Dean of the College Maria Cruz-Saco will not renew her contract with the University and will leave her post following this academic year, having spent two years steering a variety of academic and student life resources. The change will allow her to return to her primary field, research.
“It was a very difficult decision for me to make,” she said. “I’m moving on to my next challenge.”
In an all-campus e-mail, President Douglas Bennet wrote that he will appoint an acting dean, likely a current faculty or staff member, to a one-year interim dean position. He intends for his successor, whose tenure as the University’s 16th president will begin in September, to organize the search for and determine the next permanent dean.
“It gives the next president the opportunity to staff [his or her own] senior staff,” Cruz-Saco said. “One should not underestimate the value of that. That’s a nice side-effect of this particular decision of mine for the new president.”
In the fall, Cruz-Saco will travel to her native Peru to initiate a year-long, United Nations (UN)-commissioned study of the Madrid International Plan of Action on Aging (MIPAA).
The UN designed the MIPAA in 1992 at the Second World Assembly on Aging in Madrid. Cruz-Saco, a former UN Senior Economist in the Division for Economic and Social Affairs, participated in the assembly and will review what progress the MIPAA has achieved as it approaches its 5th anniversary. While Cruz-Saco investigates in Peru, similar studies will develop simultaneously in the various other nations that have enacted the MIPAA.
Cruz-Saco has also been awarded a grant from the Fulbright Scholar Program. She will use the grant at Universidad del Pacifico in Lima, where she will conduct research to corroborate her study of the MIPAA.
“The context of ageing is particularly difficult in the developing world,” Cruz-Saco said. “Poor elderly are extremely vulnerable.”
She explained that these vulnerabilities, which the UN hopes to counter in developing nations, range from lacking health care to inadequate income and pensions.
Bennet supported Cruz-Saco’s decision to leave the University.
“My response when I heard the news was that, as a former economic development person, I could only celebrate Maria’s mission,” he said.
During her year in Peru, Cruz-Saco plans to write two articles on her findings. Once she returns to the United States, she will rejoin the Economics Department at Connecticut College while she consolidates her ideas into a full-length book.
“This work will bring me back actively to my research agenda,” Cruz-Saco said. “I hope that my research will produce a model for other Latin American nations to follow.”
Before her two-year tenure at Wesleyan, Cruz-Saco taught for 15 years in the Economics Department at Connecticut College and acted as interim dean of the college for two years. Although she had not planned to work in academic administration, she said that the transition from the classroom to the office came very naturally.
“My passion for students, and for learning communities that are cohesive, brought me to the dean of the College post,” Cruz-Saco said.
Looking back on her time at the University, Cruz-Saco said that her focus as dean of the College has been collaborative work and multiculturalism as a source of education.
“My tenure at Wesleyan, my agenda, has been to communicate, to network, to think collectively,” she said. “The conviction that I could provide leadership and help create a few programs that would help Wesleyan in its dynamic evolutions were other factors that brought me [here]. I believed that I would contribute another little step.”
Cruz-Saco’s initiatives at the University include First Year Matters, a program that extends the academic and social awareness programs of New Student Orientation into freshmen students’ entire first year on campus.
Cruz-Saco also helped create the position of dean for Diversity and Academic Advancement, a position now held by Daniel Teraguchi.
“Diversity needs to be understood as a crucial component of academic excellence,” Cruz-Saco said of the position.
Most recently, the Office of the Dean of the College collaborated with the Wesleyan Student Assembly’s Student Life Committee to launch the Campus Climate Log. In response to a recent increase in reported acts of hate and intolerance on campus, the log serves to publicly record all reported incidents and to provide intervention and prevention resources.
“It’s not clear to me that we’re securing welcoming environments for everyone, particularly traditionally underrepresented communities,” Cruz-Saco said of the events that led to the log’s development.
To the University’s next dean, Cruz-Saco offered two pieces of advice: to listen to students and to work with all members of the Office of the Dean.
“It’s not one person doing anything, it’s always a team,” she said. “Every single member of the dean’s office is absolutely committed to thinking creatively.”
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