Boston University announced Thursday that Ann Cudd will take over as the new dean of BU’s College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Beginning August 1, Cudd will replace Virginia Sapiro who, after eight years, is taking a year’s sabbatical and then returning to CAS to teach political science.
“[Cudd] has a wonderful energy and enthusiasm … She just was the whole package,” said University Provost Jean Morrison. “Impeccable academic credentials combined with deep university leadership experience combined with a really positive spirit and energy was a combination that won the job.”
Morrison said she is looking forward to Cudd’s leadership in CAS toward achieving greater excellence as well as to her ability to work with Boston University President Robert Brown, provosts and other academic deans. Morrison said these partnerships will lead to academic programs, research and activities that further advance CAS and the university as a whole.
“She will be an effective leader within CAS, working with the faculty, articulating the strategic priorities for the departments and working also with my office and the dean’s to be an effective partner in cross-school collaboration,” she said.
Cudd, the current vice provost of the University of Kansas, has “come up through the ranks … and so has a deep working knowledge of how a college of arts and sciences works,” Morrison said. “That will serve her well in this role.”
The dean is responsible for making sure everything gets done on time, ensuring that classes get taught productively and exhibiting a certain administrative leadership, Morrison said.
“The really important part of the job is to hold the faculty together and to help move the department and the college as a whole to a greater level of excellence,” Morrison said. “So there are a lot of different things. The dean is the leader of the faculty. The dean is responsible to the students both graduate and undergraduate. The dean does a lot of different things.”
The process of selecting a new dean took approximately six months, said Nancy Ammerman, the chair of the search committee and a sociology professor at BU.
The search committee consists of faculty members from CAS as well as other schools and colleges. The committee does not personally select the new dean, Ammerman said. Rather, they are responsible for recommending a few candidates to Brown and Morrison.
“[The committee] came with their recommendation a couple of weeks ago,” Morrison said. “Then the president and I made the decision among the recommendations shortly there after. But the appointment of any dean has to be approved by the Board [of Trustees] and that approval was the vital step in the process of hiring Dean Cudd. She was approved this week.”
Ammerman said the committee members had a long list of qualifications as they were looking for potential candidates.
“We wanted somebody who’s really an innovative educational leader,” she said. “We wanted somebody who understood the broad range for kinds of research in the college, work with and advocate for nuclear physics to 17th century poetry, so we needed somebody who has some experience in thinking and working a really broad range of different academic discipline.”
Additionally, Ammerman said a high priority for the committee was to find someone who is committed to increasing BU’s diversity among students and faculty. She said she believes Cudd will successfully help the committee achieve its goal.
“I think one of the primary challenges is this challenge of thinking about increasing all kinds of diversity at BU and making that work,” she said. “I think that’s the big challenge that she’s ready to take on … I certainly hope to see CAS continue to be the kind of place that is both a terrific undergraduate and graduate education and [continue to] foster innovative research.”
