Bethel Hires In­terim CFO

MISHAWAKA—Bethel Col­lege has a new CFO for the next six months. Dick Rea­gan is a CPA, for­mer au­di­tor with Arthur An­der­son, and for­mer CFO for the New Eng­land Pa­tri­ots. Orig­i­nally from Boston, Rea­gan was hired by Bethel with as­sis­tance by The Reg­istry, an in­terim staffing or­ga­ni­za­tion. Ac­cord­ing to Pres­i­dent Gregg Chenoweth, Rea­gan will use his ex­pe­ri­ence and ad­min­is­tra­tion skills and will as­sist the phys­i­cal plant on some new pro­jects.

“For ex­am­ple ... we’re work­ing now to get a de­sign and bids from con­trac­tors for this sum­mer to build out two new com­puter lab­o­ra­to­ries, as­so­ci­ated with the new Com­puter Sci­ence ma­jor we’re launch­ing in the fall,” Chenoweth said.

An­other ex­am­ple is a Wel­come Cen­ter as an ad­di­tion to the Ad­mis­sions barn.  

“It will nearly dou­ble the square footage of what’s avail­able there but be very dif­fer­ent in de­sign. It’s not for of­fices—we’re keep­ing the barn space for of­fices. This will be sort of a gallery space with some me­dia and will be a first place to meet with par­ents and prospec­tive stu­dents,” Chenoweth said. 

The Pres­i­dent went on to de­scribe the im­por­tance of the pro­ject. 

“We have about 7,000 per year—prospec­tive stu­dents and or par­ents. So, with that vol­ume, we felt that we should do bet­ter than what we’ve been do­ing.  … typ­i­cally, we would meet them in the cof­fee shop or that con­fer­ence room [in the back] that’s been mod­i­fied. For­tu­nately, we talked to some friends of Bethel who have do­nated to this cause and nei­ther of the [pro­jects] I’ve men­tioned come out of stu­dent tu­ition, they all come from  phil­an­thropy.” 

Al­though Pres­i­dent Chenoweth did not want to dam­age for­mer CFO David Arm­strong’s rep­u­ta­tion, he did at­tempt to give some ra­tio­nale for why Arm­strong was no longer at Bethel.

“For any per­son at Bethel, when we hire some­one we have them sign a covenant lifestyle, like stu­dents. We also have work val­ues that we in­ter­view on... Once the per­son is here, we have train­ings and on­board­ings. We also have an­nual per­for­mance re­views. And if there’s any dif­fi­cul­ties in an em­ploy­ment re­la­tion­ship, we can use our work val­ues to di­ag­nose the sit­u­a­tion... Some­times we have what we call a per­for­mance im­prove­ment plan. Some­times there’s even a sec­ond per­for­mance im­prove­ment plan, but typ­i­cally if things aren’t im­prov­ing you would­n’t have a fu­ture to­gether,” he said.