From the Dean's Desk: The (First Full) Year in Review

As my first year at Jepson winds down, I have taken time to reflect on a wonderfully challenging and varied year.

I fully anticipated that the Jepson School would be a place of high energy, where students, faculty and staff wrestle with "big" questions, including leadership ethics; how individuals come together to decide who gets what; and what leaders ought to do. I knew the faculty to be inspiring teachers and extraordinarily productive scholars and our students to be serious and creative risk takers. These expectations proved to be exactly right.

I am very pleased to write that we have added two new faculty members who will add to that energy in different ways. Peter Iver Kaufman will join the Jepson School where he will serve as the George Matthews and Virginia Brinkley Modlin Chair in Leadership Studies. He joins us from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where as a professor of religious studies, he specialized in medieval and early modern religious thought. Sungmoon Kim, who earned his Ph.D. in political science in 2007 at the University of Maryland, will join us as an assistant professor of leadership studies specializing in international and comparative political and leadership theory.

This year the School held four conferences - most recently, the Summer Institute for Leadership and the Liberal Arts, supported by the W. M. Keck Foundation. The Institute attracted 126 scholars and students from 27 states in the U.S. as well as from Canada, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Mexico and Singapore.

In March, we hosted the Donchian Symposium on the Ethical Challenges in Leadership, supported by the Davoud Donchian Foundation. Speakers included environmentalist Ray Anderson, founder of the world's largest carpet manufacturer; Neal Katyal, professor of national security law; and the Jepson School's Joanne Ciulla. In the fall, we hosted a conference on preparing for responsible leadership in health care, supported by the Claude Moore Foundation, and the Jepson Colloquium, a conference that examined "leadership and discovery" from varied disciplinary perspectives.

Our very successful Jepson Leadership Forum series outdid itself this year. The Forum was unprecedented in that we formed a one-time partnership with Women involved in Living and Learning and we staged 10 programs. The programs produced partnerships with many other on-campus groups including the law school, Bonner Center for Civic Engagement, the Office of Common Ground, the psychology department and WILL.

I was happy to continue meeting alumni this year as well. It was a great pleasure to meet with our Jepson Alumni Networking Committee in January. Events we held for alumni this year included our 15th year anniversary dinner, which was attended by alumni from all years, making it the most extensive gathering of Jepson School alumni to date; a networking reception for alumni and current students interning in the area; and "speed mentoring," where alumni met with current students. Along with Associate Dean Teresa Williams, I attended President Ed Ayers' welcome reception in Washington, D.C., and socialized with Jepson School alumni. Finally, it was a great pleasure to award the 10th year Reunion Recognition Award to Maia Carter Hallward, '98, assistant professor of international relations at Kennesaw State University.

The Jepson School has just begun a process of strategic planning and I invite you all to become involved. Our timing is fortuitous since the University of Richmond is also in the midst of a strategic planning initiative led by President Ayers. In May, the faculty met and adopted a new Mission, Purpose and Goals. I welcome your input during this process. Please feel free to e-mail me at speart@richmond.edu with any comments or suggestions.    

What else is in store for 2008-09? Plans are well advanced for our Leadership Forum Series on "Lincoln's Legacy of Leadership." And Leland Melvin, '86, the first "spider" in space, has agreed to serve as our leader-in-residence. I'm looking forward to it all!

Best wishes, 

Sandra J. Peart, Dean