In an e-mail sent to the Georgetown community this afternoon, President John DeGioia announced the appointment of William M. Treanor as the new Dean of the Georgetown Law Center, effective August 16.

Treanor has been the Dean of Fordham Univerisity’s School of Law since 2002. During his time at Fordham, Treanor became known for offering students free ice cream and cupckaes during exams, as well as gifting flip-flops to every student prior to summer vacation. For his involvement with the student body, The New York Sun dubbed Treanor “an activist dean” in a 2006 profile.

“I’m trying to encourage a family feeling at the school,” Mr. Treanor told the Sun.

As an expert in constitutional law, Treanor also served as a member of Fordham Law’s faculty, as the Deputy Attorney General in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Council, and as the associate independent council during the Iran/Contra investigation.

Treanor will replace Judith Areen, who has served as Interim Dean since the departure of T. Alexander Aleinikoff in early December.

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In an e-mail sent last night to the University community, John DeGioia named Edward B. Montgomery as the new Dean of Georgetown’s Public Policy Institute.

“I am excited by this opportunity to work with President DeGioia and the faculty, students, staff and alumni of the GPPI community,” Montgomery said, according to a press release.

Montgomery’s career spans both the federal and academic worlds—and then back again. The new GPPI Dean comes to Georgetown after time at the White House as both a member of President Obama’s Task Force on the Auto Industry and as the Director of Recovery for Auto Communities and Workers. (In other words, he was the guy tasked with helping that areas that suffered after the federal government’s restructured General Motors.)

Before his latest stint with the federal government, Montgomery worked at the University of Maryland as both an economics professor and Dean of the College Behavioral and Social Sciences.

Montgomery also worked under President Clinton as the Deputy Secretary and Chief Operating Officer of the Department of Labor in the late 1990s.

Montgomery will officially become the GPPI Dean on August 15. GPPI, which has an enrollment of about 450 students, specializes in master’s degrees in public policy and policy management.

After the jump, we’ve posted DeGioia’s full e-mail announcing the Dean Montgomery’s hire.

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This week, the Voice sat down to talk with Chester Gillis, who was named Dean of the College at the end of last year.  We included a portion of the interview in today’s paper, but here’s the full transcript!

The Voice: How you are adjusting to this new job as Dean of the College? Do you find it particularly challenging or interesting?

Chester Gillis: Well in terms of adjusting, fortunately I had a year as interim dean to get the lay of the land. It was just a very good introduction to the position; it was very helpful. So in some ways this year, I’m doing some things for the second time, like last year, but also now I can implement a vision for the next five years. Are there challenges? There are a range of challenges. There are always a range challenges with this job. One is simply attending to multiple constituencies: the students, of course, the faculty, the alumni, the donors and the multiple stakeholders in the University from outside so it’s a very large constituency, very large, so any waverings tend to come from that, just like today. It’s just the reality.

That said, I have a superb staff here in the office, who are very knowledgeable, very experienced, and very helpful to make everything work so the leadership does the execution is happy on may levels and that makes everything possible. It’s as simple as that.

The Voice: I’ve spoken to a few students who are very excited about the proposed creation of a business minor in the college. I was wondering if you had any plans in the future for more of these cross-disciplinary majors?

Gillis: Specific ones, there are none at present. We’ll have to see how this one goes we’re working hard on it to make it happen.

The Voice: Do you have any idea of what the time frame would be?

Gillis: I don’t want to be held to saying next year. I would love to see it next year. I’d love to take my time do it right and do it quickly, but it requires a lot of coordination with the business school and the college and the provost’s office, so it’s not something you can simply fashion overnight.

We can’t even say, “Oh, we’ll just duplicate the program we already have.”  But I think once it’s done it will have a long shelf time, and if it’s successful, then it can be a model for other kinds of programs between schools.  But this is a good start and it’s an important start. We haven’t done it before, so it sets benchmark, and that’s another reason we want to do it well and do it carefully so it is successful. If it doesn’t benefit our students, if it’s not well-designed, it’s not good. If it is well-designed and it benefits students, then I’m in favor, and it could serve as a model.

