Six Women Appointed as Deans at Colleges and Universities

LaTanya Buck was named dean for diversity and inclusion at Princeton University in New Jersey. She will take on this role in August. Currently, Dr. Buck is the director of the Center for Diversity and Inclusion at Washington University in St. Louis. Before joining the staff at Washington University in 2014, Dr. Buck was director of the Cross Cultural Center at Saint Louis University.

Dr. Buck holds a bachelor’s degree in public relations and a master’s degree in college student personnel administration from the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg. She earned a doctorate in higher education administration at Saint Louis University.

Susan S. Rugh was appointed dean of undergraduate education at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, effective May 1. Dr. Rugh is a professor of history at the university and has been serving as associate dean of undergraduate education. Earlier, she was associate dean of the College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences at the university.

Professor Rugh joined the faculty at the university in 1994. She is a graduate of Brigham Young and holds a Ph.D. in American history from the University of Chicago. Dr. Rugh is the author of Are We There Yet? The Golden Age of American Family Vacations (University Press of Kansas, 2008).

Laurie Elish-Piper is the new dean of the College of Education at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. She has been serving as a Distinguished Teaching Professor in the department of literacy and elementary education at the university.

Dr. Elish-Piper is a graduate of Saint Joseph College. She earned a master’s degree at Purdue University and a Ph.D. from the University of Akron.

Adrienne C. Webber was appointed dean of library services at the Frederick Douglass Library on the campus of the University of Maryland Eastern Shore in Princess Anne. For the past eight years, she has been dean of library and information services at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg.

Dean Webber is a graduate of Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. where she majored in mass communications. She holds a master of library science degree from Clark Atlanta University in Georgia.

Gennifer Weisenfeld will be the next dean of the humanities in the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. She is a professor in the university’s department of art, art history, and visual studies. Dr. Weisenfeld, who joined the Duke faculty in 1998, is an expert on modern Japanese art. She is the author of Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 (University of California Press, 2013).

Dr. Weisenfeld is a graduate of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from Duke University.

Daveen Litwin was named the inaugural dean and chaplain of the William Jewett Tucker Center for Spiritual Life at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. She has been serving as chaplain for the Claremont colleges in California. Earlier in her career, she served as rabbi at Grinnell College in Iowa and as executive director of Hillel at the University of Kansas.

Rabbi Litwin is a graduate of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. She earned a master’s degree in Hebrew letters from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, Ohio.