Dear USC Rossier Faculty, Staff and Students,
I’m happy to share news of the appointments of Drs. Estela Mara Bensimon and Adrianna Kezar as USC Rossier Dean’s Professors.
Dean’s Professorships are rare distinctions at USC and arise from a nomination from a school’s dean to the provost. Drs. Bensimon and Kezar will be the first Dean’s Professors from USC Rossier.
Only full professors qualify for this honor, and holders of this position have distinguished careers including but not limited to groundbreaking scholarship, teaching and service. Drs. Bensimon and Kezar certainly exceed these requirements.
Estela Mara Bensimon
Dr. Bensimon will be the USC Rossier Dean’s Professor in Educational Equity, befitting her commitment throughout her career to achieving educational equity. She has demonstrated impact on universities and community colleges, as well as on leaders and policymakers, through her scholarship and through the creation and impact of the Center for Urban Education (CUE), which she founded in 1999.
In the last 10 years, Dr. Bensimon has earned the Social Justice Award from the American Educational Research Association (AERA); the Research Achievement Award from the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE); the USC Mellon Award for Mentoring; and the Research/Teaching Award for Outstanding Latino/a Faculty in Higher Education from the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education.
She became an AERA Fellow in 2011 and was elected to the National Academy of Education in 2017. Last month she was appointed by Governor Jerry Brown to the Education Commission of the States.
Her work on equity has appeared in numerous journals, including Educational Policy and Review of Higher Education. Currently, Dr. Bensimon is the Co-PI on three grants focusing on equity-minded competence in instruction and assessment.
CUE is our second oldest research center at USC Rossier. Its impact on national and state practices in higher education is due largely to her vision and leadership. Both the Equity Scorecard and the tireless work she and her colleagues at CUE perform bring about change on campuses both for individual faculty and collectively at the institutional level.
Adrianna Kezar
Dr. Kezar will be the USC Rossier Dean’s Professor in Higher Education Leadership. She is the co-director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education and also directs the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success.
She is a national expert on change, governance and leadership in higher education, and her research agenda explores the change process in higher education institutions and the role of leadership in creating change. She regularly presents her scholarship at conferences, seminars and workshops to help higher education leaders tackle key challenges such as shared governance, organizational learning and changing demographics and diversity.
Dr. Kezar has published 18 books and monographs, over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles and over 100 book chapters and reports. She has also acquired approximately $13 million dollars in grant funding.
In 2015, she was recognized as an AERA Fellow, and in 2017 she received the Research Achievement Award from ASHE, given to scholars whose “published work advances understanding of higher education in a significant way.”
Please join me in congratulating Estela and Adrianna for these well-deserved honors. Their three-year terms in these positions will begin in the 2018–19 academic year. Each will deliver a Dean’s Professorship Lecture followed by a luncheon this fall.
Fight On!
Sincerely,
Karen Symms Gallagher, Ph.D.
Emery Stoops and Joyce King Stoops Dean
USC Rossier School of Education
Waite Phillips Hall
Los Angeles, CA 90089-0031
Asst: hardison@usc.edu
213.740.5756 (office)
213.821.2158 (fax)
