Get to Know Kjersti VanSlyke-Briggs, Dean of the College of Education

Kjersti VanSlyke-Briggs is dean of Empire State University’s College of Education. Ahead, she shares the story behind her career path, goals for the college, and passion for learning.  

What inspired your career path? Did you always envision a career in academia?  

I never envisioned myself as an academic. It was a path that I landed on and continued to follow as someone that is excited by new opportunities for growth. I am a first-generation college graduate and originally went to college for adolescent English education. I completed my bachelor’s and master’s in back-to-back programs at SUNY Brockport and then began teaching high school English.  

After a couple of years in the classroom, I decided to take a class nonmatriculated at SUNY Binghamton in the Ed.D. program as an opportunity to increase my salary as a teacher. One thing led to another, and I ended up enrolling in the program and completed it part-time while still teaching high school. I had no plans to move into academia at that time and just thought of it as a way to grow as an educator. As luck would have it though, I was highly involved at the time with the New York State English Council and a colleague there encouraged me to apply for a position at SUNY Oneonta as an assistant professor in adolescent education. 

How did you transition from teaching to a leadership role? 

I was at SUNY Oneonta for 20 years and in that time, I had a lot of roles. I moved my way up to full professor, served as the inaugural director of the Faculty Center, served as chair of my department, and served as a provost fellow. I credit that transition to other people seeing leadership in me when I did not see it myself. My drive to help people and programs improve and my love of collaborative growth is what propelled me forward into these roles. I also had the benefit of an amazing mentor who was herself an excellent example of compassionate and thoughtful leadership. She encouraged me to take advantage of opportunities like SUNY SAIL, our own on-campus leadership development programs, and external opportunities like AASCU’s Emerging Leaders Program. Each one of these steps led me to the next. 

You’re the dean of the new College of Education. What’s one of your goals? 

This is an exciting time to be in the College of Education. Our programs are seeing fast-paced growth in enrollment, increasing opportunities to form partnerships with external offices and schools, and we are embracing opportunities to develop new programs to respond to an increasing demand for teachers across the state. New York state does not have enough teachers, and SUNY Empire is finding innovative ways to help working adults, such as helping paraprofessionals scale up and earn their teaching credentials. We are leaning into stackable programs and building strong relationships between our undergraduate and graduate programs. There is space for us to serve educators across their career arc not only in p-20 (pre-K through college) spaces, but beyond through professional development partnerships and fueling the work of lifelong learning for educators.  

If you weren’t working in higher ed, what would you be doing? 

There is so much I’d love to do, and I sometimes threaten to go back to college for additional degrees just for the sake of learning. If I could, I would love to pick up classes in sociology or anthropology for fun. I’d make a great lifelong student. I also sometimes wonder how it would turn out if I followed my original plan from when I was a teen. Leaving high school, I debated teaching English or moving into librarianship. When doing my master’s, I worked in the college library and assisted the research librarians. In an alternate universe, I get my M.S. in information and library science and work in a university as a librarian, likely still ending up in a dean capacity as the director of a library. In my years as a professor, some of the best projects I worked on were in partnership with our library.