Comings and goings
- Steven Wilkinson, vice provost for global strategy and director of the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University, has been named dean of the university’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
- Jeffrey Kallberg, a professor of music and deputy dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, has been named interim dean of the school.
- Ken Witcher, interim chancellor of the Prescott campus of Embry‑Riddle Aeronautical University, has been named to the post permanently.
- Robert Q. Berry III, dean of the College of Education at the University of Arizona, has been named dean of the School of Education at Indiana University at Bloomington.
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Footnote
Let’s take a moment to remember Nikki Giovanni, the poet, activist, and emerita professor at Virginia Tech. She died on Monday at the age of 81, of lung cancer. It was the third time she was diagnosed with cancer.
Giovanni’s writing dealt with social issues like race, gender, sex, love, and politics. Her work spanned more than 30 books, including at least 11 for children. Another of her poetry books is scheduled to be published next fall.
The New York Times described her as a star of the civil-rights era’s Black Arts Movement, one who “was confounded by the machismo that dominated it” and who gained a stature “independent of the movement as a celebrity poet and public intellectual.” She appeared regularly on a public television program that aired from 1967 to 1972, “Soul!”
NPR called her language “sometimes spare and longing, other times dense and righteous.” It noted the last lines in her work “Word Poem,” which read: “let’s build / what we become / when we dream.”
Giovanni sought to teach students to think deeply, she said when she retired from Virginia Tech in 2022.
“I want my students to not accept what they are hearing, but to look and say, ‘What kind of sense does this make?’” she said.
