The College of Arts and Sciences joined the ranks of Boston University colleges without permanent leadership this month as Dean Jeffrey Henderson announced he will step down in July 2007.
The process of replacing Henderson, who joined the classical studies department in 1991 and has led the college since 2002, will begin in the fall, according to Provost David Campbell.
“The search will consider candidates from inside and outside Boston University, with the goal of identifying an individual possessing the outstanding intellectual credentials and the organizational leadership skills necessary to move the College of Arts and Sciences and BU forward,” Campbell said in a university press release.
Henderson said the timing of his resignation was prompted by a university-wide 10-year strategic planning initiative put into motion by President Robert Brown last fall.
“I thought that this would be the best moment for my transition,” Henderson said in an email, “because otherwise I would be locked into leading the plan for at least several more years.”
In a Nov. 14, 2005 memo to Campbell, Brown wrote the he “would like to drive a planning process that will lead to the best possible consensus on how Boston University should develop over the next decade.”
The memo, obtained by The Daily Free Press, set a July 1 deadline for individual college proposals and an Oct. 1 deadline for the final plan.
Henderson is the second dean to leave his post this summer because of the ten-year plan. On May 11, the university announced School of Education Dean Douglas Sears will step down July 1 to head a “strategic planning coordinating task force.”
Sears was criticized by some faculty this spring for pursuing the presidency at Warren Willson College in rural North Carolina. He withdrew his application immediately before the school’s search committee named another applicant to the position.
Both Sears and Henderson initially led their schools as deans ad interim until the university Board of Trustees named them to the positions permanently Jan. 9, 2003.
Henderson said he plans to return to teaching in the classics department and to devote more time to his personal studies.
“That I plan to return ‘solely to the world of teaching’ is not quite true, since I also have an active and broad scholarly program,” he said in the email. “Desire for more time for my scholarship was in fact my primary motivation for leaving the deanship after five years.
“Deanship of the college and graduate school has been a very rewarding but virtually all-consuming job, leaving me little time for teaching and research,” he continued, “which are the reasons I pursued an academic life to begin with. The longer scholars are absent from this life, the harder it is for them to rejoin it.”
Henderson was CAS dean during a transitional period at the university, and those who have worked with him said they credit him with maintaining stability at the college while increasing fundraising.
“He has continued to advance our academic programs through a period of higher enrollments and reduced budgets, he has engaged the faculty in the process of articulating a vision of arts and sciences as the vital core of the university and – as measured by the dramatic increases in fund raising by the college in these recent years – he has effectively communicated that vision and commitment to academic quality to our alumni and to the supporters of the arts and sciences at Boston University,” CAS Associate Dean Scott Whitaker said in an email.
Senior Associate Dean Susan Jackson said Henderson was responsible for elevating the quality of CAS’ academics.
“Dean Henderson has articulated a compelling vision of liberal arts education for the twenty-first century,” she said in an email, “together with a deep appreciation for the accomplishments and potential of CAS/GRS, and a keen practical sense of what it takes to compete successfully for outstanding students and faculty, to advance knowledge at the leading edge and to deliver academic programs of the highest quality.”
Whitaker and Jackson said they expect a relatively smooth transition in the schools leadership. The search committee will have 10 months after it is formed in September to name a replacement before Henderson steps down on July 1, 2007.
“We have an outstanding faculty and a dedicated, professional staff who are committed to the combined enterprise of education and research,” Whitaker said, “and I am sure everyone will join in to work with the new dean when he or she is in place.”
Although eager to return to the classroom, Henderson said he has mixed feelings about leaving his leadership position at the college.
“I will miss the dean’s front-row view of a great college and graduate school, and the hundreds of wonderful faculty and students that only a dean gets to work with,” he said. “And I will miss the satisfaction of having an impact far broader than a professor can have. But I look forward to full-time teaching and scholarship even more.”
Staff writer Neal Simpson contributed to this report.