By Ryan Allen Wight, Copyeditor
Basil Stewart started as Western New England University’s new Vice President of Finance and Administration on June 15, 2021. Stewart’s long career in accounting and higher education have enabled him to help constitute and empower our institution moving forward.
Stewart began his career in public accounting at PricewaterhouseCooper’s. After achieving his goal of obtaining a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) license, he eventually decided that he wanted to work in higher education. Northeastern University gave Stewart his first financial position in higher ed, and he was there for several years.
After working at Smith College and RPI in New York, Stewart returned to Northeastern as the institution’s Controller. This second stint there ended when he became Controller at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Stewart took his first Chief Financial Officer (CFO) position at Merrimack College and then worked at Lasell University after that. Finally, he arrived at Western New England University as the new CFO.
While Stewart was at the University of Massachusetts Amherst — studying to get his bachelor’s in Business Administration in Accounting — he met his wife. They got married at the University and now have five children. Two have graduated college, one is still in college, one is a high school senior and the other a high school sophomore.
One of Stewart’s favorite family vacation spots is Falmouth, Cape Cod. As his entertainment preferences go, action films and anything with Denzel Washington are at the top of the list — and Adam Sandler is cool too! He also follows football, proudly stating, “I’m an avid supporter and fan of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.”
Stewart wants to make it clear that he’s been a long time fan of the Buccs. He did not just hop on the Brady train, although Brady did make the “train ride a lot better.” Apparently, President Johnson gives Stewart a hard time about all this, “he likes the Dallas Cowboys, so he’s with America’s team — whatever that means.”
Stewart always knew he wanted to be a CPA — in sixth grade, he even wrote a paper about wanting to be a CPA and got an A on it. The dream started when as a kid he asked his mom what he should do, and she suggested accounting because he was good at math. Noting his quick realization that mathematical prowess doesn’t make accounting a cinch, Stewart joked that perhaps his mother hadn’t quite “understood accounting either.”
Throughout his career, Stewart’s work commute has occupied up to 3 hours of his day, and sometimes he’d even stay overnight in the area of his job instead of making the drive home to Amherst, MA. Working from home during the pandemic showed him everything he “was missing out of [his] kids’ life.” Seeing this, he became “really committed to try to find a role closer to home.”
That search brought Stewart to Western New England University, where he was able to work with his predecessor for 15 days in order to facilitate a productive transition. And he’s wasted no time in “thinking about the work and how it gets done.” Indeed, some of Stewart’s primary goals are efficiency and intentional productivity.
What “processes and procedures” add value? This question orients Stewart and his team as they work “to stop doing things that don’t add value” and ensure that they “are able to articulate the value added” by every process and procedure retained.
Stewart has already restructured the finance organization at Western New England University. I asked him what this looked like during our meeting at the University Commons. He emphasized the devoting of more resources to scenario and long-range financial planning, since “the budget was more based on what people wanted it to be, but it wasn’t really reality.”
Stewart expressed his goal of sharing “the realities of the budget with the community,” saying how important it is “for the whole community to know” and understand those realities. He continued to explain that the budget is a “representation of what we’d like to do for the year. The folks who play an integral role in the actual things that occur are the people out in the community, so they really need to understand that the decisions they make over the course of the year… have impacts.”
Moving forward, Stewart and his team intend to connect with the community at Western New England University. This means more frequent and personalized discussion with all departments on campus about their respective budgets with the goal of “understanding what’s going on in our operations and the impacts it’s having on spending and revenues.”
Connecting with the community also means establishing rapport and a two-way exchange with the student body. Stewart expressed his desire to visit the Student Senate or any venue he can in order to explain Western New England University’s budget: “what our budget is this year, and what are some of the things that we’re gonna address in next year’s budget.”
Stewart mentioned that a budget advisory committee will form and begin to meet later in October. The committee will have cross-campus representation to include faculty, staff and all kinds of employees at the University. Notably, he was eager to put graduate and undergraduate students on the committee as well, though forthright in saying that this decision was not his.
On the topic of community, he thinks “the accounting can only be as good as we understand what’s going in the operation or the business” and feels “that way about everything [done] in the finance administration division; we have to go out and have interactions with the customers we serve.” Stewart calls his unit a support organization for all departments and groups at the institution.
Stewart also chairs Western New England University’s Emergency Management Response Team (EMRT). He told me how important it is “for people to be with the facts, not the fiction;” the responsibility to educate, inform and ensure understanding in the community falls to the EMRT in addition to their work in handling the COVID-19 pandemic. Further, Stewart wants “to make sure folks know that [EMRT is] not making those decisions lightly.”
Having been here only a few months, Basil Stewart is knees and elbows deep in the work being done to bring Western New England University into its next era. Our new CFO is committed to facilitating communication and efficiency in all financial operations at our institution, and he wants to make the community here an integral part of that process. Go Buccs!
