December 10, 2015
Dear Members of our Campus Community:
It is my great pleasure to jointly announce with Executive Vice Chancellor David Marshall the appointment of Professor Carl Gutiérrez-Jones as Dean of Undergraduate Education in the College of Letters and Science and Associate Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate Education, effective January 1, 2016. In addition to overseeing the L&S Division of Undergraduate Education, he will lead a new campuswide Office of Undergraduate Education (including the Education Abroad Program, Instructional Development, and Summer Sessions) and serve as an advocate for undergraduate education across campus.
We are grateful to our search advisory committee, chaired by Omer Blaes, Professor of Physics and Vice Chair of the Academic Senate, for conducting a rigorous national search for this important position. The members of the committee are listed below. We would also like to thank the Academic Senate and all of the members of our campus community who provided important consultation, input, and advice throughout this search process.
Professor Gutiérrez-Jones has been Interim Dean of Undergraduate Education since July 1, 2014, having previously served as Senior Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education. He is the Principal Investigator on the $2.6 million grant recently awarded to UC Santa Barbara from the U.S. Department of Education for "Opening New Doors to Accelerating Success," a new Title V grant awarded under the Education Department’s Developing Hispanic-Serving Institutions Program.
Professor Gutiérrez-Jones served as Chair of our Department of English from 2001 to 2004, and as Director of our Chicano Studies Institute from 2005 to 2011. He has chaired and/or served on numerous committees, including the Academic Senate’s Committee on Academic Personnel, the Committee on Educational Policy and Academic Planning, and the General Education Task Force; the Chancellor’s Year-Round Enrollment Committee; and many program advisory boards, both on our campus and systemwide. A professor in our Department of English since 1990, Professor Gutiérrez-Jones holds affiliated appointments in Comparative Literature, Latin American and Iberian Studies, and Chicana and Chicano Studies.
His areas of scholarly research include American studies, Chicana and Chicano studies, contemporary fiction, critical race studies, and the culture of human rights. He is the author of Critical Race Narratives: A Study of Race, Rhetoric, and Injury; Rethinking the Borderlands: Between Chicano Narrative and Legal Discourse; and the recently published Suicide and Contemporary Science Fiction, as well as articles on legal studies and cultural theory. Professor Gutiérrez-Jones was selected as our campus’s Harold J. Plous Award Lecturer in 1994.
We appreciate Professor Gutiérrez-Jones’ commitment to undergraduate education and his longstanding dedication to our academic community. Please join us in extending our warmest congratulations and welcome to Carl in this important new leadership role.
Henry T. Yang
Chancellor
Search Advisory Committee for Associate Vice Chancellor and Dean of Undergraduate Education
Omer Blaes, Chair, Professor, Physics; Vice Chair, Academic Senate
Glenn Beltz, Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies, College of Engineering; Professor, Mechanical Engineering
Henning Bohn, Professor, Economics
Michael Brown, Dean, University Extension; Professor, Education
Paige Digeser, Professor, Political Science
Niki Elyasi, Associated Students Representative
Dominique Jullien, Professor, French and Italian
Laura Kalman, Professor, History Chandra Krintz, Professor, Computer Science
David Lea, Professor, Earth Science
Jane Mulfinger, Professor, Art
Samantha Rae Powers, Graduate Students Association Representative; Department of Communication
Lisa Przekop, Director of Admissions
Denise Segura, Professor, Chicana/o Studies
Bruce Tiffney, Dean, College of Creative Studies
Ex Officio:
Ricardo Alcaíno, Director and Title IX Officer, Office of Equal Opportunity & Sexual Harassment/Title IX Compliance