Former Law Dean to Head Occidental College; Yale Philosophy Dept. Grows by 5

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By PIPER FOGG and JOHN GRAVOIS

ACROSS TOWN: After several years on the market for a top administrative job, Susan Westerberg Prager has found a spot in her own backyard. Ms. Prager, a professor and former dean of the law school at the University of California at Los Angeles, will stay in the city she loves but head to Occidental College in July as its first female president.

Ms. Prager, one of the country's longest-serving law-school deans — she spent 16 years running the school at UCLA — was a finalist for the provost job at the University of Washington in 2005. A year earlier, she was a finalist for the presidency of the University of Utah. And back in 2000, she was a finalist for the chancellorship at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Moving to a liberal-arts college does not mean she will be out of her element. From 1999 to 2001, Ms. Prager, 63, served as provost at Dartmouth College, where she says she became comfortable working and living on a tightknit campus. "That gave me a real appreciation for what a small place enables," she says.

Ms. Prager also spent 14 years as a member of Stanford University's Board of Trustees, so she appreciates the importance of a president's relationship with the board.

At Occidental, she is particularly excited about the college's focus on diversity. More than one-third of the college's 1,839 students are members of minority groups, and almost 20 percent are the first in their families to attend college. "We need to find more effective ways as a culture to work across racial lines," she says.

Ms. Prager replaces Theodore R. Mitchell, who resigned last year to lead the NewSchools Venture Fund.

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HIRING SPREE: This fall Yale's long-troubled philosophy department will get a shot in the arm. In fact, it will get five of them.

Michael Della Rocca, department chairman, recently locked up five new hires for next year's faculty roster, filling several gaps in the philosophy curriculum. "The department," he says, "hasn't been this well and fully staffed in about 15 or 20 years."

Coming aboard as full professors will be Tamar Szabó Gendler and Zoltán Gendler Szabó, a married pair of philosophers from Cornell, and Verity Harte, an import from King's College London. Ms. Gendler studies connections between philosophy of mind and cognitive science, Mr. Szabo studies philosophy of language and metaphysics, and Ms. Harte studies ancient philosophy.

Kenneth Winkler, a scholar of early modern philosophy at Wellesley, was offered a full professorship at Yale but has signed on to a yearlong visiting period to weigh the offer. Rounding out the list, Jill North, a philosopher of science, will join the department as an assistant professor.

The batch of hires is a major move in Mr. Della Rocca's "grand plan" to resuscitate the department's reputation. "The department had been, many years ago, one of the top departments in the country," he says. But by the mid-90s, because of disagreements over analytic and Continental approaches to philosophy and just plain personal rancor, Mr. Della Rocca says, the department "had just imploded."

According to the Philosophical Gourmet Report, a popular ranking system for graduate programs in philosophy, in 2004-6 Yale's department ranked 26th. Brian Leiter, who compiles the report and is a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, said the new crop of hires should boost Yale's ranking. "I would expect Yale to be at least in the U.S. top 20 in our 2006 survey," he wrote in an e-mail message, "perhaps even top 15."

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COMINGS AND GOINGS: Jeremy J. Waldron is leaving Columbia University for the New York University School of Law. He is the third Columbia law professor in recent months to jump to NYU, joining Cynthia Estlund and her husband, Samuel Issacharoff. ... William C. Hunter, dean of the University of Connecticut School of Business, has been hired as the new dean of the University of Iowa's Henry B. Tippie College of Business. He will take over in July, replacing Gary C. Fethke, who is retiring.

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