Dear colleagues,
President Fitts and Provost Forman have publicly announced that I am stepping down as dean at the end of the fall semester to become the next president of Haverford College, beginning July 1, 2027. But I wanted you to hear from me as well.
This is a hard letter to write. When I accepted the invitation to serve as dean in 2018, some friends asked what I was thinking. Why leave a secure faculty position at a major university to lead a school of liberal arts at a moment when the liberal arts were said to be in crisis? My answer was to repeat my long-held belief: that a liberal arts education is the best preparation for the challenges of the future. Tulane was an ideal place to pursue that commitment.
So many of you welcomed me and my family graciously. You taught me about New Orleans: the king cakes, the festivals, how to survive the potholes while riding my Vespa. It seems a long time ago already.
Look at what we have done together. We brought more than 130 new colleagues into the permanent faculty and established 10 new endowed chairs and professorships. We launched the Department of Africana Studies and the Department of Comparative Literature, established new academic programs, one in Middle East and North African Studies and another in Native American and Indigenous Studies. We established the Suzanne and Stuart Grant Center for the American Jewish Experience. With our partners in the School of Science and Engineering, we created STEM² Studies, where faculty across schools teach alongside each other and show students what dialogue across disciplines looks like. We established the Tulane Global Humanities Center, connecting scholarship rooted in New Orleans and the Gulf South to conversations around the world, and rebuilt a sense of community among colleagues and dialogue across disciplines. And we reimagined our largest building, Newcomb Hall, around a vision for the future of liberal arts education.
A dean did not do these things. Our collective community did — through your ideas, your partnership, your teaching, your world class scholarship, your engagement and your willingness to lean in.
I did not go looking for this opportunity. But the invitation to lead a prestigious college devoted to the liberal arts is one I could not pass up, and I carry what I have learned from you — and from the remarkable port city of New Orleans — to Philadelphia.
There are still several months until the end of the semester ahead of us, and I intend to spend them working alongside you. An interim dean will lead the school in the spring while the university conducts a national search, with the goal of having a new dean in place by summer 2027. The school is strong, and it is positioned well for what comes next.
I will have many more chances to say thank you before the end of the year, but I did not want to wait to express my profound appreciation. Serving as your dean has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. I feel confident that the School of Liberal Arts we have built together is one that will continue to thrive well into the future.
With deep gratitude,
Brian T. Edwards | Dean and Professor