Dean of the Graduate School and Vice Provost for Graduate Education

Cornell University is an innovative Ivy League university whose inclusive community of scholars, students, and staff impart an uncommon sense of larger purpose and contribute creative ideas to further the university's mission of teaching, discovery, and engagement. With our main campus located in Ithaca, NY, Cornell's far-flung global presence includes the medical college's campuses on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and Doha, Qatar, as well as the Cornell Tech campus located on Roosevelt Island in the heart of New York City.

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About the Cornell Graduate School

The Cornell University Graduate School is internationally recognized for its strong commitment to post-graduate education, with enrollment exceeding 7,800 students across many disciplines from the physical sciences to the humanities. The mission of the Graduate School is to enhance the intellectual life of the university by enabling graduate students to pursue interdisciplinary scholarship and advanced research in preparation for their subsequent professional and academic careers. Priorities of the Graduate School include enhancing the overall student experience and scholarship through programming focused on professional development, career exploration, and student well-being. The Graduate School is committed to the promotion of inclusion and equity by fostering the academic, professional, and personal success of a diverse graduate student community.

Position summary

Cornell University seeks a visionary leader and accomplished scholar for our next Dean of the Graduate School and Vice Provost for Graduate Education (Dean/VPGE). Candidates for this role should have a record of successful leadership at a research-intensive university and experience guiding communities to create the highest levels of institutional academic accomplishment. The candidate will combine intellectual curiosity with management acumen, be adept at facilitating connections and building partnerships and collaborations and serve as a trusted and respected member of multiple university leadership teams. Above all, the Dean/VPGE must support and advance a culture that values collaboration, shared governance, thoughtful management, and the aggressive pursuit of inclusive academic excellence rooted in scholarship within the framework of Cornell University Core Values.

Formerly the Dean of the Graduate School, this position was expanded in 2020 to include the role of Vice Provost for Graduate Education. As Dean/VPGE, the incumbent will serve as the advocate for graduate education and oversee the graduate student experience at the highest level of the university.

As a member of the university leadership team, the Dean/VPGE will report directly to the Provost. The Dean/VPGE will work collaboratively with twelve academic deans on all aspects of graduate education and directly oversee the Graduate School administrative offices.

The Dean/VPGE will be the institutional advocate for graduate students and oversee all of the Ph.D. programs on the Ithaca and Cornell Tech campuses as well as many master's programs. The incumbent, in consultation with the faculty, will articulate an overarching vision for graduate education at Cornell. In addition to being the voice of graduate education internally, the Dean/VPGE will be expected to be visible and influential in local, state, and national conversations about graduate education.

The Dean/VPGE will have particularly close working relationships with each of the vice provosts to assure alignment around their specific portfolios, and with the Vice President for Student and Campus Life to ensure that services are optimized for the graduate student community. The Dean/VPGE will also work closely with the dean of the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences in New York City to assure alignment with the graduate programs on Cornell's medical school campus.

Together with the Departments and Colleges, the Dean/VPGE will be responsible for oversight and continuous program assessment of the graduate fields of study. This will include peer review of the fields closely associated with departments during the periodic review of those departments, and, in some cases (as determined by the Dean/VPGE), specific review of fields linked to multiple departments that might fall outside these periodic department reviews. The Dean/VPGE will be empowered to implement improvements suggested by field reviews.

The Dean/VPGE will be expected to embrace Cornell's ethos of inclusion and diversity and continue to build on this trajectory in terms of graduate student enrollment.