Chemistry professor James Valentini has been appointed Columbia College’s interim dean, University President Lee Bollinger announced on Friday.
Valentini is replacing philosophy professor Michele Moody-Adams, who resigned unexpectedly last month after two years leading the college. In an email to alumni, Moody-Adams said she felt compelled to resign because of impending structural changes to the University that would “ultimately compromise the College’s academic quality and financial health.”
Valentini said that although he doesn't yet know what those changes are, he is committed to protecting the Core Curriculum and Columbia College's commitment to need-blind admissions, both of which he called central to the College's identity. He added that he plans to work hard to raise funds specifically for the College.
“The dean’s responsibility is to ensure the best possible undergraduate education for students in Columbia College. That’s his or her job,” Valentini said. “How that’s done is going to be different in different times in the University’s history, but it’s the dean’s responsibility to make sure that he or she does that. That’s what I’m going to do.”
During his 20 years at Columbia, Valentini has served in the University Senate, on the Committee on Instruction, and on the Committee on the Core Curriculum, as well as on several faculty governance committees. He is currently the director of undergraduate studies in the chemistry department, a department he chaired from 2005 through 2008.
Valentini said he enjoys working with undergraduate chemistry students, but could not pass up the opportunity to lead the college when Bollinger offered it to him last week.
“It [changing jobs] wasn’t a trivial matter,” Valentini said. “But the president asked me to do this, and I think I can do a good job at it, and the University needs somebody to do this now. So I’m willing to do it.”
Bollinger told Spectator that he picked Valentini because of his wealth of experience at Columbia, and because he is a “very successful teacher and a very fine scholar” who is committed to the college and the Core Curriculum. He also cited Valentini’s science credentials.
“To have a scientist take this on is really important in this particular point in time, because there’s a lot of thought going into how to integrate science more into the Core Curriculum,” Bollinger said.
In a joint statement issued yesterday, the Columbia College Student Council and the Student Affairs Committee of the University Senate called on Valentini to fight to maintain the college’s generous financial aid policies, to preserve the Core Curriculum’s small seminars, and to keep enrollment in the College at its current level.
Valentini said that he spent much of the weekend getting advice from students, professors, and administrators, and that it is still too early for him to make pronouncements about what he will and will not do as dean.
CCSC President Aki Terasaki, CC ’12, said that he would like Valentini to affirm his commitment to the college, perhaps via a video message. But he added that he is already confident that Valentini has Columbia College students’ best interests at heart.
“He teaches undergraduates,” Terasaki said. “That’s a big key right there.”
Moody-Adams resigned in August in response to recommendations presented by the Policy and Planning Committee, a nine-member faculty advisory committee that reports to Executive Vice President for Arts and Sciences Nicholas Dirks. Moody-Adams implied that these changes would absorb academic and financial decision-making for the college into the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Bollinger declined to explain Moody-Adams’ reasons for resigning. He acknowledged that there are ongoing discussions about how best to structure the University, but said that no changes are imminent.
“There really aren’t any changes. It’s a process, that’s the way I describe it,” Bollinger said. “We are always trying to improve the organizational structure, as well as the content of what we do with our undergraduate program, and the college in particular.”
Bollinger called the college’s undergraduate experience “one of the great success stories of Columbia’s modern history” and said that proposed changes about the University’s structure will eventually be made public.
Valentini said Bollinger did not give him details on those proposed changes when they talked last week.
“The focus of the discussion was on what we can do. It wasn’t a retrospective analysis of what past issues were,” Valentini said. “And that seemed to me to be the right emphasis, is what are we going to do moving forward.”
He added that while he is not “fearful” about the changes Moody-Adams mentioned, he plans to talk to Moody-Adams to find out what they are.
“The [former] dean resigned and expressed concern about this, so it’s a concern of mine,” he said.
Valentini is married to Italian professor and Policy and Planning Committee member Teodolinda Barolini, who chaired the PPC last year, which he acknowledged had created speculation that he might put the interests of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences above those of the college. But he said that this will not be the case, and that he sees no conflict between the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Columbia College.
Literature Humanities chair Christia Mercer, who has sat on the Committee on the Core Curriculum with Valentini, praised the college’s interim dean as “a super smart guy with great integrity.”
Elizabeth Kipp-Giusti, CC ’12, took a small class on energy conservation with Valentini last year. She described him as “a really genuine educator” who is very enthusiastic about teaching, saying that like Moody-Adams, he will defend students’ best interests. But she also called him quirky, charming, and “a little bit awkward,” qualities that she thinks differentiate him from his predecessor.
“I think that Moody-Adams is a much more statuesque administrator, or academic, that she kind of presents this very composed image,” Kipp-Giusti said. “And Valentini is a little bit more of a zany professor.”
Bollinger told Spectator said he will soon put together a search committee to find the college’s permanent dean, noting that Dirks will be very involved in the search process.
Valentini said that his experience working with students in the chemistry department over the past six years is the best preparation he has had for becoming dean. He capped enrollment for chemistry recitation sections at 22—some sections previously had as many as 40 previously—and raised money from alumni for a program that funds summer research for chemistry students, among other projects.
“I had an opportunity to make a lot of improvements in the chemistry program by dealing with students and finding out what the issues are, what the situations were,” he said. “And that’s been a lot of fun, and I think it would be interesting to be able to do that on a larger scale.”
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