News
A message from Dean Frederick J. Antczak
May 21, 2019
Dear CLAS Colleagues,
I have decided that the coming academic year, 2019-2020, will be my last as CLAS Dean. I’ll be stepping over to the faculty June 30, 2020 or so.
When this coming academic year is over, I will be 68—and it’s a forehead-slapping mystery to me how that observation could so suddenly become true. But even in younger days I have had, in Julian Barnes’s phrase, a sense of an ending. What I have always seen for myself was a few years at career’s end to do what called me to this vocation in the first place: to reflect, read and teach, and maybe to write, on the off chance I think of something worth saying. Even across the years when my assignment has been in academic leadership, I’ve always understood myself as having fundamentally, as my mentor Wayne Booth would say, the vocation of a teacher. That’s where I will want to go. And there is the practical reality that announcing this with ample notice empowers the Provost and those of you who will represent CLAS on the committee the time to organize a robust national search for a person with the ideas and values, and let me say the requisite scope and stamina, to be a great CLAS Dean. So then, in about a year I will beg your indulgence: after 28 years in administration—six as a department chair, six as an associate dean at Iowa; and what would be sixteen years as your dean—midsummer 2020 strikes me as a moment when I might make a graceful transition.
Sixteen years is a number with its own symmetry, and it has a resonance with my coming to Grand Valley all these years ago to serve under a relatively new provost and president. Out there, months from now, will probably be a moment to articulate how profoundly grateful I have been to serve you as your Dean, but also how glad I will be to join you as a professor. In the time between now and then, you can count on my full-hearted commitment to this work, and to positioning CLAS where Grand Valley needs us to be—at “the heart of the University.”
~Fred