Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences - Letter of Application

Sep 16, 2026

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Application letter to the Search Committee for the Dean position of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida. Outlines the writer’s experience at Penn State, including leadership as Associate Dean and Director of Graduate Studies, with emphasis on recruitment and retention of underrepresented graduate students, data-driven assessment, and strategic expansion of digital scholarship and pedagogy. Also describes undergraduate innovations through an honors program and the Career Enrichment Network, supported by philanthropy and external grants.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLetters

FormatPDF

Pages10

Reading Time4 min

AccessFree to download

Search Committee Letter

Application for Dean Role

Graduate Education Initiatives

Office of Digital Scholarship and Pedagogy

Undergraduate Honors and Career Enrichment

January 5, 2015 Search Committee Dean, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences University of Florida Dear Search Committee: It is my pleasure to submit this letter of application for the position of Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida. In the wake of the emergence of new modes of digital communication, higher education has entered a time of intense transformation that opens new possibilities for more collaborative, dynamic, and engaging scholarship even as it unsettles well-established institutional structures and academic practices. During my time at Penn State as Associate Dean for Graduate and Undergraduate Education, I have sought to respond to this situation by combining traditional liberal arts strengths in communication, analytical thinking, and ethical imagination with supported opportunities for students to deepen their understanding of global interconnections, cultivate digital fluencies, and develop professional experience that will enable them to thrive inan information rich networked world. This approach is consistent with the values that animate my own academic scholarship in Philosophy, which combines traditional research with new forms of digital scholarship designed to engage a wider public beyond the walls of the academy. To illustrate how I would integrate these values into my role as Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida, let me speak about three specific ways I have sought to enrich graduate and undergraduate education over the past ten years at Penn State. First, before taking on my role as Associate Dean of Graduate and Undergraduate Education, I served for five years as the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Philosophy. During my tenure in that position, I helped transform the department by developing a strategy to recruit and retain graduate students from traditionally underrepresented groups. As a result, a full third of the current graduate students on funding in the department (11 of 33) are from underrepresented groups. Now as Associate Dean, I am responsible for leading our 20 graduate programs with almost 800 students, setting recruitment targets, implementing graduate placement strategies, and managing the admissions and funding processes to ensure that we attract and retain top graduate students from a diversity of backgrounds. In two recent articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education, I have written about the importance of tying the size of graduate programs to well documented placement success and how to restructure the Humanities PhD. I have a record of strategic decision making and of ongoing, data-driven assessment and evaluation that has raised the profile of our graduate programs and helped attract, recruit and retain some of the best faculty in our disciplines. Second, one of my first initiatives as Associate Dean was to create a new Office of Digital Scholarship and Pedagogy with a mission to advance the vision of an excellent 21st century liberal arts education. By partnering with faculty, staff, and departments I developed strategic projects aimed at increasing community engagement and integrating digital approaches to teaching and research. This infrastructure has enabled us not only to cultivate a vibrant online educational community we call Liberal Arts Voices but also to secure financial resources from outside the college to create distinctive academic experiences for our faculty and students. For example, we developed new online programs that have grown World Campus revenue for the College to over $15M/year; we received $1M from the Provost to create a Center for Humanities and Information in collaboration with the University Libraries; and we’ve now received two Mellon grants (totaling over $780K) to fund the Public Philosophy Journal, a project for which I am the PI. Third, under my leadership, the College has enhanced undergraduate education by implementing an

FAQs

What role does digital scholarship play in the writer’s experience?

The writer describes creating an Office of Digital Scholarship and Pedagogy, partnering with faculty and departments to develop strategic projects, build an online educational community, and secure external funding for digital learning initiatives.

Sep 16, 2026

Upload by Eliana