Neil Theobald, Senior Vice President & Chief Financial Officer
Neil Theobald serves as senior vice president and chief financial officer at Indiana University. In January, he will become the tenth President of Temple University in Philadelphia. In naming Theobald to this role, IU President Michael A. McRobbie cited his extensive record of accomplishment as an IU administrator and faculty member: "Neil has an extremely strong academic and practical background, particularly on matters concerning the financing of higher education. Through his work across so many of our academic and administrative units, he has developed a keen understanding of Indiana University, its objectives, and the support it needs to achieve those objectives. He also is an excellent teacher and nationally recognized researcher who has dedicated himself to enhancing the quality of higher education while seeking new and innovative ways to keep it affordable and accessible."
Theobald was named IU Bloomington's vice chancellor for budgetary administration and planning in 2002. In 2006, he was appointed as senior vice provost and special assistant to the president. Major accomplishments during his five years overseeing the campus budget include increasing the number of tenure-track faculty members by 80, increasing the campus financial aid endowment from $150 million to $370 million, and increasing the mean SAT score of the incoming class from 1099 to 1147.
In addition to his senior administrative responsibilities, Theobald holds a professorship in education finance on the IU Bloomington campus. His research interests in the appropriate role of decentralization in educational financing and in modeling educational labor markets are reflected in more than $1.5 million in funded research, numerous books and book chapters, dozens of articles published in professional journals, and nearly 50 policy reports for state governments across the United States.
Theobald is a past-president of the American Education Finance Association, winning the association's Jean Flanigan Award for the outstanding dissertation in the study of educational finance in 1990. In 1995, the University Council for Educational Administration presented Theobald with the Jack A. Culbertson Award as the professor who, in the first seven years of his or her career, made the most outstanding contribution to the profession. In 2003, Theobald was presented the Distinguished Graduate Award by the College of Education at the University of Washington. Professor Theobald is a three-time winner of IU's Teaching Excellence Recognition Award.
A native of Peoria, Illinois, Theobald came to IU from the University of Washington, where he was associate professor of education finance. He earned a bachelor's degree from Trinity College and a doctoral degree from the University of Washington.
He lives in Bloomington with his wife, Sheona Mackenzie, who is a school psychologist in the Monroe County schools. Their son, Roddy, is a graduate student in statistics at the University of Washington; their elder daughter, Kinnear, is completing a medical residency at the University of Colorado; and their younger daughter, Mattie, is a junior at Hamilton College (NY). Theobald will be relocating to Philadelphia in January as he assumes the Presidency of Temple University.
