Wilson G. Hess

Wilson G. Hess has over 35 years of experience in both private and public higher education, including executive leadership, board development, strategic planning, financial and enrollment management, academic innovation, organizational assessment, and higher education accreditation. He is highly regarded in the fields of higher education leadership, institutional accreditation, board governance, and organizational turn-around situations. As a CEO, Wilson has been a champion of shared governance at three institutions and led boards at those institutions to exemplify best practice standards. He has advised other governing boards and presented nationally on board development.

Wilson has recently completed a four-year appointment at the College of the Marshall Islands, a community college in an equatorial Pacific island nation, and was appointed president emeritus. While engaged there, he was credited with leading a transformative institutional change based upon a stakeholder-developed vision that employed best practice techniques to become “a model community college for the Pacific region.”

As a private college president at Unity College in Maine, Wilson inherited an organization with profound accreditation difficulties. In a heralded “turnaround” early in the 1990s, the college was restored to fully accredited status. During his 10-year tenure (with a rebuilt and revitalized board) it went on to enjoy an unprecedented period of growth and vitality. Its achievements earned the college a respected regional reputation in its market niche and drew the interest of higher education scholars such as Robert Zemsky, Edward Kormandy, and Terrence MacTaggart.

Throughout his career, Wilson’s extramural service has included a wide variety of organizations and boards: corporate boards of directors, community service organizations, economic development agencies, regulatory bodies, governmental entities, conservation organizations, and historical societies. As founder, president, and CEO of Sandy Pond Associates, a private consulting firm, he expanded his professional activities into not-for-profit organizations and NGOs in the areas of strategic planning, governance, management, fund raising, and organizational assessment.

Wilson has also served as executive director of the Audubon Expedition Institute (an experiential, field-based graduate program affiliated with the National Audubon Society), where he instituted international program offerings in Mexico, Canada, and Nepal and remote offerings in Alaska and Hawaii. He has also served as dean of the college at Sterling College (Vt.) and dean of academic affairs at Unity College (where he also served as a professor of history, as part time varsity coach, and in various administrative positions for over 15 years).

Wilson holds degrees in history from the University of Baltimore and the University of Maine and is a frequent speaker and presenter at professional conferences and public forums, a respected authority on conservation issues and natural resource policy, and a scholar of conservation and environmental history.