Marlene Tromp will join Boise State University as the seventh president in the university’s history. A packed crowd of students, faculty and staff applauded loudly as the Idaho State Board of Education voted to approve her appointment Tuesday. They also approved her $425,000 salary.
Tromp comes to Boise State from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and before that was in leadership at Arizona State University. The 52-year-old is the first woman to lead the university, and she beat out four other finalists to get the top job. She has a doctorate in English literature from the University of Florida.
Wearing a Boise State-blue ensemble, Tromp said one of her first priorities will be understanding how Boise State works to bring first generation college students into the fold.
“They look at their lives, they look at their futures, they look at their communities and they don’t see the motive to go," she says. "That’s what it was like when I was growing up. But what we know from research is it’s not just that people earn more over the course of their lives … people are happier, they spend more time with their families [and] they give back more to their communities.”
She says innovation and community spirit are two of the things that attracted her to the job. She’ll take the helm July 1, when interim president Martin Schimpf's term is over.
Find reporter Frankie Barnhill on Twitter @FABarnhill
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