Stephen Lassonde, currently dean of Yale University's Calhoun College, will become Brown's deputy dean of the College July 1, University officials plan to announce today.
Lassonde announced his resignation in an e-mail sent to all Calhoun students last night, revealing his plans to fill Brown's newly created position after 14 years as dean there.
Lassonde "has worked extensively with Yale's academic advising programs, including first-and second-year advising, upper-class advising, fellowship and pre-law advising, career and study-abroad advising and advising on academic standing," Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron wrote in a campus-wide e-mail to be sent today. "He has also participated on Yale's equivalent to the (College Curriculum Council), and on the President's Alcohol Policy Review Committee," Bergeron wrote.
The position of deputy dean of the College was created as part of a restructuring of the Office of the Dean of the College. Lassonde "will be responsible for the overall coordination of the office" and will work with Bergeron and other deans "to establish programmatic priorities and directions for the College," Bergeron wrote.
Additionally, Lassonde will oversee undergraduate academic advising programs and "will be working closely with faculty, with academic departments, and especially with the Office of Campus Life and Student Services, on issues related to advising," Bergeron wrote.
In addition to serving as dean of Calhoun College, Lassonde is a lecturer in history at Yale and published a book in 2005 titled "Learning to Forget: Schooling and Family Life in New Haven's Working Class, 1870-1940."
He is currently working on a project to examine the lives of several children growing up from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s and is authoring a history of 20th-century children's perceptions of U.S. governmental authority.
"I am, of course, enormously excited at the prospect of the new and broader responsibilities that await me (at Brown), just as I recollect the cherished friends I have made among yourselves and the hundreds of Hounies who have passed through here during my time as your dean," Lassonde wrote Sunday in the e-mail to Calhoun students.
The search committee for the new position included Associate Vice President for Campus Life and Dean of Student Life Margaret Klawunn, Associate Dean of the College David Targan, Professor of Political Science James Morone and Lauren Kolodny '08.
