Lila Carlsen Carries Honors College Experience into Higher Education Leadership

Lila McDowell Carlsen, B.A. ’03, M.A. ’05, has built a career in higher education as a professor, scholar and administrator. Now vice provost and professor of Hispanic Studies at Pepperdine University, she can trace many of the interests and skills that have shaped her career back to her time as a student in Baylor’s Honors Program.

Carlsen entered Baylor with an interest in Spanish and a curiosity about the wider world, but she initially questioned whether the Honors Program was the right place for her.

“I was really intimidated,” Carlsen said. “I didn’t know if I was good enough or smart enough to do the Honors Program, but it was such a good decision. I loved all of the faculty. I remember all the different weekly seminars, the readings that I did that first year, and it just made such an impact.”

The Honors Program would ultimately help set the course for Carlsen’s academic career. Through seminars and relationships with faculty, she developed confidence in her ability to engage challenging ideas, communicate her thinking, and keep asking questions.

“It really launched me into my career as an academic. It launched me into graduate school,” Carlsen said. “It gave me confidence in my abilities to think and to explore and to communicate clearly. It really was exactly what I needed in those developmental years as a young person, trying to find my way and having so many options and so many choices.”

Those experiences were particularly formative for Carlsen, who described herself as a shy student. Honors seminars gave her a place to learn how to enter a conversation, listen to others and respond when her own ideas were challenged.

“I was great with a script, but when it had to be me impromptu, with no protective layer, that was where I really would be challenged,” Carlsen said. “I had to develop that as an undergraduate, and here we are today. My whole life is an impromptu discussion.”

Carlsen’s Baylor experience also helped establish scholarly interests she continues to pursue today. Her undergraduate Honors thesis in Spanish led to a master’s thesis at Baylor focused on utopianism in contemporary Chilean narrative and later a doctoral dissertation at the University of California, Riverside examining the utopian impulse in Chilean and Mexican novels.

Today, Carlsen is an accomplished scholar of Latin American literature whose research explores utopia, cross-cultural representation and migration in Chilean and Mexican narratives. Her recent scholarship includes work on Pablo Neruda, Isabel Allende and the global reach of Chilean literature.

“This work is what I started as an undergraduate in the Honors Program,” Carlsen said. “Here in 2026, being invited to contribute and to explore and to be in the world conversation on these significant Chilean writers and discussing their impact, I would not be doing this if it weren’t for the mentorship, the classes and the experiences that I had as an undergrad in the Honors College.”

Carlsen joined Pepperdine’s faculty in 2008 and over time took on increasingly broad leadership responsibilities. After serving as associate provost and interim vice provost, she became vice provost in 2025. In that role, she works with university leadership across areas including research, information technology, institutional effectiveness, academic technology and the student academic experience.

For Carlsen, moving into administration did not mean leaving behind the curiosity that drew her to academic life. Instead, leadership has given her new questions to explore and new opportunities to learn.

“Learning is challenging, and it’s disorienting, and that means that you’re being stretched and you’re growing,” Carlsen said. “I don’t shy away from learning. I want it to be challenging. I want it to be something that I’m not familiar with, and I love to be a beginner at a lot of things, which has helped me get to where I am today.”

That approach also informs how Carlsen thinks about Christian higher education. She believes Christian universities have a distinctive opportunity to pair academic excellence with a larger purpose, asking how knowledge, scholarship and innovation can serve others.

“Christian higher education in itself, it’s something bigger,” Carlsen said. “It’s something more eternal. It’s something that is part of something bigger than oneself. We can have all the intellectual ability, all of the technological ability, all of the research and scholarship, but how do we orient that toward something that is for the good of others?”

Outside of her work at Pepperdine, Carlsen enjoys spending time with her husband, George, and their children. As a family, they enjoy traveling, spending time outdoors and taking advantage of life in Southern California.