Leadership and Staff

Meet Our Team

Scott Parsons, Ph.D., Founding Executive Director

Professional headshot of a man smiling slightly. He is wearing a white button-down shirt and a navy blue blazer against a plain white background.Scott Parsons, Ph.D., serves as the Founding Executive Director of the Institute for Character and Leadership at Fairleigh Dickinson University, where he leads the institute’s efforts to cultivate character, inspire leadership, and advance human flourishing through research, education, executive development, and strategic partnerships.

Scott is also the founder and CEO of The Flourishing Leaders Academy and host of the Flourishing Leaders Podcast. His scholarship focuses on character development, virtue ethics, human flourishing, ethical leadership, moral education, reflection, gratitude, grace, and the ethics of war and peace.

A retired U.S. Army Military Intelligence Officer with more than twenty-one years of service, Scott served in strategic, operational, and tactical leadership assignments, including three combat deployments to Iraq and one to Afghanistan. His professional journey has taken him from military service and higher education to executive leadership, healthcare partnerships, and international collaborations dedicated to cultivating character and developing flourishing leaders.

Prior to joining Fairleigh Dickinson University, Scott served as Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Ethics at the United States Military Academy at West Point and later as Assistant Vice Chancellor for Character and Ethics for the Texas Tech University System, where he helped advance character development initiatives across five universities.

Scott earned his Ph.D. in Character Education from the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom and holds master’s degrees in Philosophy and Political Science from Columbia University.

He is the co-author of Ethics and the Good Soldier (Routledge, 2024), author of the forthcoming Accountability with Grace: The Human Secret to Sustainable Success (Wisdom/Works, 2026), and co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge volume Working the Pause: Reflection and Character Education Across Disciplines (2026). His work also appears in numerous edited volumes on leadership, military ethics, intelligence studies, and character education.

Through his teaching, writing, speaking, coaching, and leadership, Scott seeks to help individuals and organizations cultivate character, strengthen leadership, and create cultures where people flourish.