Upon completion of a successful internal search process this summer, I am pleased to announce that Steven Brint has agreed to serve as UCR's new Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education beginning on September 1st. Steve succeeds David Fairris, who is returning to full-time duties on the faculty after four years of outstanding service as Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education. I want to thank David for his substantial leadership contributions, including successful stewardship of our WASC reaccreditation, during a time of significant growth and change on this campus.

Steven Brint has been Associate Dean for Student Academic Affairs in CHASSsince July 2007. He is a member of the faculty in the Department of Sociology and has a courtesy appointment in the Graduate School of Education. Steve joined our faculty in 1993, after teaching at Yale University for seven years. Professor Brint has been active in efforts to improve undergraduate teaching and learning in CHASS, and he received the Chancellor's Award for Fostering Undergraduate Research (in 2006). Professor Brint is an organizational sociologist whose research focuses on topics in the sociology of higher education (including undergraduate teaching and learning), the sociology of professions, and middle-class politics. He is the author of a number of award-winning books and articles in these areas, and he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2008. Professor Brint has been funded for more than a decade by NSF and two philanthropies to study organizational and cultural change in U.S. colleges and universities. He is also co-Principal Investigator of the SERU Project and Consortium, which administers a biannual survey to undergraduate students at 18 major research universities (including UCR and other UCs, where the survey is known as UCUES). He is a native of Albuquerque, NM, and received his B.A. with highest honors in Sociology from UC Berkeley and his Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University.