The University will announce its pick for Columbian College of Arts and Sciences dean next week, ending a six-month search for the key administrative role, Provost Steven Lerman said in an interview Friday.
The selection, made by Lerman and University President Steven Knapp, will conclude a search process where administrators have stressed that mum’s the word and kept the final three candidates secret as they looked for the next leader of GW’s largest college.
“We’re in the last stages, and we expect an announcement next week,” Lerman said. “We’re looking for someone who has the breadth of knowledge and has the ability to run a very heterogeneous, complicated school.”
A nine-person faculty search committee narrowed a pool of hundreds of candidates to three finalists last month. It also brought the last six candidates to campus, introducing the potential deans to groups of faculty, students and administrators in private meetings.
The Hatchet learned last month that two of the final six candidates were Ben Vinson, a vice dean at Johns Hopkins University, and Suzanne Austin, a vice provost at University of Alabama at Birmingham.
The next leader of the University’s largest college will take over at a time of transition, and just as GW lays out its decade-long strategic plan. He or she must also juggle the college’s 42 departments, usher the move into the Science and Engineering Hall and improve its research operation.
The dean would also oversee some of GW’s most prestigious and popular programs, like the School of Media and Public Affairs, the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration, and the economics, political science and anthropology departments.
Lerman said, above all, the next dean has to demonstrate “enormous interpersonal skills” and have a “proven track record of leading an organization.”
GW’s deans have recently struggled to balance the University’s rising ambitions with easing faculty disgruntlement. Columbian College Dean Peg Barratt’s announcement last spring that she would step down this June came one month after professors criticized her leadership skills and vision in a school-wide survey.
Former GW Law School Dean Paul Schiff Berman was nearly bounced from the college’s top position in the fall, moving into a vice provost position before faculty could take a vote of no confidence. GW School of Business Dean Doug Guthrie also faced some faculty strife last year.
