I know it may not look like it, but I actually spend a lot of time in the gym. I can’t do as much walking as I would like to, since the incident in the pond, but I am definitely pushing to do more walking. Seattle is such a beautiful city to walk around. It has actually inspired us to begin a partnership with MOHAI, the Museum of History and Industry just down the street on the lake. I hope we’ll all be thinking of that beautiful building and park as part of the campus. My wife is the adventurer of the family though, she does all the crazy things. She’s really enjoying kayaking and canoeing at the moment. I really cherish spending time with my wife and family. One of my daughters lives here, she’s a teacher. My other daughter just finished her studies to be a midwife. My son is currently enrolled at Berkeley. We try to get together as often as we can, family is absolutely the most important thing to me.