university administration Dr. Robert (Bob)
BELL
UNIVERSITY OF Florida 1969
v University President
Dr. Robert (Bob) Bell, now in his 12th year as President of Tennessee Tech, is an avid supporter of TTU and Ohio Valley Conference sports. He spent 2010-11 as the chair the OVC President’s Board of Directors. Bell became TTU’s President in 2000 after serving as dean, associate dean, assistant dean, and a chairperson in the university’s College of Business. After taking the post, he oversaw the reorganization of the athletics department, bringing in a full-time athletics director for the first time in almost 20 years. He has also been involved in statewide economic development on behalf of the Tennessee Higher Education Commission, working on the THEC master plan focusing on links among higher education and stakeholders in business, health care and state government. Bell has served four terms on the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award’s Board of Examiners and was appointed a charter member of the Tennessee Center for Performance Excellence in 1992, serving on the group’s panel of judges from 1994 to 2005. He
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represented Tennessee as a state delegate to the White House Conference on North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 and spent two years as an economic development consultant for the nation of Mauritius. Dr. Bell has served on or chaired a variety of professional, regional and national organizations, including the American Association of Collegiate Schools of Business International, the Southern Business Association, the North American Case Research Association, the Tennessee College Association, and a number of Tennessee higher education task forces, among others. In 2005, Bell was named the first recipient of the Ned R. McWherter Leadership Award, presented by the Tennessee Center for Performance Excellence. In the scholarly arena, he has been published extensively in the fields of management, organizational design, computer science and quality/productivity management, authoring two books and more than 70 articles, case studies and papers. Bell is also well known and respected in the Cookeville community. He has chaired the Cookeville-Area Putnam County Chamber of Commerce’s board of directors, the Regional Quality Council and the Putnam Tomorrow Task Force for the Putnam County Commission. A past president of the local YMCA, Bell currently chairs the Cookeville Industrial Development Board and is a member of the Board of Directors for CityScape and Blood Assurance Corp. He has been an adult leader in the Boy Scouts of America since 1988 and serves on the executive board for the Middle Tennessee Council of BSA. He is also a member of the Cookeville Rotary and Evening Lions Clubs.
TENNESSEE TECH GOLF GUIDE / 2010-11