From the Rainforest to Cedar Hill

Words matter to Dan Everett. The university’s new dean of arts and sciences spent years in the Amazon River jungle, studying language and its broader cultural meaning. He has been quick to master the Bentley lexicon.

“The arts and sciences is more than just a service unit to support business,” observes Everett, who assumed the deanship on July 1. “It’s an integral part of the Bentley experience.”

Everett arrives with something of an unconventional background. True, he spent 14 years in university administration, with appointments that include Linguistics Department chair at Illinois State University and at the University of Pittsburgh, as well as a professorship in phonetics and phonology at the University of Manchester in England. But it is Everett’s time in the Amazon that deeply informs his approach to the Bentley post.

Necessary Union
Starting as a Christian missionary, he dedicated seven years over the course of three decades to living among the Pirahã (pee-da-HAN) people of Brazil. His missionary work gave way to in-depth study of their singular language and culture, which are absent notions of time, number and similar elements that mark accepted linguistic and cultural theory. His research and conclusions have challenged some conventional wisdom in modern linguistics, not without controversy. The work gives him a keen appreciation for the difficulties of research.

“I understand the amount of midnight oil that needs to be burned, the kind of money you need, and the conditions that researchers work under,” says Everett, the author of  90-plus articles and six books, the latest of which is published in six languages.

Similarly, the Bentley combination of business and arts and sciences is a good fit for the new dean, who sees a necessary union among different academic disciplines in his own work.

”If I want to study human language, I have to know something about the human mind and human culture,” he explains. “I need to know psychology and cultural anthropology. I need philosophy to help set the conceptual framework.”

The high degree of interdisciplinary work underway at Bentley made an immediate impression. “The department chairs talk to each other a lot,” Everett notes. “The faculty work across boundaries.”

Betting on Business
But isn’t a business university an unusual place for a linguistics scholar? Not at all, says Everett, who sees an opportunity to make a difference at Bentley and in the larger society.

“CEOs have a chance to affect the world in ways that other people can’t,” he says. “There will always be business, or society will have ended. So betting on business is about the most prudent thing you can do. And Bentley does it uniquely: We reach the whole person by integrating the arts and sciences.”

As he settles in here, Everett finds his research background an apt metaphor for current tasks. “I approach the job of dean as I would an anthropological linguist going into a tribe for the first time,” he says. “This is a complex society, and I need to understand the society before I start trying to lead it.”

He pauses, adding with a chuckle: “But if I fail here, they probably won’t kill me.”