Rusty Monhollon, Ph.D., is the vice president for academic affairs at the Kansas Board of Regents.

Monhollon previously served as President and Executive Director of the South Carolina Commission on Higher Education, from 2019 to 2024. In his role as President and Executive Director Monhollon stabilized the Commission and helped restore confidence in the agency. Monhollon also convened the Higher Education Advisory Committee, which resulted in CHE’s Ascend 60×30 strategic plan, which seeks to increase the state’s educational attainment to 60 percent by 2030 through the reduction of achievement gaps. This led to the formation of a statewide Transfer Task Force, whose Transfer Action Plan is now the blueprint for improving transfer in the state. Under his leadership, South Carolina has been recognized as a national leader in transfer excellence.

Between 2011 and 2019, Monhollon was the Assistant Commissioner for Academic Affairs at the Missouri Department of Higher Education. There he led the Missouri Reverse Transfer Initiative, which resulted in more than 1,000 students receiving associate degrees. Monhollon also led the state’s efforts to implement best practices in remedial education, including the use of multiple measures for placement, gateway courses aligned to programs of study, alternative modes of delivering remedial education, and sending consistent messages of constitutes college readiness to high school students, among others. Between 2013-2019, the overall rate of remediation in Missouri declined by nearly 36 percent, and by 42 percent in mathematics. He also oversaw the Missouri Math Pathways Initiative, which was implemented in the fall of 2018 with 25 of 27 public institutions participating, and the state’s Corequisite at Scale effort, which included three-fourths of all public institutions. Monhollon also headed up the effort to implement a statewide core transfer curriculum known as CORE 42, which was implemented in the fall of 2018. The CORE 42 is a library of nearly 100 courses guaranteed to transfer course-for-course among all public institutions, which resulted in fewer “wasted” credits and unnecessary credit hour accumulation, and also began developing appropriate academic maps aligned to CORE 42.

Before joining the MDHE in 2009 as a Senior Associate, Monhollon was Associate Professor of History and Director for the Masters of Arts in Humanities program at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland. He previously held academic appointments at Washburn University, Friends University, Rockhurst University, the University of Kansas, and the University of Missouri-Columbia, teaching courses in twentieth-century America, the 1960s, race and race relations, the civil rights movement, and American popular culture. His first book “This is America?”: The Sixties in Lawrence, Kansas (Palgrave, 2002), received the Edward H. Tihen Publication Award from the Kansas State Historical Association and was nominated for the Phi Alpha Theta Annual Book Award, both in 2003. He also was the editor of Baby Boom: People and Perspectives, published by ABC-Clio in 2010. Additionally, Monhollon has published many articles and reviews and has given numerous professional presentations. His work has been cited by scholars from across multiple disciplines.

Prior to entering academia, Monhollon worked as a welder and machinist and was the general manager of a custom steel fabrication shop. A native Kansan, Monhollon began taking college courses in the evening while working full-time and received his baccalaureate degree summa cum laude at Washburn University of Topeka, with a dual major in History and Political Science. He earned his master’s and doctoral degrees in History (with honors) from the University of Kansas. He and his wife Sonja Erickson (also a native Kansan and KU alumnus) have four children.