Dean of Planning and Academic Affairs to resign

Professor of Greek and Roman Studies and Dean of Planning and Academic Affairs Rachel Kitzinger will resign from her post as dean at the end of the academic year. Kitzinger is the first to hold the Dean of Planning and Academic Affairs position since the office's creation in 2007, so her resignation marks its first moment of turnover.

"It was sort of a sequence of decisions," said Kitzinger of what led her to her final decision. "When I accepted the position in 2007, I told [President Catharine Bond Hill] that I wanted to the possibility of re-evaluating it after three years because at that point I was going to be eligible for phased retirement through my faculty position. And I thought that that would be good for her in case she felt that she needed a change and good for me because this was such an unknown position."

Kitzinger explained that the College created the office in recognition of two main concerns: an overwhelmingly large portfolio of responsibilities for the Office of the Dean of the Faculty and the lack of a position dedicated to long-term planning. With these in mind, the office came to be defined by a diverse set of responsibilities, including oversight of Vassar's libraries, the athletics department, the Wimpfheimer Nursery School and Infant Toddler Center, the Francis Lehman Loeb Art Center, the Offices of Admissions and Financial Aid, the grants office, and the Office of Institutional Research.

In concert with the Vice President for Finance and Administration, the Dean of Planning and Academic Affairs considers the long-term goals of the College, such as deferred maintenance projects and capital improvements, and, since the financial crisis, has assumed responsibility for the faculty housing program.

Prior to her appointment as Dean of Planning and Academic Affairs, Kitzinger had served as the chair of the Faculty Policy and Conference Committee, had been a member of the Faculty Compensation Committee and had served as both the Director of Academic Facilities Development and Director of Teaching Development. "I really viewed my taking on the position as a sort of preliminary way of getting the position defined," said Kitzinger. "And that was partly because I had been involved in a lot of different areas, and so I didn't have to learn huge amounts about some of these areas before I could start."

After leading the office for four years, which included a significant financial crisis, Kitzinger feels that it is time for a new person to move the position forward.

According to Kitzinger, the onset of the financial crisis made it impossible for her to consider leaving after three years, but as the economic situation improves she is now considering the next step. "It felt to me that it was important for someone who…could start thinking in new ways for how this office could move forward to take over just because so much of my time and thinking had been focused on the issues that had come up because of the financial crisis," she said.

A search committee has now formed to consider the next dean, and it will begin reviewing nominees at the end of March. In part because the responsibilities of the position and knowledge that it requires are so varied, the committee is conducting an internal search of the Vassar faculty. "We're looking for someone who knows the College and knows those kind of values," said Professor of Political Science Peter Stillman, who is serving on the search committee. "Since you've got to learn a lot about a lot of different parts of the College…it probably helps at least to have a head start knowing how Vassar works." The committee will consider past administrative experiences of candidates, including committee work and any positions a candidate has held that relate to the office's responsibilities. However, Stillman acknowledged that each candidate will probably come with different combinations of experiences, so deciding on the ideal will be a challenge.

According to Stillman, the fact that the committee is conducting an internal search is reflective of how Vassar-specific the position is: "Since it's not a usual kind of job, there's going to be less interest in it from the outside because an outside person would know what the Dean of Faculty did, [but] that person wouldn't necessarily know what a Dean of Planning and Academic Affairs is," he said. "That term doesn't have an automatic meaning outside of Vassar."

Kitzinger added that it has been valuable for a faculty member to hold the position for other reasons as well, especially in the context of the financial crisis: "I think the crisis really brought to the fore the wisdom that the College showed in trying to bridge the academic and financial sides of the College in this position."

"Part of my interest right now is to document what happened in those three years so we don't lose the memory of how the College responded to that situation," said Kitzinger.

The knowledge gained through the experience of the financial crisis will be only a portion of the information that will be passed to the new dean. Part of the challenge of the search process is finding a candidate with experience in so many areas of the College. According to Stillman, "We're trying to figure out what the needed qualifications of the job are because this is not a standard job."

Especially because this will be the first transition period for the office, there are some unknowns going into the process. While the definition of the position and its responsibilities are not expected to change, Associate Dean of Planning and Academic Affairs and Associate Professor of Anthropology Tom Porcello explained that the new dean might simply have a different style of leadership. "We haven't gone through a transition yet; with [Kitzinger] being the first dean I don't think that we kind of know what to expect," said Porcello. "In my mind the single greatest challenge of this office is its breadth, what it is responsible for doing, and the different kinds of abilities that the dean has to have, which is everything from being able to develop and manage budgets on one hand to serving as a kind of a mediator among all of the different priorities of the College."

After leaving the Office of the Dean of Planning and Academic Affairs, Kitzinger will take a phased retirement plan. She will teach next spring and then spend two years conducting research. "But I'm hoping that I'll come back and teach. My department always needs people for one course or another, so I'm not viewing this as the end," she said. "People keep asking what you do when you retire, and part of what you do is not to know what you're going to do and allow new things to emerge. So I don't really know what they might be."

"I'm looking forward to that exploration."