Dr. Susan Schultz Huxman will serve double duty this May as Bluffton University’s 2017 Commencement speaker and mother to a graduating Bluffton student.

President James Harder announced during a recent faculty meeting that Dr. Huxman, president of Eastern Mennonite University, will address the graduating class during the May 7 ceremony in the Sommer Center.
 
Huxman’s daughter, Emily Huxman ’17, is a communication and marketing double major.

Dr. Huxman has spent more than 25 years in higher education in a variety of administrative and academic leadership roles. She has served as Eastern Mennonite University’s ninth president since Jan. 1, 2017.
 
Dr. Huxman was president of Conrad Grebel University College Waterloo, Canada, from 2011 to 2016. Previously, she was director of the Elliott School of Communication at Wichita State University, the only comprehensive, integrated communication program in the state of Kansas. She has served on the boards of Mennonite Education Agency (MEA) and Western District Conference of Mennonite Church USA.
 
Dr. Huxman holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Kansas.
 
A 1982 graduate of Bethel College with a degree in English, Dr. Huxman went on to specialize in communication. Her dissertation, titled “In the world but not of it: Mennonite rhetoric in World War I as an enactment of paradox,” was inspired by an interterm history class that she took at Bethel College.
 
Dr. Huxman won numerous awards and recognitions for teaching excellence while on the faculty at WSU. She published two dozen scholarly articles and book chapters and is co-author with Karlyn Kohrs Campbell of “The Rhetorical Act: Thinking, Speaking, and Writing Critically,” 5th ed. (2015) and editor of “Landmark Speeches on U.S. Pacifism,” Texas A&M University Press (2015).
 
She and her husband, Jesse, live in Virginia and have three adult children.