Nobody mentioned it was going to be simple.
But it surely’s arduous to think about that any College of Washington president had a tougher 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 battle. Ongoing funding uncertainty and hostility from the federal authorities.
Cauce must obtain excessive grades for dealing with these troublesome conditions whereas enhancing UW’s repute as top-of-the-line 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 baby when Fidel Castro’s revolution compelled 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 school since 1986, Cauce was chosen by the Board of Regents to change into 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. Below Cauce’s tenure, the multiyear Be Boundless marketing campaign raised $6.3 billion in personal donations from greater than 500,000 donors. Cauce additionally labored to extend scholarships and accessibility — 68% of UW graduates go away with no recognized scholar debt.
Recognizing the wants of the area’s high-tech business, Cauce created the Paul G. Allen College of Laptop Science & Engineering and doubled enrollment. Pupil our bodies grew at each UW Bothell and UW Tacoma.
There isn’t a sugarcoating the threats going through the UW and different establishments of upper studying from the disturbing shift in federal priorities. These will certainly be among the many largest objects for incoming president Robert J. Jones.
As Cauce famous in a latest blog post, the UW’s capability to backstop federal funding could be very restricted. “No supply of cash accessible to the UW — public or personal — can presumably exchange greater than a small fraction of the greater than $1.2 billion in federally funded analysis we carried out final fiscal yr alone,” she wrote.
It is a job the place it’s inconceivable to please all of the folks on a regular basis — from sports activities fanatics to these involved about campus tensions and scholar security.
However a lot of those that disagreed together with her acknowledged that Cauce listened, collaborated and tried to resolve issues.
That may be a effective legacy and one to which future UW presidents must aspire.
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