Director of Finance/Controller

Institutional Overview

Institutional background/history

Beloit College was chartered by a group of educated, innovative New Englanders in 1846—two years before the Wisconsin territory became a state. Since then, our students, faculty, and staff have created a campus that seeks to push boundaries, defy expectations, challenge societal norms. That’s just the Beloit way.

Since the first small batch of students graduated in 1851—when Middle College was the only building on campus—Beloit College has been dedicated to educating the whole individual.

Beloit is historically renowned for both the humanities and the sciences, for its accredited art and anthropology museums, its international education, and integrative first-year program. As a small liberal arts college, your professors want to make meaningful relationships with you, with both sides learning from each other. Our flexible curriculum retains much of the spirit of the innovative Beloit Plan, a groundbreaking year-round curriculum from the 1960s that emphasized field studies and required off-campus terms.

Today, students take classes from five different areas to learn how to write, research, and question. Professors and peers alike expose students to people and stories from around the world and in the campus backyard. They ask students to challenge what they once believed to be true, to stretch the limits of what they thought was possible. At Beloit, they ask students to observe and introspect, educate and empathize and take these skills with them for the rest of their lives.

With a liberal arts education, Beloit students always find a way to make their college experience their own. Beloiters inherently march to the beat of their own drums. With a liberal arts education under their belt, they learn to love dabbling in a bit of everything. They take a geology class on a whim and are surprised by how much they love it. They attend an interest meeting for Art House and decide to live there next semester. They become a DJ for the student radio station WBCR. They add a political science minor because their favorite professor recommends it, and students think, why not?

With an education at Beloit, they earn the skills to do almost anything—and they get to decide how and where to apply them.

Beloit College has had it—this inexplicable something President Scott Bierman has called “the special sauce.” Beloiters have a hard time describing the power and the magic of this place.

https://www.beloit.edu/our-story/our-history/

Formal Mission Statement

Beloit College engages the intelligence, imagination, and curiosity of its students, empowering them to lead fulfilling lives marked by high achievement, personal responsibility, and public contribution in a diverse society. Our emphasis on international and interdisciplinary perspectives, the integration of knowledge with experience, and close collaboration among peers, professors, and staff equips our students to approach the complex problems of the world ethically and thoughtfully.

https://www.beloit.edu/our-story/our-purpose/

Beloit, WI

The city of Beloit has the best of both worlds: It’s small enough to feel like a place you will call home, yet big enough to transport students between the Midwest’s larger cities for a long weekend.

On the southern border of Wisconsin above northern Illinois, the city of Beloit is not just the site of Beloit College’s campus. With nearly 40,000 residents, it’s a vibrant community that has changed and redefined itself as much as the college has. Now, Beloit is home to an engaged community that, by its very nature, gives students in-person and highly relevant experiences living and working here. And there’s no shortage of opportunities. Beloit is home to hundreds of businesses of every size, from global companies like ABC Supply, a roofing company across the mighty Rock River from campus, to Bushel & Peck’s, a locally-sourced restaurant and market in the heart of downtown.

Beloit is living history, the legacy of the past and present blue-collar workers. Some residents can trace their family line back to Fairbanks Morse’s first African American workers during the Great Migration, while others immigrated here as recently as the last decade. Beloiters connect with this beautiful place, its hardworking people, and maybe even its snowy Midwestern winters.

The city of Beloit offers local events and festivals almost constantly: the state’s second-largest open-air farmers market during the warmer months, an international film festival in the winter, and revolving student art exhibits at Gallery ABBA downtown—all year round.

Beloit is also a close (and affordable) Van Galder bus ride away from Wisconsin’s bigger cities. Janesville, Rockford, and Madison are around an hour away, with Milwaukee and Chicago, IL, being less than two.

https://www.beloit.edu/our-story/beloit-wisconsin/

Leadership

Scott Bierman, President

Scott Bierman became the 11th president of Beloit College in July 2009. This followed 27 years at Carleton College in Northfield, MN, highlighted by being named the Ada M. Harrison Chair of Teaching Social Sciences and Professor of Economics and then serving as Dean of the College.

President Bierman earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics and mathematics from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, and received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Virginia. His most significant publications include two editions of Game Theory with Economic Applications co-authored with Luis Fernandez, an economist from Oberlin College. Earlier in his career, he collaborated with Todd Proebsting, one of his students from Carleton, to develop an interactive tutorial to accompany well-known principles of economics texts (including Economics by Paul Samuelson and Paul Nordhaus and Economics by Campbell McConnell). He has regularly taught courses in microeconomic theory, game theory, and applied microeconomics. He has also directed several off-campus studies programs based in Cambridge, England, with a focus on the British Industrial Revolution.

While at Beloit, Bierman has significantly deepened the college’s commitment to connecting students’ educational experiences with their futures/careers in intentional and purposeful ways. He has led substantial improvements to physical spaces on campus that directly enhance the quality of student lives. These include the development of the Powerhouse (a reuse of the adjacent Blackhawk power plant into a student union and recreation center), residence hall renovations and additions, athletic facility enhancements, and classroom improvements.

He has been active in the world of higher education as a member of external review committees and other advisory groups for colleges in the U.S. and abroad. He is a member of the Bates College board of trustees.

President Bierman and his wife, Melody, have two children, Lauren and Emily.

https://www.beloit.edu/president-office/biography