Appointment of Dean of Columbia College
February 27, 2009
To the Columbia
community:
I am extremely pleased to announce the appointment of
Michele Moody-Adams as the next Dean of Columbia
College and Vice President for Undergraduate Education. She comes to Columbia
from Cornell University where she is the Hutchinson
Professor and Director of the Program on Ethics and Public Life, and has served
for the past four years as Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education. As an administrator, she has been responsible
for ensuring the integrity and coherence of undergraduate curriculum and
instruction at Cornell and overseeing a number of academic and residential
initiatives.
Professor Moody-Adams is an accomplished scholar and
administrator who has taught at Cornell, Indiana University, the University
of Rochester and Wellesley College. She has produced an extensive and exemplary
body of work in moral philosophy and is the founder of Cornell’s program in
ethics and public policy. Her 1997 book,
Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality,
Culture, and Philosophy, has been widely praised as “a major contribution to
moral philosophy.” She has also written
and lectured extensively throughout the United States and abroad on a wide
range of timely issues, and her voice is a prominent one among publicly-minded
philosophers.
In the breadth of her scholarship and interests, Professor
Moody-Adams exemplifies Columbia’s
own tradition of great scholarship that is engaged in the public issues of our
time. Hers is the kind of approach to
teaching and learning imagined by Columbians who have created and nurtured a
Core Curriculum that has called on generations of undergraduates to reflect
deeply on our shared intellectual traditions, to challenge their own
preconceptions about the world, to remain open to the perspectives of others,
and to grapple with the questions essential to active citizenship in a
democracy.
Professor Moody-Adams received BA degrees from both Wellesley College
and Oxford University; and went on to earn her MA
and PhD in Philosophy from Harvard. She
has won numerous academic honors, including the “Last Lecturer” faculty award
from Cornell in 2004 and Howard
University’s Alain Locke
Award in Philosophy in 2003.
I want to thank Vice President for Arts and Sciences Nick
Dirks and all the students, faculty, staff and alumni members of the search
committee for their hard work and enthusiastic recommendation of Professor
Moody-Adams for this vital leadership role at Columbia.
Professor Moody-Adams’ extraordinary commitment to teaching,
scholarship and public service, as well as her experience as an academic
administrator, make her uniquely well suited to this role. I want to thank Dean Austin Quigley again for
his 14 years of leadership at the College.
With the appointment of Michele Moody-Adams, we know that Columbia College will continue to be in good
hands in the years ahead. Please join me
in welcoming her to the Columbia
University
community.
Sincerely,
Lee C. Bollinger
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