Bateza named ACM Mellon Academic Leadership Fellow
Associate Professor of Religion and Department Chair of Race, Ethnic, Gender and Sexuality Studies Anthony Bateza has been awarded an Academic Leadership Fellowship from the Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM) consortium. The grant is funded by the Mellon Foundation.
ACM Mellon Academic Leadership Fellows are tenured faculty who have demonstrated leadership capabilities, a commitment to diversity and inclusive equity, and the potential to have a transformative impact through leadership at their current or future institutions. As contributors to senior leadership discussions, each fellow will lead a project or portfolio of responsibilities as identified by their college’s senior leadership team.
For his project, Bateza is working to combine his research related to questions of virtue and character throughout history with the college’s goals of fostering a community of leadership and character on campus. He notes that great work has already been done in St. Olaf Athletics with initiatives like the Ole Leadership Academy, and he hopes to spread that progress into other spaces on campus. The Ole Leadership Academy is a cohort of sophomore student athletes who complete educational sessions throughout the year focused on a variety of topics related to leadership, including how to build team community and what skills make for an effective leader.
“In addition to skill building, I’m really interested in thinking about what virtues people need to have to resist oppression and fight against injustice,” Bateza says. “I feel like we’re primed to have some hard conversations about what it means to be a virtuous leader, to be somebody who has a sense of responsibility, accountability, and commitment to justice and the common good. It’s about finding a way that we can make this an ongoing conversation across the college, and I think St. Olaf has a lot to offer with that.”
“In addition to skill building, I’m really interested in thinking about what virtues people need to have to resist oppression and fight against injustice.”
— Anthony Bateza
Bateza will meet with other ACM fellows in Chicago this July for training and mentorship opportunities. He speaks to the importance of continued professional development and resources for growth being available throughout someone’s career, particularly for those of historically oppressed communities.
“The program was originally conceived and still has an emphasis on trying to pay attention to populations and folks in leadership who haven’t had leadership opportunities in the past, those who have been historically marginalized or excluded for whatever reasons,” Bateza says. “I do think there is a recognition that across the board, and particularly for faculty of color and other underrepresented folks, there may be additional barriers to getting mentorship, to getting training, to living into that middle part of your career, and taking on more leadership roles. I think this fellowship is an attempt to respond to that.”
Bateza earned his bachelor’s degree from Iowa State University, a Master of Divinity from the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, and his doctorate degree from Princeton Theological Seminary. On campus, he frequently mentors incoming faculty and was a member of both the presidential search committee in 2023 and the search committee for the college’s next provost in 2024. He is an ordained Lutheran pastor who has spoken at many chapel services and in various congressional settings. He delivered the 2023 Martin Luther King Jr. Day Keynote Address, speaking about how to make sense of Martin Luther King Jr.’s radical imagination in the present day.