Scot Bemis, the former vice president for human resources at Brandeis University and former employee of the U.S. military, was named the chief human resources officer for the College last month, replacing interim vice president of human resources Lynn Baker.
In his new role, which he will begin on April 27, Bemis will oversee various aspects of human resources management including payroll, recruitment, training and termination and will report directly to executive vice president and chief financial officer Richard Mills.
Bemis wrote in an email that he hopes to continue to attract a competent and diverse pool of candidates to the College as well as maximize the efficiency and accessibility of the human resources department’s services.
He also stressed the importance of communication when assessing how the human resources office can better support the community. He wrote that he looks forward to arriving on campus and listening to community members’ feedback.
Baker said that the College’s human resources department is excited to have a distinguished candidate who has experience in higher education for the permanent position. She added that current human resources staff members are looking forward to having a director with his experience.
Mills said that Bemis’ experience at Brandeis demonstrates his understanding of the function of human resources management in higher-education institutions, which Mills said he believes differs from that of other types of organizations.
“[Human resources] has historically been viewed as a transactional-processing function — hiring people, firing people,” he said. “In higher-education institutions, it is a service function, but it is a hugely important strategic function around managing human capital that is almost the entirety of what makes us be what we are.”
Prior to working for Brandeis, Bemis held three different senior human resources positions with the U.S. military, including National Guard human resource operations director in Washington D.C., director of the Leadership Center in Tikrit, Iraq and senior director of human resources in Baghdad, Iraq.
Bemis wrote that his prior experience provided him with a heightened sense of “cultural awareness,” increased his “appreciation for diversity and inclusion” and allowed him to better understand the path to success in higher education.
Mills said that though a military background may appear non-traditional for the position, Bemis’ experience at the U.S. military indicates that he is capable of working with a wide array of people. Mills added that he, along with College President Phil Hanlon and Provost Carolyn Dever, is committed to further diversifying the Dartmouth community, adding that he believes Bemis is qualified to achieve such a goal.
“[There is] a lot of opportunity and a lot of work to be done — but that’s the topic that Scot and I spent a lot of time talking about,” he said.
In addition to acting as the vice president for human resources at Brandeis, Bemis served as the University’s Title IX coordinator. Bemis declined to comment on the College’s ongoing Title IX investigation, writing that it was “premature” to do so.
In 2012, during Bemis’ tenure as the vice president for human resources, the editorial board of The Justice, Brandeis’ independent student newspaper, criticized the human resources department for hiring a journalism professor with a criminal record for drunk driving who was subsequently terminated for another drunk driving incident.
Bemis wrote that his department followed the policies in place at the time when hiring this faculty member and that the hiring process for adjunct professors was reviewed in response to the incident. He declined to comment further.
In response to this criticism, Mills noted that the College’s human resources department has a limited role in the hiring of academic faculty, though he noted that there is an opportunity for collaboration between the academic departments and the human resources department.
“I think human resources can have a strategic partnership with the academic side — those are the sort of places where we can make a lot of improvement,” he said.
Brandeis executive administrator to the vice president of human resources Giovanna Abeiga, who worked under Bemis, said that he was an encouraging and pleasant presence at the office.
“He of course has high expectations, he expects that everyone would work with high standards,” she said. “He was an amazing mentor to many of his directors and even to the staff who did not directly report to him.”
Bemis is filling the vacancy left by former vice president of human resources Myron McCoo, who left the college in November 2013.
