Nobody mentioned it was going to be straightforward.
However it’s exhausting to think about that any College of Washington president had a more difficult tenure than Ana Mari Cauce, who steps down from the place of high dawg subsequent month.
The pandemic and subsequent rush to distant studying. The dismemberment of the Pac-12 convention. Campus violence stemming from the Gaza conflict. Ongoing funding uncertainty and hostility from the federal authorities.
Cauce should obtain excessive grades for dealing with these tough conditions whereas enhancing UW’s status as among the finest public establishments within the nation. The group benefited from her management throughout extraordinary instances.
The daughter of a former Cuban Minister of Training, Cauce was a toddler when Fidel Castro’s revolution pressured her household to flee to Florida in 1959. She earned her undergraduate diploma on the College of Miami. At Yale College, she earned a Ph.D. in psychology.
A member of the UW college since 1986, Cauce was chosen by the Board of Regents to turn out to be UW’s thirty third president in 2015. She succeeded Michael Younger, who served from 2011 to 2015 till he was employed by Texas A&M College.
Fundraising is a part of any college president’s portfolio. Underneath Cauce’s tenure, the multiyear Be Boundless marketing campaign raised $6.3 billion in non-public donations from greater than 500,000 donors. Cauce additionally labored to extend scholarships and accessibility — 68% of UW graduates go away with no identified pupil debt.
Recognizing the wants of the area’s high-tech trade, Cauce created the Paul G. Allen College of Pc Science & Engineering and doubled enrollment. Pupil our bodies grew at each UW Bothell and UW Tacoma.
There is no such thing as a sugarcoating the threats dealing with the UW and different establishments of upper studying from the disturbing shift in federal priorities. These will certainly be among the many greatest gadgets for incoming president Robert J. Jones.
As Cauce famous in a current blog post, the UW’s capability to backstop federal funding may be very restricted. “No supply of cash accessible to the UW — public or non-public — can presumably change greater than a small fraction of the greater than $1.2 billion in federally funded analysis we performed final fiscal yr alone,” she wrote.
This can be a job the place it’s unimaginable to please all of the individuals on a regular basis — from sports activities fanatics to these involved about campus tensions and pupil security.
However a lot of those that disagreed along with her acknowledged that Cauce listened, collaborated and tried to resolve issues.
That could be a wonderful legacy and one to which future UW presidents should aspire.
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