Cornell University has been trying to beef up its social-science departments, which have slipped in prominence in recent years. The recently announced departures of three top psychologists, however -- two to Yale University, one to Harvard University -- don’t exactly help.
Frank Keil, a specialist in developmental psychology, announced that he would leave for Yale next fall. With him goes his wife, Kristi Lockhart, a lecturer in psychology who has won major teaching awards from both students and the faculty. Meanwhile, Mark Lenzenweger, an associate professor of human development at Cornell who studies schizophrenia and milder personality disorders, announced that he would take a job at Harvard.
Dr. Keil has done groundbreaking work on how children develop abstract concepts through observations of individual events. At Yale, he will more or less take the place of William Kessen, a developmental psychologist who retired last year. Dr. Keil said Yale’s small faculty would make it easier for him to collaborate with professors in other disciplines who are interested in how the mind processes information.
He emerged from negotiations impressed by both universities. “The people at Yale touched on the right intellectual issues, and the central administration showed a genuine interest in the case,” he says. As for Cornell, he adds, “I was honored and flattered by what they did to keep me.” His wife, Dr. Lockhart, will join Yale’s clinical-psychology program, though not on the tenure track.
Yale’s psychology department is still looking for two senior professors and two assistant professors.
Dr. Lenzenweger, who has tenure at Cornell, will join Harvard as an advanced associate professor without tenure. Unlike assistant professors there, though, associate professors hired laterally face good tenure prospects.
He was sufficiently excited by the offer that he asked Cornell not to bother countering it. “I really value rigorous standards in psychological sciences, and it will be a great pleasure to be among people who share those values,” he says. Dr. Lenzenweger’s wife, Lauren Korfine, is finishing up a Harvard Ph.D. in psychology. She will teach at Harvard, off the tenure track.
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A year ago, Adelphi University was fixated on ousting its president, Peter Diamandopoulos. Now it’s focused on finding his permanent replacement.
The search committee brought two candidates to campus last week and planned to bring in a third one this week. Mary Kay Tetreault, vice-president for academic affairs at California State University at Fullerton, was the first to visit the Garden City, N.Y., campus. By all accounts, she wowed the crowd with her down-to-earth style and her ability to take a joke. One student leader, Luke Cooper, asked her how many times she’d traveled to Greece -- an allusion to Dr. Diamandopoulos’s penchant for trips to his native country, at Adelphi’s expense. She said she’d never been there.
In an interview, Dr. Tetreault said she felt that “the chemistry was good” during her two-day visit to the campus.
Joyce F. Brown, a former psychology professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate School and University Center, was next on the schedule. Dr. Brown served as a deputy mayor of New York under David Dinkins, and has been acting president of CUNY’s Baruch College. In an interview, she said she saw “great potential” in Adelphi.
Some people on the campus, however, speculated that the first two visits were for show, and that the search committee’s first choice was the man behind curtain No. 3.
“If that ever were true, it ain’t true after today,” said Tom Heffernan, an English professor and member of the search committee, referring to Dr. Tetreault’s visit. Of the third candidate, who was to visit the campus this week, the professor would say only, “He’s someone widely known.” Adelphi hopes to name a president on March 2.
Adelphi professors apparently don’t have quite the appetite for rumors about their presidency that they used to. One professor who helped lead the effort to remove Dr. Diamandopoulos called it “inappropriate” even to discuss the two public candidates.
Lots of perspectives have changed in a year. When the New York State Board of Regents stripped Adelphi’s trustees of their power last year, the head of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, Tom Ingram, called the act a “very dangerous” precedent for government intrusion in the affairs of private colleges. This month, however, the group honored the new regents, installed by state officials, for “exceptional leadership and unusual courage.”