“Leadership in a Changing World” podcast: Provost Elizabeth Béjar on powering through disruption

Years before she became FIU's provost, executive vice president and chief operating officer in 2023, Elizabeth Béjar was a fifth-grade teacher in Miami-Dade County. When Hurricane Andrew hit, displacing hundreds of students, she found herself reassigned to teaching seventh- and eighth-grade math in a converted band room with no desks.

It's not the origin story most people expect from a university's chief academic officer. But for Béjar, it set the tone for everything that followed: Leadership, she says, is less about a polished plan and more about what you do when the ground shifts under you.

Béjar shared that story and others in a recent episode of "Women on the Mic: The Power of Giving Voice," a podcast produced by FIU’s Lillian Lodge Kopenhaver Center for the Advancement of Women in Communication and hosted by award-winning investigative journalist Monique O. Madan. The series, now in its fifth season, spotlights perspectives of professionals making waves in the world of communications who are shaping the narrative and inspiring others.

Béjar calls herself an "accidental provost." She didn't set out for higher education administration. Her path ran through K-12 classrooms first, then through a series of roles at FIU that put her at the center of major institutional change, including reorganizing the former College of Health and Urban Affairs as a new college of medicine was being created, and building the nursing and public health programs into full-fledged schools of their own. When the pandemic hit, she helped move the university to fully remote instruction in roughly a week.

"Not perfectly," she said of that shift, but fast enough to keep students, faculty and staff connected to the university's mission.

Overseeing an institution with roughly 10,000 employees and staff, Béjar returned throughout the conversation to a theme: Leadership isn't confined to people with titles. She credited coordinators, support teams and student workers as much as senior administrators for keeping the university moving.

On preparing for an uncertain future, Béjar was direct: She doesn't believe in trying to control what's coming, only in staying ready for it. Her advice to students is to "give it a thousand percent," not because the world rewards perfection, but because it will keep changing, and readiness is what allows people to pivot without losing their values.