Gray-Little takes over at arts and sciences
Bernadette
Gray-Little became the new dean of the College of Arts &
Sciences on March 29. University trustees approved her appointment
at their regular meeting March 25 based on the recommendation
of Chancellor James Moeser following an extensive internal search.
"With impressive credentials as
a scholar, teacher and University leader, Bernadette Gray-Little
has earned the deep respect of her colleagues across the College
of Arts & Sciences and the entire campus," Moeser said.
"She has the experience, wisdom and drive to lead our exceptional
liberal arts program to even greater excellence. And as a North
Carolina native, she understands the important role that the
University plays in serving the people of this state and beyond.
We have gained an extraordinary new dean for the College and
the University."
Gray-Little has served in numerous leadership
positions at Carolina since joining the faculty in 1971.
A professor of psychology, she was named
executive associate provost in 2001, serving as the top adviser
to the University's chief academic officer. In that capacity
she oversaw a comprehensive study of faculty salary equity,
directed searches and reviews of senior academic administrators,
helped to develop and implement a new academic plan, and advised
the provost on the annual budget planning process and major
funding allocation decisions.
She served as the College of Arts &
Sciences' first senior associate dean for undergraduate education
from 1999 to 2001. During that time, she led the development
of innovative programs to enhance intellectual climate, including
the now popular and nationally ranked First Year Seminar Program.
She was instrumental in expanding academic advising services
and providing new opportunities for undergraduates to engage
in research with leading faculty.
Gray-Little has also served as chair of
the Department of Psychology (1993-98) and director of the graduate
program in clinical psychology (1983-93), and as a faculty affiliate
at the Center for Creative Leadership (1998-2003).
A native of Washington, N.C., she received
a Ph.D. in clinical psychology in 1970 from St. Louis University,
which presented her with the William Stauder Alumni Merit Award
in 1997. She graduated from Marywood College in Scranton, Pa.,
which honored her as a distinguished alumna in 1996.
Her research interests include the association
of ethnicity and social status to self-esteem, decision-making
strategies in marital relationships, relationship violence and
the influence of demographic characteristics on diagnostic accuracy.
She has earned fellowships from the National
Research Council, the Fulbright program, the Ford Foundation
and the National Institute of Mental Health. She is a fellow
of the American Psychological Association and associate editor
of the journal "The American Psychologist."
Gray-Little replaces former Dean Risa
Palm, who resigned June 30 to become the executive vice chancellor
and provost at Louisiana State University. Richard Soloway,
the Eugen Merzbacher distinguished professor of history and
former senior associate dean for social sciences, has served
as interim dean during the search period.
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Allred tapped as executive
associate provost
Stephen
Allred has been named Carolina's executive associate provost.
Allred's appointment took effect March
29. He comes to the post from his position as the University's
associate provost for academic initiatives. A Carolina alumnus,
he joined the Institute of Government's faculty in 1986 and
later directed its Master of Public Administration program before
moving into the provost's office in 2001.
In his new role, Allred will serve as
chief deputy to Robert Shelton, executive vice chancellor and
provost. He will replace Bernadette Gray-Little, who was confirmed
March 25 as the dean of the College of Arts & Sciences.
(See story above.)
"Steve Allred has an exceptional
grasp of the substance and spirit of this university," Shelton
said. "Complementary to his professional and scholarly background,
Steve has two-and-a-half years of experience in the provost's
office. His performance at the university level established
his credibility with deans and the faculty leadership."
Allred will serve as acting provost in
Shelton's absence and will work with the Deans Cabinet on all
day-to-day matters, including academic personnel, finances,
facilities and activities among schools. He also will work with
deans and others to carry out the University's academic plan,
as well as promote interdisciplinary initiatives supporting
that blueprint.
Allred's other duties will include organizing
and overseeing five-year reviews of deans and librarians. He
will direct senior administrative searches and reviews, coordinate
the awarding of distinguished professorships, teaching awards
and competitive leaves.
