Robin Forman Named First Dean of Undergraduates

Robin Forman, professor and chair of the mathematics department and master of Jones College, has been named Rice University’s first dean of undergraduates.

The new dean will be responsible for bringing together all aspects of the undergraduate experience, including academics and advising, career services, and extracurricular and social activities. The dean will report to and work closely with president David W. Leebron and provost Eugene Levy.

“Robin provides precisely what we had in mind in creating the new dean’s position,” Leebron says. “He brings an exceptional combination of experience and talent and an understanding of Rice, student life, and the values of an academic community. At the same time, he is an innovator. Add to this his understanding of people and sense of humor, and you have an ideal person to shape the new dean’s role.”

The president and provost specified that the new position would be filled with a tenured Rice faculty member. Forman was chosen after a months-long internal search conducted by a committee chaired by Allen Matusow, the W.G. Twyman Professor of History and associate director of academic programs at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy.

“Robin’s particular strengths,” Matusow says, “were the wide support his candidacy enjoyed in the university community, his deep knowledge of the college system, his innovative leadership as a college master, and his excellence as a scholar. I believe he will be a great dean of undergraduates.”

Forman expects the deanship to be particularly challenging initially as the position is established. He will relinquish his positions as chair of the mathematics department and master of Jones College, but not all of his faculty roles. “I will remain a mathematician and will continue to lead a research group in the math department and advise my graduate students,” Forman explains. “After we get things organized, I will teach one class a semester as well.”

The precise set of offices that will report to the dean’s office will evolve as the vision for the position comes into being, he notes. “The idea is to stop thinking of academic activities and college-life activities as existing in different spheres,” he says, “but rather to think of college life in a more holistic way. The student affairs division has primarily looked after the noncurricular aspects of student life, but the distinction between the curricular and noncurricular is somewhat artificial and limits the scope of what we can really accomplish as a university.”

As a college master, he has gotten to know hundreds of undergraduates, and he says that experience has made being a member of the Rice community “immensely rewarding.” Forman is eager to continue interacting with students, who he describes as “phenomenal, creative, talented, smart, and ambitious.”

A native of Philadelphia, Forman holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD from Harvard. He first came to Rice as a visiting faculty member in 1986 and began teaching full time in 1987 as an assistant professor of mathematics. His research is in the area of combinatorial methods in topology and geometry, focusing on the relationship between continuous mathematics—such as calculus and topology—and discrete mathematics of the sort that computers do. He has published numerous articles and book chapters and given presentations and invited addresses on his research.

He and his wife, Ann Owens, producing director of the Houston Grand Opera, are in their third year as masters of Jones College. They have a son, Saul, 7.

—Margot Dimond