From The Dean
Welcome to the website for the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, the core institution of the Johns Hopkins University. I encourage you to spend some time browsing the pages of this website, learning more about the school, its people and programs, the community we comprise, the work we do, and the goals that drive us.
To get you started, here is my most recent newsletter to the Krieger School community:
 | Fall 2009 QUARTERLY NEWS FROM THE DEANIN THIS ISSUE: |
| Dean Adam Falk |
On a university campus, fall means transition: the start of a new academic year, the arrival of a new group of students, and, here at Homewood, as the leaves change color and the Baltimore summer heat finally relents, there’s a refocusing on the things that matter most. All of these are very comfortable, familiar, and indeed welcome transitions. This fall, as many of you know, came an announcement of another transition, this one in leadership. On Sept. 24 I was named the 17th president of Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., a role I will assume on April 1 of next year.
I am humbled by this extraordinary opportunity for my family and me, and I am enormously grateful for the support of the communities both here and at Williams. I look forward to this great challenge, but I will miss Johns Hopkins and, in particular, the School of Arts and Sciences deeply, for this place has been my home for more than 15 years. In that time, I have had the great fortune to come to know many of you and to see your dedication to the school manifest in so many ways. I want to assure you now that the progress of the School of Arts and Sciences will continue unabated, and that the next James B. Knapp Dean will inherit a school in better shape than it has ever been, supported and defined by its exceptional community of students, scholars, staff, parents, and alumni.
Over the past year, you have seen much about the impact of the nation’s economic downturn on the school, including details from me about school-wide hiring and salary freezes and other painful but necessary measures. Thankfully, our actions helped the school avoid serious financial troubles and, as a result, we are emerging from the recession not only intact, but fiscally healthy. We have resumed the faculty searches we suspended last year—nearly two dozen of them—and are moving ahead with strategic priorities in academic programming, faculty and student support, capital projects, and student life initiatives. I am pleased to say that the Gilman Hall renovation is proceeding on schedule, and we expect that stunning transformation of the school’s flagship building to be complete next summer.
In so many ways, the School of Arts and Sciences is poised for even greater successes and positioned to take advantage of new opportunities in the years to come. And with an outstanding leadership team in place, the next dean will have all the tools he or she needs to guide the school’s continued growth.
The university has launched a national search for the next dean and recently announced the membership of the university’s search committee, led by Provost Lloyd Minor. Several longtime faculty members and leaders in the School of Arts and Sciences are members of the search committee, which also has alumni and graduate and undergraduate student representation, as well as a number of faculty members from other divisions of the university. Their work will be aided by a search consultant firm, as well as by input from faculty, students, and staff, and I am confident the committee will identify the absolute best candidates for the job. We will keep you informed as this process moves forward in the coming weeks and months.
Finally, I want to share with the broader Arts and Sciences community that this has been a difficult semester for us at Homewood for a few very specific and painful reasons. Over the summer, the school lost two longtime faculty members, true academic giants, to illness, and then just last month, our community was shaken by the tragic death of Miriam Frankl, a junior in the School of Arts and Sciences who was struck in a hit-and-run accident as she was crossing St. Paul Street.
The Hopkins community came together last week to honor Miriam and celebrate her life, which was filled not only with academic achievement, but also, as we heard at the memorial service, an abundance of love, laughter, and hope. Miriam worked in the lab of Jeffrey Rothstein in the School of Medicine’s Department of Neurology, where she was a valued member of a team researching the pathogenic mechanisms of ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, and she planned to pursue graduate work in the field. She represented the third generation of women scientists from her family at Hopkins. Her grandmother, Pearl S. German, is a professor emeritus in the Bloomberg School of Public Health, and her aunt, Rebecca Z. German—who spoke so eloquently at last week’s memorial service—is a distinguished faculty member in the School of Medicine. The memorial was a powerful uniting of the Hopkins community; as we mourn Miriam together, so, too, will we heal together.
Miriam’s death followed closely the untimely deaths of two treasured faculty members: Giovanni Arrighi, the George Armstrong Kelly Professor of Sociology, died June 18 at his home in Baltimore, and Raymond Westbrook, the W.W. Spence Professor in Semitic Languages, died July 23 in London. Both are being honored on campus this fall for their achievements in their fields (Giovanni in world systems analysis and historical sociology, Ray in ancient Near Eastern law), as well as for their impact on decades of Hopkins students and all of us who knew them. The school has been enriched immeasurably by both Giovanni and Ray, and we miss them terribly.
I know the entire Hopkins community joins me in extending its deepest sympathies to the families of Miriam, Giovanni, and Ray. My best wishes to them and to all of you for a peaceful, healthy holiday season.
Sincerely,
Adam F. Falk
James B. Knapp Dean
Johns Hopkins University Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences
