A Listening Approach on the Environment
Because Pitzer College, in Claremont, Calif., is only 35 miles from downtown Los Angeles, urban sprawl is never far from mind, even while “at various times of the year, you’ll smell the sage and see lizards basking in the sun,” says Brinda Sarathy.
And that makes the college’s Robert Redford Conservancy for Southern California Sustainability, whose director she has just become, a compelling place “to think about land conservation in terms not only of wilderness and wildlife, but also of social relations,” she says.
Established in 2012 with the film star, a Pitzer trustee, as patron, the conservancy seeks fresh approaches to teaching, research, and advocacy through such methods as getting policy makers in the same room with scientists and artists to see what might emerge, says Ms. Sarathy.
She took a similarly inclusive approach in her 2012 book, Pineros, about the boom in Latinos in the American forestry work force. She sat and listened to Pacific Northwesterners from all walks of logging life, including many hit hard by enforcement of environmental-protection laws.
Ms. Sarathy, who is 39, says that she, like many arriving students on the campus, became alert in her youth to “seeing natural resources around me being depleted.” She viewed that harm, in her high-school years, from a boarding school in southern India that she attended after growing up in Canada and Saudi Arabia, where her father worked for an oil company.
After studying at McGill University and the University of California at Berkeley, she arrived at Pitzer in 2008 to teach environmental policy, California water politics, and environmental justice. The last is clearly her particular passion.
“Environmentalism is often portrayed as having an upper-middle-class, largely white demographic, but it’s so much more than that,” she tells students. “This writing off everyone else as not interested in environmental issues—as less invested in clean water and air—is so unfortunate.”
Last year she found common cause with a group of students whom she advised as they pressed Pitzer’s trustees—successfully—to divest holdings in fossil-fuel companies. —Peter Monaghan
Uniting 23 Campuses on Title IX in California
California State U.
Pamela J. Thomason
In December, Pamela J. Thomason began her new job as the systemwide Title IX compliance officer for California State University. As the first person to ever hold the position, she says she feels honored to be in the role.
“In terms of enforcement of Title IX, it’s an exciting time to be involved.” The 1972 federal law bans sex discrimination at institutions that receive federal funds and plays a significant role in how the government defines colleges’ responsibilities regarding campus sexual assault.
“Student advocates across the nation have helped move the needle about awareness because they’ve been willing to be vocal, and CSU is really being proactive to try and make sure that the campuses are safe places,” says Ms. Thomason, who is 58.
California State has responded to the sexual-assault issue in part by creating Ms. Thomason’s position and requiring that each of the system’s 23 campuses have an advocate for survivors of sexual assault.
Ms. Thomason’s primary focus is reviewing the system’s Title IX policies and making sure they comply with the law and best practices.
Another of her responsibilities is to bring together everyone within the system who handles Title IX issues. She recently organized a conference to discuss establishing collaborative teams on campuses to deal with sexual assault. She also plans to have the various Title IX officers meet regularly.
Before taking her new post, Ms. Thomason, who is a lawyer, was the sexual-harassment and Title IX officer at the University of California at Los Angeles. In her new position, she will have a key role in setting standards that could have wider influence.
“The system has an opportunity here to make a difference not just for the system, but for the nation,” she says. “Just like it has an impact nationwide on providing college graduates, it has an opportunity—that, from everything I can tell, it wants to snag—to make a difference in how students experience college.” —Casey Fabris
A Step Up for a CFO
U. of Texas at Austin
Kevin P. Hegarty
During his nearly 14 years as vice president and chief financial officer at the University of Texas at Austin, Kevin P. Hegarty was often invited to apply for jobs elsewhere, but he always politely declined.
That all changed last year when Mr. Hegarty’s boss at Texas, President William C. Powers Jr., who was under pressure from the Board of Regents, said he would resign effective this summer.
“When Bill agreed that he was going to leave—any time a president leaves—that creates a ‘jump ball’ for the executive team,” Mr. Hegarty says. “So I got a few calls after that.”
One of those calls led to his being appointed as executive vice president and chief financial officer for the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He will start his new job in April.
When someone is at a university the size and quality of Austin, Mr. Hegarty says, finding a job “that’s equal if not a step up” can be challenging. But Michigan offered a definite step up. At Texas, he has been responsible for finances, accounting, business contracts, real-estate matters, and information technology. “At Michigan it’s all that plus capital construction, campus operations, and investments,” he says. “It’s a much broader job.”
One of his tasks will be coordinating Michigan’s continued move into shared services, a transition familiar to Mr. Hegarty from his work in Austin. Shared-services plans attempt to save campuses money by recombining tasks so they can be accomplished by fewer staff members.
At Texas, Mr. Hegarty has been a proponent of moving slowly into shared services, consulting closely with faculty members along the way. “Dictatorial-type decisions do not work well on college campuses,” he says.
The University of Michigan, under its longtime CFO Timothy P. Slottow, made a rapid plunge into shared services, triggering a faculty rebellion. Mr. Hegarty, while emphasizing that he cannot speak for Michigan’s situation, says the two institutions took different approaches: a more centralized one at Michigan and a more bifurcated one at Texas.
For instance, the Texas plan recognizes that technology services for administrators are a lot different from those for professors. For classroom technology, he says, “you’ve got to have someone who’s in close proximity to that classroom in case something goes wrong.” —Don Troop
Changes at UCLA Health
The University of California at Los Angeles Health Sciences and David Geffen School of Medicine are in the midst of major changes in leadership.
David T. Feinberg will step down as president of the UCLA Health System and chief executive of the university’s hospital system on May 1 to become president and chief executive of Geisinger Health System, a nonprofit hospital network in Pennsylvania.
In an email to the campus community at UCLA, Gene D. Block, the university’s chancellor, praised Dr. Feinberg for “his determination and his focus on patient-centered care,” which Mr. Block credited “for helping UCLA’s patient-satisfaction ratings reach the 99th percentile among the nation’s academic medical centers.”
Meanwhile, John Mazziotta, an expert on brain imaging who has been associate vice chancellor for health sciences and executive vice dean of UCLA’s medical school since 2012, was appointed vice chancellor for health sciences, dean of the medical school, and chief executive of the UCLA Health System. He begins those positions this week, succeeding A. Eugene Washington, who will lead Duke University’s health system.
—Ruth Hammond
Neuroscientist Dies
Xu Liu, a new assistant professor in the neurobiology department at Northwestern University who studied how social experiences alter the brain, died suddenly on February 7. He was 37.
While he was a postdoctoral associate in the laboratory of Susumu Tonegawa at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mr. Liu, who is from Shanghai, led an effort to reactivate memories in the brains of mice by stimulating specific cells. In a later study, he and his collaborator, Steve Ramirez, a graduate student, implanted false memories in mice by manipulating cells that are activated when fear memories are formed.
The two men’s discoveries were seen as having potential implications for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder and Alzheimer’s disease. They received the 2014 Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award in Natural Sciences for their work.
Harvey Goldschmid, a professor of law at Columbia University, died on February 12 from complications of pneumonia. He was 74. Mr. Goldschmid, who joined Columbia’s faculty in 1970, helped to put into effect the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, a corporate-reform law passed in response to the financial misconduct of major corporations like Enron. —Anais Strickland
