Presidential Candidate John Ryder

Dr. John Ryder brings an international perspective to Lyndon State College.

Ryder's work as the president of Khazar University in Baku, Azerbaijan for the past year and a half has given him a different perspective that he would use back here in Vermont.

 "One of the things we need to do at Lyndon and at other institutions in the U.S. is to broaden the scope of our attention, so to speak, to internationalize in some larger sense and there are a lot of ways to do that," said Ryder. "The United States is too insular, too inward looking. It comes from our own power as a society and as a nation. We are powerful enough not to pay attention. Everyone else (in the world) knows that that's not true."

He has also spent 22 years at the State University of New York College in Courtland, New York and has worked as a teacher and a dean.

"What I bring is many years of experience in public higher education, experience from both an on campus perspective and a system perspective," said Ryder. "I bring, based on international experience, a pretty good sense of issues facing higher education in the U.S. and abroad. I have a commitment to a university's social engagement to its responsibility to community, both local community and more broadly."

The size of LSC fits Ryder just fine.

"I like small universities because it presents a daily opportunity to be connected with everybody, especially students because students are the majority of the population," said Ryder. "At larger universities there is so much more than occupies a senior administrator's time that you can forget that you're even at a college. I like this kind of environment."

He sees the connection with LSC to the Northeast Kingdom an opportunity.

"I think that is very exciting for a higher education institution," Ryder said. "What the university needs to do is enter into or sustain conversations with the community to see what we can do for each other. We need their help as well."

He has a background in philosophy which gives him a different outlook than other administrators.

"We have the ability to think things to death and that's not good," said Ryder. "So one has to control that, but ideally the benefits of a philosophical education or a philosophical mind are to be able to see through the surface of problems and to analyze things in a way that helps you reach a sense of what to do about them. For me that's been a useful capability in addressing problems, analyzing problems."

Having been a faculty member himself at SUNY Courtland he can empathize and work better with faculty.

"A faculty environment is a unique kind of thing," said Ryder. "University professors have an extraordinary amount of independence. There is a culture that has developed around it and people expect to be outspoken, they expect to be active in ways they decide are important. They don't wait around for people to tell them what to do.

If offered, Ryder would take this job as a long-term arrangement.

"There's an opportunity here and it is an opportunity that sits well with my experience and my interests," he said. "I'm interested in a position where I can feel comfortable, people are comfortable with me and I can make a contribution. If offered the position I would stick around for a while."