After over a year of deliberations and interviews, DU has selected Psychology Chair and Professor Daniel McIntosh as the new dean of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, according to a campus-wide email written from Chancellor Robert Coombe and Provost Gregg Kvistad.
“Danny’s achievements at the University, and the extraordinary level of trust he has among his faculty and staff colleagues, make him an excellent choice to lead this large, complex, and institutionally vital academic unit at the University of Denver,” said the email.
McIntosh, a DU alum, will start the position on July 1 of this year.
“I’m thrilled, I’m excited,” said McIntosh. “It’s a tremendous set of departments and people and students and staff.”
According to McIntosh, the search process started in the fall of 2013 when the application was initially sent out, followed by interviews in early January.
“The reason I applied for the job is that I love working with people in the divisions across the different departments,” said McIntosh. “I’m really excited and look forward to doing more of that.”
After a national search, four final candidates were chosen and interviewed in March and April; according to McIntosh, the rest of the candidates were from other universities. Following the on-campus interviews, the search committee created four anonymous surveys on the DU Portfolio website, designed to collect feedback on each of the candidates from those who had met the finalists, according to Dean of Penrose library, Nancy Allen.
“After the interviews were over, the search committee met to consider all the input from campus stakeholders and from each other,” said Allen. “Next, the search committee met with the provost and the chancellor. In this meeting, the provost and chancellor listened carefully to each member of the search committee’s analysis of the four finalists and engaged the committee in a discussion of the candidates.”
The provost and chancellor met in order to make the final decision, a process used in all dean searches, according to Allen.
Some of McIntosh’s responsibilities as dean will include programming events, some of which are extended to the community, as well as hiring professors and supporting departments, among others.
McIntosh said his background in psychology could support his new role as dean.
“I’m a social psychologist, which means that part of my academic training and the research I do looks at how people and context interact with each other,” said McIntosh. “One of the roles of dean is to try to create the context where students, faculty and staff can do what’s most important, focus on what they want to do.”
McIntosh also said he is looking forward to working with alumni.
“One of the roles of the dean is to connect with alumni in the community and create really good experiences here and to be connected to people in the community who may be interested in higher education, may be interested in the university and provide ways for them to have access and a connection to that.”
McIntosh will continue to be a professor in the department of psychology but will not be teaching classes; a new department head will also be selected. He will also continue his research and involvement in research labs focusing on emotion, coping and the psychology of religion.
“[Being the AHSS dean] a big job, and it definitely moves me away, for the period of time that I’m dean, from being a fully-connected faculty member,” said McIntosh. “Thinking about the loss of teaching and as complete a connection to the department is certainly a loss I’ll have coming into this.”
Despite these changes, the new AHSS dean said he is excited to collaborate with other departments.
“One of the things I enjoyed about being director of the Honors Program [from 2008 to 2012] was working with people from across the different departments,” said McIntosh. “I really, really value interdisciplinary-like things; I think one of the things that’s nice about the university and the divisions is that you can learn so much by talking to people and taking different perspectives.”
