Dean of Faculty to step down

Brian Farkas News Editor

Dean of the Faculty Ronald Sharp will step down from his administrative role at the end of the academic year to join the Vassar College English Department. Sharp, who has been at Vassar for five years, announced his decision on Sept. 14 in an e-mailed statement to the faculty and administration.

“Like most deans, I have always felt some tension between the demands of administration on the one hand and the activities that first drew me to the life of the mind, on the other,” he explained in the Sept. 14 statement. “After a decade of administration, I really want to return to my original passions—teaching and writing.”

Sharp intends to take a sabbatical next year and will teach English in the 2009-10 academic year.
“I’ve been thinking about this for quite a long time, but I made my final decision only last week,” he said in a separate interview. Before coming to Vassar in July 2003, Sharp spent five years at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio as Associate Provost, Provost, and Acting President.

A scholar of the 19th-century English poet John Keats and author of six books, Sharp has received various fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, and other foundations.

Sharp believes his most important role as the Dean of the Faculty has been hiring and retaining quality professors. “In my first four years we hired 40 new tenure-track professors, which is a significant portion of the faculty, and in almost every case we got our first choice,” he said. “I’ve also helped retain a number of our best faculty, some of whom have been strongly pursued by other first-rate colleges and universities.”

He described his work on Vassar’s diversity initiative as his proudest accomplishment during his tenure.

“Over half of those new assistant professors are faculty of color,” he said. Sharp has also coordinated an annual diversity retreat for the faculty and sponsored a series of lectures and conversations about diversity in academia.

In addition to diversity initiatives, Sharp believes that over the past four years there has been a stabilization in the staffing of multidisciplinary programs, an initiative to develop new science facilities and a strong partnership with the Dean of the College to develop a number of programs that combine academic and residential life. Sharp is also pleased to have helped to redefine the function of the Committee on Curricular Policies and reconfigure the Department of Athletics and Physical Education.

Sharp believes that his successor will have the opportunity to complete and implement many of the initiatives discussed during the past few years.

“I have done a lot of the preliminary work for developing a system of assessment for departments and programs, for considering whether we should move to a 2:2 teaching load, for finding additional ways of evaluating teaching and for planning the new science facilities,” he said. “All of these initiatives will need a great deal more attention.”

Among the most controversial of these projects, the 2:2 teaching load would reduce the number of classes each professor must teach per year from five to four. Such a move could require the College to hire more faculty to maintain current class sizes, or force departments to combine classes and increase the number of students in each class.

The Dean of the Faculty is one of seven Senior Officers of the College. According to the 2007-08 Governance, this individual is “in charge of the execution of all educational policies adopted by the faculty as they relate to the departments of instruction.” The dean is responsible for general supervision of all academic departments, as well as appointments of professors and instructors.

The search for the next Dean of the Faculty will begin with the formation of a faculty committee. The Dean of the Faculty is appointed for a five-year term, with eligibility for term renewal. A faculty committee consisting of five members from different departments will begin the process by soliciting nominations and self-nominations from the Vassar faculty, before looking beyond the College for candidates. At the end of this process, the committee will submit a short list of three to five candidates to the president, at which point the president nominates a candidate to the Board of Trustees, who makes the final decision.

“I think those elections [for the Faculty Committee] will start right away,” said Vassar College President Catharine Bond Hill. “That committee then confers with me on whether we start with an internal search or look outside the College.”

Sharp’s replacement is expected to begin his or her term on July 1, 2008.