The Franklin University Switzerland (FUS) Presidential Search Committee invites applications, expressions of interest, and nominations of candidates in its search for the University’s next President. The search is being launched in response to President Greg Warden’s decision to retire from his position in June 2022, after 10 highly successful years leading the institution. FUS seeks a visionary, globally minded, and collaborative leader who can build on Franklin’s remarkable accomplishments and continue to enhance its profile and extend its reach around the world while remaining consistent with its mission and values.
FUS is a small international university located in the southern Swiss city of Lugano. Founded in 1969 as Franklin College, it was granted university status in 2013 and officially renamed itself Franklin University Switzerland in 2014. It is the only higher education institution in the world that is accredited in both the United States and Switzerland. Continuing its original vision to create a new kind of higher education, FUS now occupies 15 buildings, including eight residence halls, and offers undergraduate and graduate programs for students from over 60 countries majoring in any of 19 disciplines on two connected campuses. Academic Travel represents the single most distinctive element of the FUS curriculum, in which active field study is used as an experiential tool. Once a semester, students embark on travel connected to the course subject of one of their five classes, during which they apply the theoretical knowledge from the classroom into practice on site. FUS’s fundamental values have remained consistent throughout its half-century: personalized learning through interactions both inside and outside the classroom, true understanding of people and culture through direct contact and guided travel, and active engagement with the world as an imperative of a global, liberal education.
FUS has attracted some of the most adventurous students, creative faculty, resourceful administrators, and dedicated trustees, and today occupies a leadership position in higher education that is the envy of institutions of far greater size and resources.