Michael Benson

Michael T. Benson is president and professor of history at West Virginia University, after serving 4 1/2 years as president of Coastal Carolina University. He spent 2020 as a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University in the Department of History of Science and Technology. His third book, titled “Daniel Coit Gilman and the Birth of the American Research University,” was released in 2022 by Johns Hopkins University Press, and was named one of the best higher education books in 2023 by Forbes magazine. From 2013 to 2020, Michael served as 13th president of Eastern Kentucky University and oversaw nearly $300 million in capital improvements during his tenure. Prior to his chief executive post at Eastern Kentucky, Benson was the 15th president of Southern Utah University, where he helped secure the designation for SUU as the state’s public liberal arts and sciences university; established the Hispanic Center for Academic Excellence; gained admission into the Big Sky Conference; completed new residence halls, a teacher education facility, and a science and engineering center; and directed the development and implementation of SUU’s largest and most ambitious fundraising effort. Before his tenure at Southern Utah, Benson served as the 14th president of Snow College, where he helped raise more private money for the institution than had been secured in the previous 115 years of the college’s history combined. Appointed president of Snow College at age 36, Dr. Benson was the youngest college president in the history of the Utah System of Higher Education. Michael began his career in public higher education at the University of Utah in 1995 and served as assistant to the president. Benson worked and studied abroad for over six years in Italy, England, and Israel. He earned his B.A. cum laude from Brigham Young University in 1990 with a major in Political Science and double minors in English and History. He completed his doctorate in Modern History from the University of Oxford (St. Antony’s College) in 1995, where he was a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar, recipient of the Oxford Graduate Overseas Fellowship, and a full blue (basketball). He earned a master’s degree cum laude in 2011 from the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame in non-profit administration (MNA), where he was the recipient of the prestigious Father Theodore Hesburgh Founder’s Award. In 2021, Benson completed a master's degree in liberal arts (MLA) from Johns Hopkins University.