Of all the personnel changes happening at the Kennedy Center for International Studies this summer, one of the most notable involves the position of Associate Director for Academics and Research: after four years of tireless service and leadership, Professor Quinn Mecham will complete his term at the end of August. He will be replaced by Professor Scott Sanders of the Sociology Department. Mecham has been a valued part of the Kennedy Center, and we are deeply grateful for all he has done to strengthen our academic programs and improve the student experience.
An Interdisciplinary Background
Mecham earned a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature from BYU, followed by a master’s degree and PhD in political science from Stanford. He wrote his dissertation while at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, where he was an Academy Scholar. Before coming to BYU, he taught at Middlebury College and the George Washington University and worked for a time as a management consultant at McKinsey.
“I’m an interdisciplinary scholar,” he says. “I have degrees in humanities and in the social sciences. I have experience in many different regions of the world, and I’ve done research on most continents.”
He was hired by BYU’s Department of Political Science in 2013. Given his expertise in the Middle East, he was quickly recruited to be an affiliated faculty member with the Middle East Studies/Arabic program; only two years later, he became faculty coordinator of that program when the previous coordinator, Jim Toronto, was called as a mission president for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Mecham served in that position for six years.
Associate Director
In 2021, Mecham was asked to step into the role of Associate Director for Academics and Research after the previous associate director, Stan Benfell, became director of the Kennedy Center. In his time here, in addition to his responsibilities as the associate director, he has taught classes, led the Washington Seminar internship program in Washington, DC, and taken study abroad groups across Europe, the Middle East, and central Asia.
In his role as associate director, he has left an indelible mark on the Kennedy Center through a host of changes, achievements and improvements.
Over the last four years, he’s overseen eight semesters of the Kennedy Center Lecture Series and brought a wide range of academics, authors, journalists, politicians, and ambassadors to campus. He also oversaw the expansion of the Center’s existing Kennedy Fellows program to begin offering fellowships to faculty doing research on topics related to each semester’s lecture series theme.
Under his leadership, the Kennedy Center added three new academic programs: a Scandinavian Studies minor, a Global Environmental Studies minor, and an American Studies major; eighteen months later, American Studies got a minor as well. The curricula of all twelve Kennedy Center academic programs were revised to provide BYU students with stronger educational experiences. Additionally, he made the decision that the Kennedy Center would start naming a valedictorian for each of its majors, rather than a single valedictorian, giving more students a chance to be recognized for their achievements.
He also oversaw the creation of two new classes: the International Studies Seminar, in which students meet to discuss topics related to the semester’s lecture series theme, and the Professional Development course, which guides students in making five-year plans and designing their future lives. Mecham will continue to teach the Professional Development course for fall 2025.
In the 2024–2025 academic year, Mecham was involved in the creation and implementation of two student fellowship programs based on lecture series themes: in the fall, he and Andy Reed (BYU Religious Education) led the Global Religious Experience writing seminar, which guided students in reflecting on and writing about religious experiences they had while studying abroad, and in the winter, he ran the Peacebuilding Lab, where students learned about peacebuilding and conflict resolution.
Student outreach has been a major part of Mecham’s efforts as well: he collaborated with the Advisement Center on initiatives to make majors and minors feel welcome and part of the Kennedy Center from the moment they declare their major or minor until after they graduate, and he started a program of Kennedy Center student lunches, where different groups of students are invited to enjoy a meal and provide feedback on their programs.
One major effort he spearheaded involves reaching out to BYU students to tell them about Kennedy Center minor programs that could complement their majors. “We had a ‘minors first’ strategy,” he explains. “We felt like many students all across campus, regardless of their major, could benefit from a Kennedy Center minor.” And his efforts have paid off: “We've grown our programs,” he says. “Winter 2025 was the first time in at least the past ten years where our student numbers went over 1000. It’s a 20% increase over the same time the year before.”
What Comes Next
Having completed his time as associate director, Mecham will return to teaching full-time for BYU’s Political Science Department, though he’ll remain involved in some Kennedy Center initiatives, including the Global Religious Experience Seminar, which will run again in fall 2025.
In addition to teaching, Mecham looks forward to having more time to devote to several book projects he’s working on. One he’s particularly excited about involves surveying communities in the upper Midwest of the USA. “It looks at 40 counties and 46 cities in the upper Midwest to try to understand what leads people to love the communities that they're part of,” he says. “The main point of the book is trying to figure out what helps communities thrive.”
The Value of the Kennedy Center
As he looks back on his time at the Kennedy Center, Mecham notes that it is uniquely suited to helping its students achieve success in the future. “The Kennedy Center is unique at BYU because all of our programs are interdisciplinary,” he says. “The value for students in having that kind of experience is that they learn how to see the world through different lenses—they learn how to be both a social scientist and a scholar of humanities. They learn how to communicate to different kinds of audiences because they're writing in different ways in different disciplines.”
And that leads to increased success down the road, he explains, because in today’s world, knowledge of facts is no longer a premium quality, since anyone can immediately look up anything on their phone. So, he says, “a high-level professional skill set should include skills that allow you to be flexible and communicate to multiple audiences, to look at problems through different lenses and angles, to think about big questions and assess answers to those questions by triangulating potential answers across different methods. The Kennedy Center does that better than other types of programs because our students have to develop that flexibility.”
There’s also value, he says, in the way Kennedy Center students “see the world through someone else's eyes. That pulls them out of their limited lived experience, because we're all trapped, to some extent, by our own lived experience. Seeing the world through someone else's eyes stretches us, gives us the ability to have empathy, and allows us to be much more open to other perspectives.”
In this, he says, the Kennedy Center differs from other disciplines on campus where students are trained to do a particular job with a particular skill set, making their professional path clear upon graduation. “Sometimes our students are not clear immediately upon graduation which direction their career will take,” he says, “but they are trained to have an enormously interesting career, and they have the flexibility and skill set to do that in a wide range of different fields professionally. And they almost always reflect on their experiences here as transformative for them—a Kennedy Center education helps shape who they are.”
To facilitate that kind of experience, Mecham says that he instructed Kennedy Center faculty coordinators that when they’re talking to students who are trying to decide what to study, instead of asking What do you want to do when you graduate?” they should ask “Who do you want to be when you graduate?” “Because we transform people,” he says, “in addition to giving them useful skills to go out and do things. They're different people when they leave here, for the better, because they understand the world in its complexity better than when they came.”
Though he looks forward to what lies ahead, Mecham says that he will miss the Kennedy Center. “My time at the Kennedy Center has been like Camelot,” he reminisces. “I’ve always felt that I was surrounded by people I love, who always taught me amazing things.”