Ken joined NCHEMS as a Senior Associate on July 1, 2002 but has been on the NCHEMS Board since 1980. He served as President of two universities—Western Washington University from 1988 to 1993 and University of Hawai‘i from 1993 to 2001, where he also served as Chancellor of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He was Vice President and Vice Provost of Penn State from 1984 to 1988.

Ken has had a distinguished career as a scholar, faculty member and administrator. He was a faculty member in higher education and public administration at Penn State from 1969 to 1988 and directed the Penn State Center for the Study of Higher Education from 1976 to 1981. He has written five books or monographs, including Sharing Authority Effectively, and published dozens of articles and book chapters on governance and policy issues. In the 1970s his work concentrated on academic governance and the evolution of faculty unionization at the state and institutional levels.

In the 1980s he published extensively on strategies for the management of "Reductions, Reallocations and Retrenchments." His research was funded by a variety of foundations including the Lilly Endowment, the Carnegie Corporation and the National Science Foundation.

Education: Ken holds an A.B. in English from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.B.A. in International Business from Penn’s Wharton School, and a Ph.D. in Higher Education from the University of California at Berkeley