The gin and whiskey flowed freely at Carr’s Hill on April 24. And why not? It was 5pm on a warm spring day—and at last UVA had a dean of Arts & Sciences. A group of faculty, students and administrators assembled in a pavilion outside the University President John Casteen’s house to meet Meredith Jung-En Woo, who will take the reigns from interim dean Karen Ryan in June.
 UVA administrators enthused that Meredith Woo raised money for her Canadian-award-winning documentary—a good sign for all the money she’ll have to raise as the new Arts & Sciences dean. |
The University has known it must find a replacement for the former dean (and popular American history professor) Ed Ayers since Ayers announced in November 2006 that he was taking over as president of the University of Richmond. Despite having seven months to fill the post, the initial search committee fell short. Ryan was appointed to fill the spot a few days after Ayers officially took over at Richmond, but she made it clear that she wasn’t interested in the job long term. UVA officials didn’t comment publicly on where the first search went wrong.
The Arts & Sciences dean is in a unique position among campus deans, required to unite in one school the hardest of sciences with the most ethereal of the arts—in addition to handling the fundraising duties that are increasingly part of the job for the modern UVA dean. The University wants to improve its sciences, both in terms of teaching and researching, while maintaining its historical strength in the humanities.
“We talked early on about no factions, and we could not have gotten Meredith Woo had [the search committee] done anything other than work together,” said Provost Tim Garson. “You found somebody that reflects exactly what we’re after. We’re after somebody who spans arts and sciences.” Woo, 49, currently is the associate dean for social sciences and a political science professor at the University of Michigan.
“The previous search was done on a short time scale,” says James Galloway, the environmental sciences professor who led the new search, which started in September. “The new dean did not have to be a scientist. The new dean did have to have the skills to be able to build the sciences, and we’re convinced that Dean Woo has those skills.”
In hiring Woo, the University fulfilled another objective that it surely had: hire someone other than a white man. When discussing hiring searches for the long list of open deanships and VP slots, Garson has often joked that he would like to see a woman from Singapore get hired. With Woo, he’s pretty close to getting his wish. She was born in South Korea, and though she earned her undergrad and graduate degrees in the states, she is fluent in Korean and Japanese in addition to English.
Woo showed she was mastering the language of UVA with her brief remarks on Thursday, pulling out a quote from Thomas Jefferson: “Institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times.”
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