Message from the Dean

P. David Pearson

As I finish up my fourth year as dean, it has become increasingly clear to me that one of the gravest responsibilities, most difficult tasks, and most rewarding experiences of a dean and a faculty is recruiting the next generation of scholars. It is important to emphasize all three faces of recruiting. It is a grave responsibility because each of us wants Berkeley to remain a national leader in educational scholarship and leadership. It is a difficult task because we have such high aspirations for our future faculty that we try to recruit the very candidates who are top prospects for our competing peer institutions, places like Stanford, UCLA, and Harvard. And once they are convinced, then trying to make it possible for young scholars to live and raise families in the Bay Area offers an even more daunting challenge. Finally, it is our most rewarding experience because nothing compares to witnessing—maybe even having a hand in shaping—the unfolding of a line of professional work and a career of significant contributions to educational scholarship.

But I speak too abstractly about this experience. There is a very real, material face—as revealed in the faces of the new faculty who have joined us over the last three-and-a-half years. And we are on the verge of offering positions to young scholars in Mathematics Education and in Cognitive Science. In the near future we are planning for recruitments in Educational Philosophy, Immigration and Education, Technology Education, and Research Design, among other priorities.

There is a certain ironic pleasure in knowing that our most important task as scholars is to recruit those who will replace us in the long and storied tradition of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education.

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