Status of the School of Arts and Sciences Executive Dean Search

April 16, 2008

Members of the Rutgers Community:

I am writing to bring you up to date on the status of the executive dean search for the School of Arts and Sciences (SAS) in New Brunswick. As you know, SAS is the largest academic unit in the university, and as such the search for its dean would always be one of intense interest. The need to attract just the right person to the position has taken on added importance with the recent merging of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) with the students from the various New Brunswick undergraduate colleges into the School of Arts and Sciences. The school now includes not only the 800 faculty who were under FAS but also approximately 20,000 undergraduate students in New Brunswick.

I am very pleased to report that the SAS executive dean search committee, ably chaired by professor Terry Wilson from the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology and the SAS Department of Psychology, has forwarded three excellent final candidates to me and to Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Phil Furmanski. Those candidates will now come to New Brunswick for public two-day campus visits, with the first here April 28 and 29, the second May 1 and 2, and the third May 5 and 6. The specific schedules are currently being developed. As these dates and agendas are confirmed, we will post the names of the finalists, their bios, and detailed information regarding their campus visits on the SAS executive dean search website at http://rci.rutgers.edu/~saseds/index.html.

One component of each of the visits will be a public talk outlining both the candidate's thoughts regarding the future of SAS as well as the individual's own academic scholarship, followed by a general Q&A session. This will also be an opportunity for the candidates to meet more informally with members of the Rutgers community. The website will also contain a mechanism for you to provide feedback directly to me and to Vice President Furmanski regarding each of the candidates, so that we may have the benefit of the broadest array of voices to inform our final decision.

We are confident that among these three fine finalists is the next Executive Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences. I hope you will help us welcome each of them to campus over the next few weeks and give them a sense of the excitement we are all feeling about the future of Rutgers.

You have my thanks.

Richard L. McCormick
President
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey