Veteran Faculty Member Justine Bell-Waters Selected Executive Assistant To The President
Veteran
faculty member Justine Bell Waters, professor of public administration, is
the new executive assistant to the president at CSU Dominguez Hills, filling
the vacancy left with the retirement of James Harris, who served the university
for 30 years in myriad teaching and administrative posts.
Appointed to the position of executive assistant after what President James E. Lyons, Sr. terms "a lengthy and careful consideration of the excellent pool of candidates for the position," Dr. Bell-Waters brings a range of experience and a considerable depth of insight to the job.
"I am very pleased that she accepted the appointment and am confident that she will be a source of strength to my administrative team," the presidents says. "I am sure you will find her responsive and sensitive to campus concerns."
A member of the CSUDH faculty since 1987, Bell-Waters assumed her new duties immediately following her appointment last fall on a part-time basis, enabling her to fulfill her teaching obligations. Now, with the start of the spring semester, she is a full-time executive assistant.
Her duties include working with the President, meeting with the CSUDH Operations Group and with the system-wide office - and troubleshooting the myriad issues and problems that arise campus-wide.
Public education has been Bell Waters' life for the past two decades - but it wasn't always so.
"Initially, when I went to undergraduate school, [a career in] education was not on my mind. I was more interested in community service work," Bell-Waters recalls. "I was very interested in how to help people develop their skills, and work with at-risk children I was geared in that direction."
Her mother and grandmother were her role models, Bell-Waters says. They were in a position to help others, she explains, because of her grandfather's successful trucking business.
"They had more than others, so they were in the helping business," Bell-Waters recalls. "They had it and they shared it, and that model growing up greatly influenced my values and desire to help others."
Her search for meaningful community work opened up new horizons. The Michigan native worked in a hospital for a while and planned on a career in public health, eventually as a psychologist, before enrolling in the new multidisciplinary "human ecology" program at Michigan State University, geared to helping people find careers in community service.
Bell-Waters received a bachelor's of science degree in "human ecology at Michigan State University, then a master's of science degree and doctorate in community health education at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale.
While she was finishing her degrees, the private sector came calling.
For more than a decade, Bell-Waters worked in and out of private business in the Midwest. At Chrysler Corporation, she toiled as an administrative assistant to the plant manager in Hamtramck, Michigan. At Carbondale City Hall, she worked as a grant writer for the city's Home and Money Management Program.
Then, for seven years, Bell-Waters worked for Union Oil Corporation - now Unocal - in tasks ranging from director of its wellness program, which it later abandoned, to assisting in human resources, marketing, and even field operations.
Working for Unocal was fortuitous: Her assignments brought her to Southern California and, when she resigned from the private sector, she was in proximity to California State University to resume her true calling. Living in Redondo Beach, Bell-Waters became associate professor of Public Administration at California State University, Dominguez Hills and began teaching health care management.
The variety of courses she has taught include risk management, public personnel and collective bargaining, administrative leadership and behavior, health care policy and administration, human behavior, and strategic human resource management.
In her new assignment, Bell-Waters will draw on her considerable experience both in the private sector and at the university to serve a community of constituents - students, faculty, and staff - on behalf of President Lyons.
She's traveled a winding career path to reach this place that she loves. "I draw a great deal of fulfillment knowing I can impact a person's life," Bell-Waters says. "That impact can last throughout someone's career.
"It's our responsibility to be a gatekeeper, and to help the students with their development as well as help society be a better place. Our impact is really immeasurable because we don't know how far it extends in higher education."
- T.W.
