Elizabeth McCormack will join the Bowdoin faculty as dean for academic affairs effective July 1, replacing the Jennifer Scanlon, who has held the interim dean position since the summer of 2015. McCormack will also teach physics. Matt Orlando has become senior vice president for finance and administration effective January 4. He previously served as vice president and interim head of finance and administration and treasurer. Both positions are part of the President’s Senior Leadership Team.
Former Dean for Academic Affairs Cristle Collins Judd, who held that position at the College from 2006 until 2015, was also named president of Sarah Lawrence College. She will begin that position in July.
The College is still in the midst of hiring processes for four positions in the Office of the Dean of Student Affairs. They intend to fill the positions held by Interim Dean of First Year Students Melissa Quinby, and Interim Assistant Deans for Upperclass Students Michael Pulju and Abbey Greene Goldman. Additionally, Bowdoin is planning on hiring a dean of students to replace Senior Associate Dean of Student Affairs Kim Pacelli, who announced in December that she will leave Bowdoin at the end of this academic year.
McCormack is currently a professor of physics at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, where she has taught since 1995. She has served as chair of the faculty, director of the Center for Science in Society, director of the STEM Posse Program, dean of graduate studies and as an associate provost, where she worked to support faculty across campus.
“There was an amazingly thorough process that engaged a number of faculty and staff, and she clearly differentiated herself from a really great group of candidates that we looked at, talked to and thought hard about,” said President Clayton Rose. “She brings a record of accomplishments as a teacher, and a scholar, and an administrator and as someone who’s been deeply engaged in the liberal arts for a long time.”
McCormack is excited to join the faculty at Bowdoin.
“The tradition of excellence and the engaged liberal arts model is what attracted me,” she said.
She expects ensuring equitable academic access to be one of the challenges in her role at the College.
“The [challenge] is equitable access, finding ways to brings students in from all different walks of life, but once they are here supporting their success,” said McCormack. “This involves supporting faculty to create inclusive learning environments [and] understanding how students learn best.”
The Office for the Dean of Academic Affairs is responsible for overseeing faculty, including hiring, mentoring and tenure. The office also supports special academic programs and leads faculty discussion on teaching and innovation.
McCormack is also looking forward to teaching physics at Bowdoin.
“As someone who has gotten into campus leadership from faculty, my heart with always be with and my lens will always be through the perspective of a teacher, faculty member, and a colleague,” she said.
At Bryn Mawr, McCormack taught a gender information science and politics course with the English department. She hopes to teach a first-year seminar at Bowdoin that discusses women in science and technology.
“As a woman scientist myself, but also having taught at a women’s college, I’m pretty excited about and interested in the issues young women face today not only as scientists, but as intellectuals engaging with the world today,” she said.
Orlando will continue at Bowdoin as the senior vice president of finance and administration and the treasurer, the equivalent of the chief financial officer of the College, after a national search. He held this position in the interim after Katy Longley left in June.
“[Orlando] has been a member of the Bowdoin community for a long time and many, many of the folks here know him well,” Rose said. “The search was interesting—we did a national search, engaged one of the leading search firms, we looked at a number of candidates, and a number of really good candidates, and it was not a foregone conclusion going into the search that this was Matt’s job. This was a job he earned in an amazing competition with a number of other really well qualified candidates.”
Orlando will oversee capital projects and the campus master plan.
“Most of these ideas involve funding, whether that comes through donor funding or operating revenues,” Orlando said. “We do have finite resources. We are blessed with a really big endowment, but the dollars in the budget are all spoken of to some degree. We’ll have to figure out how to make room for these new incremental costs within the budget.”
Orlando is excited to take on a larger role at the College.
“I think that it will be a really exciting chapter in the history of Bowdoin. I know it sounds cliché, but I genuinely believe that and am excited to be a part of it,” he said.