Bruce H. Kalk is Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at Southern Connecticut State University.  Dr. Kalk, the son of two public school teachers, originally hales from a small New York suburb just five minutes’ drive from the Connecticut border.  He graduated from the College of William & Mary and received his PhD in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  His scholarship focuses on the history of the GOP “southern strategy”, especially as it relates to Supreme Court nominations and partisan realignment.  In addition to several journal articles, the most recent of which won the 2017 Clark-Weir Award for the Best Article Published in the South Carolina Historical Magazine, he authored The Origins of the Southern Strategy: Two-Party Competition in South Carolina, 1950-1972 (Lexington Books, 2001).  Dean Kalk began his career at Southern in 1992 as an Assistant Professor of History.  Since that time he was promoted to Associate Professor and thereafter full Professor, served a stint as Department Chairperson, and spent nine years as Associate Dean of Arts & Sciences before becoming the Dean.  His excitement about Southern stems from his conviction that Southern is an engine of social mobility for students of modest means—and that Southern is the only four-year institution in our region of Connecticut that can make that claim.  His proudest professional accomplishment was co-authoring the successful $31.5 million Gear Up grant, for which Southern was the recipient for 2012-2018.  The grant provided tutoring, mentoring, academic support, and summer enrichment programs for over 3,000 students from Waterbury, East Hartford, and New Haven Public Schools.  It also provided for those students to pursue higher education at no financial cost to themselves.  As Dean, he serves as the chief academic officer of the largest of Southern’s colleges.  His duties include hiring and evaluating faculty members, addressing the needs of students in distress, fund-raising, managing the College’s budget, mediating conflict, allocating hundreds of thousands of square feet of physical space, and promoting the College of Arts & Sciences.  Dr. Kalk has lived in the city of New Haven for nearly twenty-five years.  During that time, he has served on the Board of Directors of the New Haven Preservation Trust, for which he oversaw the completion of its Historic Preservation Reference Manual, as a Mayoral appointee on the City of New Haven’s Development Commission, and on the Board of the New Haven Symphony Orchestra.