Provost’s Goal: Student Success on a Larger Scale; More People News
January 26, 2015
Moving From an Esteemed HBCU to California State
Some people at Xavier University of Louisiana might have considered Loren J. Blanchard, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, a likely candidate for the top leadership job when the university’s longtime president retires this summer.
But that is not going to happen. Instead, Mr. Blanchard will move in July to California State University, where he will be executive vice chancellor for academic and student affairs.
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Moving From an Esteemed HBCU to California State
Some people at Xavier University of Louisiana might have considered Loren J. Blanchard, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, a likely candidate for the top leadership job when the university’s longtime president retires this summer.
But that is not going to happen. Instead, Mr. Blanchard will move in July to California State University, where he will be executive vice chancellor for academic and student affairs.
There, he says, he will have “a specific and almost laser focus on student success.” Among his tasks will be leading the system’s Graduation Initiative, an effort to increase the percentage of students who graduate within six years and ensure that they are ready either for careers or for professional or graduate school.
Mr. Blanchard, who is 52, has previous administrative experience in a public system, including serving as provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at the University of Louisiana system from 2004 to 2007. The desire to help rebuild after Hurricane Katrina drew him back to New Orleans, he says, and he has been provost at Xavier, his alma mater, since 2008. The Roman Catholic institution is one of the nation’s top producers of African-American students who go on to earn medical degrees and Ph.D.’s in science and engineering.
Mr. Blanchard says his close work with university presidents has shown him that the job requires skills “that I don’t embrace as my strong suit,” like fund raising.
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He says he enjoys working on the other side of that goal, however: developing the “points of pride” on campus that the president can cite when talking to potential donors.
At California State, he will take over following the retirement of Ephraim P. Smith and will report directly to Chancellor Timothy P. White.
In a January 7 letter to the Xavier community, Norman C. Francis, who has been the university’s president since 1968, said that Mr. Blanchard had made it clear to him over the years that he did not aspire to the top role. “By timing his and my departures at the conclusion of the school year, we are clearing a path for a new generation of leadership to carry on the vision, mission, and values of Xavier far into the future,” Mr. Francis wrote.
Mr. Blanchard says he and the president are leaving their successors with “a strong starting point.” The university’s value, he says, “doesn’t hinge on two people. —Ruth Hammond
Departing Presidents
Sally Mason, who led the University of Iowa through a period of construction after the campus was damaged by floods, is among the higher-education leaders who said this month that they plan to leave their posts. She will turn 65 in May and retire in August. She has been president since 2007.
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John Fitzsimmons, president of the Maine Community College System for nearly a quarter-century, decided to step down after being pressured to do so by the state’s governor, Paul R. LePage, a Republican. Mr. Fitzsimmons said in a written statement that he was unwilling to put the community colleges at risk of “further harm” from the governor if he stayed on. In his own written statement, the governor expressed appreciation for Mr. Fitzsimmons’s work but didn’t leave it there. “Today, creativity, innovation, and competitiveness must propel an antiquated system into a new era,” he wrote.
Ricardo Azziz, president of Georgia Regents University, also submitted a letter of resignation this month. In 2010 he was named president of the Medical College of Georgia, soon to be renamed Georgia Health Sciences University. He oversaw that institution’s merger with Augusta State University to become Georgia Regents, of which he was founding president.
Georgia Regents’ website says that Dr. Azziz told the university community that he did not want to be the “forever president,” but one who accomplished his mission, set the stage for his successor, and left while “on top.” Although he plans to step down from his leadership role on June 30, he says he intends to stay at the university as a professor. Last fall, Dr. Azziz was one of three top candidates to be chief of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. That post was filled this month by Len Jessup. —Ruth Hammond
Former UVa Dean to Work on Global Issues
U. of California
Meredith Jung-En Woo
Meredith Jung-En Woo remembers declaring to a teacher at her high school in Japan that if Nathaniel Hawthorne had attended Bowdoin College, then so would she.
That early cosmopolitanism has influenced her career. Ms. Woo, a professor of politics and a former dean at the University of Virginia, will become, in June, the new director of the International Higher Education Support Program at Open Society Foundations.
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Selecting a college based on its having been the choice, in the 1820s, of a writer-in-training of psychologically complex and often dark fiction seemed natural to her, says Ms. Woo, who is 56.
As a diplomat’s daughter, she had already shifted from her first 14 years in harsh, postwar South Korea to enrollment in a Roman Catholic international high school in Tokyo run by nuns who taught in Spanish. She also learned English well enough to study in the United States.
While Hawthorne would become not only a novelist and short-story writer but also, in the 1850s, an American consul in England, Ms. Woo earned graduate degrees that made her a specialist in political, social, and economic change. Those processes are at the core of the work of the Open Society Foundations, a network of organizations that the philanthropist and business magnate George Soros founded to encourage government accountability and the rule of law around the world.
Ms. Woo, who in May took a sabbatical after six years as dean of arts and sciences at the University of Virginia, says she has long admired Mr. Soros’s investment in transition to democracy. She will take up her position, in London, determined to increase the number and influence of institutions of higher education because, she says, “I feel that open societies are not possible without open minds.”
Traveling to Burma, Tunisia, Senegal, and other transitional countries, she will work with Open Society project workers and in-country collaborators to develop curricula around issues of democracy and human rights, create resource centers, promote teaching reform, and improve the quality and accessibility of higher education through technological innovation.
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She foresees that her advocacy of free thinking could loom as a “fascinating challenge” because governments often resist that greater tolerance. And that is hardly surprising because the outcomes of education can perturb rulers: They, too, she says, know that “universities are transmitters of countries’ norms, traditions, and civilizational values.” —Peter Monaghan
Grad Students Recognized
Carolyn Fisher, a Ph.D. candidate in biochemistry, and molecular and cell biology at Cornell University, has led biochemistry workshops for middle-school students to encourage them to pursue studies in the sciences. Her work was recognized with a 2015 K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award, given to graduate students who emphasize teaching and show promise as future leaders of higher education.
The nine other award winners this year are Anya Adair, English language and literature, Yale University; Rebecca Christensen, higher education, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor; Neil Conner, geography, University of Tennessee at Knoxville; Victoria H. Febrer, visual arts, State University of New York at Stony Brook; Jacob R. Grohs, educational psychology, Virginia Tech; Rebekah Le, developmental biology, University of California at Irvine; Hannah Miller, teacher education, Michigan State University; Naghme Naseri Morlock, sociology, University of Colorado at Boulder; and Erin M. Rentschler, English, Duquesne University.
The award is administered by the Association of American Colleges and Universities. —Ruth Hammond.
Neuroscientist Dies at 96
John Hopkins Medicine
Vernon Mountcastle
Vernon Mountcastle, a professor emeritus of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University who made breakthrough discoveries about the cerebral cortex, died on January 11. He was 96.
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In 1957, Dr. Mountcastle found that cells that perform similar functions in the cortex were arranged in vertical columns. Scientists had previously thought they were arranged only in horizontal layers. His later research on how the brain perceives and organizes information, and translates sensory impulses into behavior, was recognized with an Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award in 1983. He also received a National Medal of Science for Biological Sciences in 1986 and the National Academy of Sciences Award in the Neurosciences in 1998.
Dr. Mountcastle was director of the department of physiology and head of the Philip Bard Laboratories of Neurophysiology at Hopkins from 1964 to 1980. He later helped found the university’s Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute, where he worked until he retired at 87. —Anais Strickland