Allred graduated from Carolina in 1974
with a bachelor's degree in political science and stayed to
earn a master of public administration degree in 1976. He later
obtained his juris doctorate from Catholic University in Washington
D.C., where he worked for the federal government and a private
law firm. His work at the Institute of Government focused on
employment law. He was promoted to full professor in 1994 and
later to a distinguished professorship in 1999.
Allred met his wife, Julia, at Carolina
in 1974 when both were undergraduate students. She earned her
bachelor's degree here, as well as a master's in speech and
hearing. Their son James is a freshman Morehead Scholar. They
also have a daughter, Meredith, attending Chapel Hill High School
as a sophomore.
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Levine wins Bell award
Carolina
honored one of its own March 29 for her work in the present
and vowed to examine another woman's role in its past.
Madeline Levine, Kenan professor of Slavic
literatures, received the 2004 Cornelia Phillips Spencer Bell
Award, which recognizes a woman who has made outstanding recent
contributions to the University.
SIGNIFICANT CONTRIBUTIONS
Chancellor James Moeser presents
the Bell award to Madeline Levine, Kenan professor of
Slavic literatures, on March 29. |
Now in its 11th year, the Bell award is
named for Cornelia Phillips Spencer, who spearheaded the effort
to reopen the University after the Civil War. Her motives for
doing so will be the subject of campus-wide discussions in light
of a doctoral student's research that he says shows her campaign
stemmed from racist views. (See story below for details.)
Chancellor James Moeser made that announcement
before presenting the Bell award to Levine during a ceremony
at the George Watts Hill Alumni Center.
He called Levine a "person admired for
her wisdom, fair-mindedness, kindness and warmth as a mentor,
leader, advocate and friend."
"This year's recipient is a distinguished
scholar, who somehow, over a 30-year career at Carolina, has
managed to do it all, all at the same time and with grace --
to teach well, to win national prizes for her scholarship, and
to serve both the University and her profession in every conceivable
way," Moeser said.
He also said that the campus Levine came
to was quite different than the one it is today. She "belongs
to a generation of women who joined the UNC faculty when women
on the tenure track were exceedingly scarce and when life as
the only woman in a department, or as one of the tiny minority,
was not always easy," he said.
"I understand that in the 1970s,
women faculty members at Carolina sought each other's friendship,
encouragement and counsel, and this year's Bell award recipient
was one of those who took strength from other women and gave
it back, too," Moeser said.
In her nomination of Levine for the Bell
award, Professor Beth Holmgren -- chair of the Department of
Slavic Languages and Literatures -- praised Levine for the "trust
and high regard she has earned in the eyes of her close colleagues"
and for her "superb skills as a manager and the efficacy of
her collaborative, caring leadership style." Levine "has rendered
the University enormous service over the last three decades,"
Holmgren wrote.
Levine has devoted an enormous amount
of "time, skill and energy" as chair of important personnel
and curricular committees and as a member of key advisory committees.
"Given her long record of appointment and service," Holmgren
wrote, "it is reasonable to conclude that Professor Levine is
regarded by senior and junior colleagues alike as one of the
pillars of the faculty community, as a highly experienced, judicious,
reliable faculty member."
Holmgren summed up Levine's contributions
by writing, "In her research, teaching, advising, mentoring
and administrative work, Professor Levine has been a model and
dedicated citizen of the University and its overlapping communities
of students, faculty and administrators."
Levine's academic interests focus on post-war
writers and the literary representation of the Holocaust and
Polish-Jewish relations. She is the prose translator for the
1980 Nobel laureate, Czeslaw Milozs, whom she helped bring to
the University as a visiting professor.
Levine also has spent 15 years on six
different occasions serving as her department's chair or acting
chair, a tenure that Moeser said "speaks volumes about who she
is and how she is regarded by her peers."