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When it was revealed last week that the School of Foreign Service standby, Map of the Modern World, was undergoing a curriculum revitalization and getting a new professor, students and alumni were quick to voice their outrage.

A Facebook group, “Take Back Map of the Modern World,” quickly cropped up, and its membership has skyrocketed to nearly 700.

While Facebook groups are all well and good, the administrators of the group realize the real key to effecting change is putting pressure on administrators.  To that end, in the group’s leaders encourage members to e-mail the Dean of the SFS, Carol Lancaster, and other administrators:

Nothing demonstrates opposition like a letter. If every person in this Facebook group took the time to write one, we would get what we want. It doesn’t have to be too long if you are pressed for time. The most important thing is the number of people writing to express their opinion. It takes 2 seconds to join a Facebook group, but it takes effort to express your opinion in a letter.

Unfortunately, their encouragements haven’t proved too effective yet.  When asked how many letters and e-mails she has received about the Map changes, Lancaster wrote in an e-mail this Monday that she has only received 20 complaints so far.

That’s no way to make sure SFSers of the future have to learn about Vanuatu and Kyrgyzstan!

Interviews of University administrators by official Georgetown publications are generally pretty fluffy, but the question and answer session Georgetown Alumni Online recently had with Chester Gillis, the newly permanent Dean of the College, is surprisingly meaty.

Gillis starts off the interview by talking about how Georgetown has changed since he started working here 21 years ago.  He says the quality of the faculty has improved and that the students, while consistently excellent, have increasingly adopted a disconcerting pre-professional mindset.

He also talks about what his big plans are as Dean, both in the short and long-term.  Over the summer, he and the rest of the dean’s office will be discussing how to improve the advising system and give it more of a mentoring dimension.  A big long-term focus is going to be improving the sciences, with the goal of securing funding for the long-awaited new Science Center and adding 35 scientists to the Georgetown faculty over the next few years.

Possibly the most interesting part of the article, though, is when he talks about the need for allowing College students to do work through the SFS, MSB and NHS:

A second goal I have, (and I don’t mean this to contradict my comments about liberal arts), is to see the lines between the schools a bit more porous. If a student in the College wants to minor in a business discipline, I think that’s perfectly legitimate. I think it’s perfectly fine to have a history degree and a minor in finance.

I’ve had discussions with Dean Daly at the business school and he’s open and enthusiastic about this idea. The same is true for the School of Foreign Service and Nursing and Health Sciences, though that may be something to entertain down the road, as we should work with school at a time.

SFS-Qatar Dean James Reardon-Anderson will be stepping down at the end of this school year, according to a (slightly melodramatic) email recently sent out to students there.

Some of you I have gotten to know inside and outside of class. Some of you I have observed only at a distance. But all of you have helped to make this peculiar outpost of Georgetown in the desert a model for higher education in the twenty-first century. This is an accomplishment that will be remembered through the ages. And your part in it will be remembered by me, as long as I live.

Reardon-Anderson was the first Dean of SFS-Q, which was founded in 2005 and will be seeing its first class of seniors graduate in a few weeks. He will be returning to the Main Campus SFS as the Sun Yat-sen professor of Chinese History. According to the email, Provost James O’Donnell, President DeGioia and freshly-minted interim SFS Dean Carol Lancaster will be working out a process for picking his successor.

Full email after the jump!

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Carol Lancaster, a professor of Politics at the School of Foreign Service and the current Director of the Mortara Center for International Studies, will be serving as Interim Dean of the SFS, according to an email just sent out by Provost Jim O’Donnell. Lancaster is replacing Robert Gallucci, who’s leaving after 13 years at Georgetown to head the MacArthur foundation.

Lancaster has worked at Georgetown since 1981, starting in the African Studies department then moving over to the SFS in 1989.

Angela Stent, a professor of Government and Foreign Service and the Director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies will be heading the search committee to find a permanent replacement for Gallucci.

O’Donnell’s full email after the jump…

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