UNH Today

For the second year in a row, Alexis Piñero-Benson, director of community standards at UNH, has been nominated for and accepted a role as a faculty member at the Gehring Academy, the nation’s leading training institute for conduct professionals, which will be held July 14-18 in Detroit, Michigan.

This year, Piñero-Benson will serve as faculty for the senior conduct officer track, which will include new senior conduct professionals and upper-level executives who have oversight of their institution’s student conduct office – including at least one university president – from higher ed institutions throughout the U.S. and Canada.

“For me, it’s a point of pride to be able to represent UNH at this national level,” Piñero-Benson says. “To be an ambassador for the university in this way is something I don’t take lightly.”

In his role at UNH, Piñero-Benson serves as the chief conduct officer and oversees the university’s disciplinary system and the conflict resolution program for students across all campuses, serving as the primary individual responsible for establishing “our standards of behavior and educating students on the rights and responsibilities of community membership, whether on campus or out in the local community and beyond,” he says.

“It’s an honor to work with Alexis, and his selection to be faculty for the Gehring Academy two years in a row reinforces how lucky we are to have him,” says Michael Blackman, dean of students at UNH. “He is consistently one of the most collaborative and proactive staff members on campus.”

Piñero-Benson has been at UNH for two-and-a-half years after serving three-years as the inaugural director of student conduct at SUNY Oswego in Central New York. He started there in 2019, and soon after ushered the university through developing and implementing requirements in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Nobody can anticipate having a public health emergency, but you have to be able to work through these really tough issues where there are no blueprints,” Piñero-Benson says of his field.

The Gehring Academy is a highly selective workshop, and Piñero-Benson says he was thrilled to have been selected to participate two years in a row. The event trains everyone from entry level professionals to vice presidents of academic or student affairs and other upper-level executives – and it’s that latter group that he’ll be addressing in his role as a faculty member this year.

“We’re actually going to have the first university president in the group this year. It’s a great amount of responsibility to deliver high-impact, high-quality training and resources to these individuals and to serve as a mentor to people in the field,” Piñero-Benson says. “I’m straddling that tension between excited enthusiasm and just sheer nervousness. But the training topics I’ve chosen are areas that I am passionate about, are relevant to current and emerging campus issues, and I’m fully prepared lead my field in this way.”