Levine, who earned her doctorate at Harvard
University, has been credited with mentoring an entire generation
of East European scholars through her participation in the Woodrow
Wilson junior faculty seminar in East Europe. She served on
the national boards of the American Council of Learned Societies
and the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies.
At Carolina, she has been on numerous
search committees as well as the Jewish studies faculty advisory
board and panels reviewing the curriculum and its international
focus. She is a member of the Chancellor's Advisory Committee
and chairs the UNC Press Board of Governors.
Diane Kjervik, director of Carolina Women's
Center, chaired the Bell Award Selection Committee.
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Campus to examine Spencer's
role in Carolina history
The
Cornelia Phillips Spencer Bell Award namesake is generally remembered
in University history for
climbing to the top of South Building
on March 20, 1875, after hearing the campus would reopen, to
ring the building's bell.
But Carolina plans to take a close look
at Spencer's role in events leading up to that moment, as the
result of research conducted by Yonni Chapman, a doctoral student
in the history department.
He wrote to Chancellor James Moeser, objecting
to Spencer being the award's namesake, requesting a moratorium
in giving the award and calling for dialogue within the campus
community about the issue. Several dozen faculty, staff and
students joined Chapman in making the request.
Chapman says Spencer lobbied to close
the University after administrators and faculty were installed
by Republican leaders, who at that time tended to be more supportive
of the rights of newly emancipated blacks and therefore would
have been seen as installing people with similar views.
Chapman also says that Spencer pushed
for Carolina's 1875 reopening because that happened under Democrats,
restoring the pre-Civil War social order at the University.
At the March 29 Bell award ceremony, which
Chapman attended as an invited guest, Moeser said the question
is if Spencer was "simply like any other person of her day"
or someone with significant political influence who helped end
Reconstruction, setting the stage for the deepening racial divisions
that followed in the South.
Moeser said he didn't know the answer
and therefore declined to declare a moratorium on giving the
Bell award but added that those questions were worth discussing.
Getting to the bottom of the issues raised
in Chapman's research will be the goal of a campus-wide effort
organized by Harry Watson, director of the Center for the Study
of the American South, and Bill Ferris, Joel Williamson professor
and the center's senior associate director, Moeser said.
They have offered the center's resources
to organize an academic and community discussion of University
history and Spencer. The library's Southern Historical Collection
also has offered to help. The University also hopes to draw
upon the insights of Spencie Love, a relative of Spencer's,
and Chapman, who supports celebrating the contributions of women
at Carolina. The University's current plans involve an academic
symposium to anchor a program of discussions.
"If we value knowledge and understanding,
we should always be willing to look at documentary evidence
of our past, whether we think it may be painful or not," Moeser
said. "Carolina is a 200-year-old Southern university. We cherish
the times in our past when this university acted as a force
for enlightenment and progress. But the shameful institution
of human bondage is part of our past, too -- along with its
lingering effects for many years after the Emancipation Proclamation."
Moeser also invited suggestions about
the campus dialogue as well as for how the University should
honor exceptional women in the Carolina community.
In her remarks at the ceremony, Bell award
winner Madeline Levine said that her specialization as a Slavicist
had given her "a way to think about" Spencer, whom she said
"complicates our desire for a neat divide between right and
wrong, good and evil."
Levine, Kenan professor of Slavic literatures,
described a woman named Zofia Kossak-Szczucka, who before World
War II denounced Jews as a race and campaigned for the deportation
of all Polish Jews to Madagascar.
But when the Germans began their "final
solution," Kossak-Szczucka joined an underground Polish organization
that tried to rescue Jews.
She remained anti-Semitic, Levine said,
but as a devout Catholic she believed that all human life was
precious and so to murder Jews was wrong, regardless of how
much people might hate them.
"I do not know how to judge her
-- I can only try to understand her within the context of her
time, to condemn her views that I find abhorrent and to marvel
at her courage," Levine said. "I imagine that those who study
the life of Cornelia Phillips Spencer will eventually arrive
at a similarly complex view."
