College to add seventh senior officer position

John Palmer Contributing Editor

A new senior officer position will be created at Vassar as a part of President Catharine Bond Hill’s strategic planning for the College. The Dean of Planning and Academic Affairs will combine certain aspects of two existing senior offices and will primarily oversee “the development of long-term academic planning and the supervision of academic areas of the College outside the curriculum and the academic departments and programs,” according to a description of the position endorsed by the faculty on March 28.

The new dean will be the seventh senior officer position of the College and will report directly to the President. The dean will be on the same administrative level as the two existing deans and the four vice presidents and will attend weekly senior officer meetings with the President.

At a March 28 meeting, the faculty endorsed the proposal by a “significant margin,” according to Faculty Policy and Conference Committee (FPCC) Chair Peter Stillman.

The largest changes to the College’s administrative structure will take place in two existing offices, the Office of the Dean of the Faculty and the Office of Finance and Administration. According to Vice President for Finance and Administration Elizabeth Eismeier, the new dean will help to develop and institute long-term plans, while Eismeier’s office will remain exclusively focused on budgeting. The change will allow for an additional voice at the weekly senior officer meetings with the College President, and would allow “more advocacy, oversight, and understanding for the parts that are under the new dean,” said Stillman.

Hill wrote in an e-mailed statement, “It just seemed that there were some areas that could benefit from more senior administration attention. Creating a new dean’s position seemed the best way to make this possible.”

Seven administrators—the Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid, the Director of Athletics and Physical Education, the Director of the Art Center, the Director of the Wimpfheimer Nursery School
and Infant/Toddler Center, the Director of the Libraries, the Grants Office, and the Director of Institutional Research—will report directly to the new dean. With the exception of the Director of Institutional Research, a position that does not yet exist, these other administrators are currently under the purview of the Dean of the Faculty. The new dean will also be responsible for strategic planning, which is currently under the Vice President for Finance and Administration.

“What we want is a partner who will work on program planning,” said Eismeier. The new dean will help coordinate planning and data analysis “that goes way beyond the dollars.”

Dean of the College Judy Jackson said that the new position will make sure that “all the academic aspects of life here get the attention that they need.”

According to senior college officials, the need to create the new position became apparent during discussions with the College’s new president, who took office last June. “President Hill discussed this matter at great length with various committees and then FPCC organized numerous faculty discussions, both at regular faculty meetings and at special ‘faculty clubs,’ before taking the proposal through the usual process stipulated in the Governance,” wrote Dean of the Faculty Ronald Sharp in an emailed statement.

Two faculty committees—FPCC and the Faculty Appointments and Salary Committee—have been meeting since late December to define the new position and propose new language into the governance. After drafting the proposal in December and January, the faculty met in two “faculty club” meetings—meetings of the faculty without administrators and deans present—to discuss the proposal. The proposal was then discussed in a formal faculty meeting on Feb. 21 before it passed at last month’s meeting.

According to Stillman, the main concerns voiced at the faculty meeting surrounded the added cost of a new dean. Additionally, some faculty members worried that the new position might place too large an emphasis on administrators, while others expressed concern that another dean might take emphasis off of the Dean of the Faculty.

The change to the administration will allow for the hiring of both the Dean and the Director of Institutional Research. According to Stillman, the College had plans to hire the Director of Institutional Research, who will analyze and collect a wide range of data on the College, even before the office of the new dean was being discussed.

With the faculty’s approval, Hill will present the proposal to the Board of Trustees, who will decide on the position. The Board may change the proposal at any time, as permitted in the governance.

The College is establishing a search committee comprised of five faculty members that will seek candidates for the position, and the committee will search among the faculty at Vassar for candidates before searching outside the College. The College is expected to fill the position by June 1.