Ex-President of William and Mary Heads Back to N.C.; Georgia Tech Chief to Take Over Smithsonian Institution; Arizona State Staffs Up New School of Geographic Sciences

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By EUGENE MCCORMACK, ANDREW MYTELKA, and PAULA WASLEY

CAROLINA BOUND: Gene R. Nichol, whose controversial presidency at the College of William and Mary ended last month, is heading back to the Tarheel State.

Mr. Nichol, 56, has accepted an offer to rejoin the law faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, beginning on July 1. His wife, Glenn George, a professor of law at William and Mary, will return with him.

Mr. Nichol served as dean of the North Carolina law school from 1999 to 2005, before leaving to take the top job at William and Mary. He resigned the presidency last month after learning from the college's Board of Visitors that his contract would not be renewed.

His short stint at William and Mary was marked by controversy — most notably his decisions to remove a cross from the college's chapel in 2006 and to allow a student-sponsored performance featuring sex workers to appear on the campus this year. The decisions were met by heavy protests from students and alumni, and pointed questions by several state legislators.

In his resignation letter, sent campuswide, Mr. Nichol said he had been forced out for defending free speech and diversity. The board responded with its own letter, stating that its decision "was not in any way based on ideology or any single public controversy."

Mr. Nichol did not respond to requests for an interview about his new position. Matt Marvin, a spokesman for the North Carolina law school, said that any controversy surrounding Mr. Nichol was irrelevant because he would be coming back to the university only as a faculty member, not as a campus leader. He added that the return of Mr. Nichol and his wife was a "coup" for the university that helped fill crucial gaps in the faculty. Mr. Nichol's specialty is constitutional law, and Ms. George's is civil procedure and labor law.

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INSTITUTIONAL RENEWAL: The Smithsonian Institution has named the Georgia Institute of Technology's president, G. Wayne Clough, as the new secretary of the giant museum, cultural archive, and research complex. Mr. Clough, a 66-year-old civil engineer who has been president of Georgia Tech since 1994, will take over at the Smithsonian on July 1.

In his nearly 15 years at Tech, Mr. Clough has raised it into the top ranks of public research universities, increasing its enrollment, expanding its research expenditures, and establishing campuses in four foreign countries. He has also led capital campaigns that took in well over $1-billion.

Before taking office at Georgia Tech, Mr. Clough served as dean of Virginia Tech's College of Engineering and was provost and academic vice president at the University of Washington.

The choice of Mr. Clough is a return to the past for the Smithsonian, most of whose leaders have come from academic or research backgrounds. His immediate predecessor, the businessman Lawrence M. Small, resigned last year after a series of controversies over his lavish compensation and spending, as well as his willingness to strike deals with corporations that seemed bent on influencing the message delivered by the museum's exhibits.

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GEOGRAPHIC SHIFT: Arizona State University at Tempe has a plan to put its new School of Geographic Sciences on the map through a flurry of strategic hires. Its latest recruit is Billie Lee Turner, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and an expert in sustainability science, whom Arizona hired away from his position as director of the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University.

Mr. Turner, 62, studies how deforestation, desertification, and changes in land use affect people and the environment. He will join Arizona's faculty in July as the school's first Gilbert F. White chair in environment and society. Mr. Turner was won over, he says, by Arizona State's emphasis on interdisciplinary research and the chance to help create a premier center for geographic sciences. "It's an exceptional opportunity," says Mr. Turner, who leaves Clark after 28 years. "It would take something as exciting as what's happening at ASU to get me to leave where I am."

Arizona State's School of Geographic Sciences was created in July 2006 by a reorganization of the university's geography department into an interdisciplinary unit focusing on climate and environmental science, cultural geography, urban and regional geography, and geographic-information science. It houses the Office of the Arizona State Climatologist and a center devoted to mapping geographic data to solve environmental and policy problems. Mr. Turner's hiring will "move the school up a notch" and strengthen its links to Arizona State's also-new School of Sustainability, says Luc Anselin, founding director of the geography school and director of its GeoDa Center for Geospatial Analysis and Computation.

The university has hired four additional faculty members with expertise in urbanism, landscape ecology, spatial analysis, and geocomputation. "It's very unusual that a university makes a major investment in geographic sciences the way ASU has done," says Mr. Anselin. "I've never seen a geography department hire five full professors in one year."