La Sierra University professors Ed Boyatt, Ed.D., and John Webster, Ph.D., will begin positions this year as deans of the university’s schools of education and religion, respectively.

Boyatt brings to his new position a wealth of experience in education, both in and out of the classroom. He has worked in grades K-12, as well as higher education, and has served as an administrator at Walla Walla College in Washington and in the education departments of the Oregon and North Pacific Union conferences of Seventh-day Adventists. He has been at La Sierra University since 1998.

Webster, a Princeton- and Andrews University-educated doctor of theology originally from South Africa, has been a professor at La Sierra since 1999. In 2005, he was elected to a three-year presidential cycle for the Adventist Society of Religious Scholars.

As deans, Boyatt and Webster will be responsible for the academic and administrative operations of their schools for one or more four-year terms. The School of Religion has 11 regular faculty and about 20 other collaborating faculty, and about 125 students; the School of Education has 11 faculty members, about 250 undergraduate students and around 200 graduate level students in master’s, education specialist, and doctoral programs. Both professors will continue teaching classes in addition to handling their new administrative duties.

“I see our mission to facilitate learning in all the intelligences: cognitive, emotional and moral domains,” says Boyatt. “I want our students to be competent and caring, skillful and compassionate, generous and thankful to their God.”

“We are in the business of preparing students for pastoral ministry, for further graduate academic studies, and for vocations in what we call ‘public theology,’ where they bring their study of religion to bear on another chosen career,” says Webster. “As such, we seek to serve the church, the academic pursuit of knowledge and our wider society.”