More change to come at the VCU Provost Office
Provost Fotis Sotiropoulos is departing for Penn State, and Beverly Warren will take over as interim provost while the university searches for Sotiropoulos’ successor. Photo by Cameron Powell.
Heciel Nieves Bonilla, Contributing Writer
VCU has selected Beverly Warren as interim provost in place of outgoing provost Fotis Sotiropoulos.
Sotiropoulos will leave VCU on May 31 to start a role as executive vice president at Penn State in the fall, according to VCU News. He expects the search for the new provost to begin as soon as possible.
“This is a bittersweet moment, and I want to express my deepest gratitude to and admiration for the Virginia Commonwealth University community,” he wrote in a personal statement on LinkedIn.
He also listed what he felt were the most important fruits of his collaboration with deans and other faculty, which included establishing the School of Life Sciences and Sustainability, the VCU Convergence Labs and the Academy of Interdisciplinary Innovation. Sotiropoulos also led the provost’s office and coordinated with departments through the latter portions of the COVID-19 pandemic.
One recent directive of the provost’s office under Sotiropoulos involved updating the process for faculty promotion to certain titles, including assistant or professor in a field, to require a terminal degree — the highest level of degree attainable in the field in question. The change was controversial at the time, in particular with faculty themselves, according to a previous report by The Commonwealth Times.
Warren spent four years after her time at VCU as the president of Kent State University in Ohio. The university credits her for administering a five-year plan for academic restructuring and the beginning of a ten-year plan of change for its physical campus. Students at Kent expressed their opinions of Warren in the school’s paper, The Kent Stater, praising her openness as well as admonishing her to act on issues like raising campus worker pay.
Warren was also the first president of that university to officially speak off-campus about the 1970 Kent State massacre, according to the local Chautauquan Daily. That event saw four student protestors killed and nine injured by the Ohio National Guard during an anti-Vietnam War demonstration.
Warren will not be bringing those new experiences back to VCU for long, however. Grant Heston, the vice president for enterprise marketing and communications at VCU, spoke about the appointment and the process of picking a permanent provost.
“Dr. Warren is expected to remain the interim provost until a permanent provost arrives,” Grant said. “A search committee, co-chaired by senior vice presidents Dr. Meredith Weiss and Dr. Marlon Levy, is forming now with the goal of hiring a permanent provost by December.”
Weiss and Levy’s committee will search nationwide for the new permanent provost, and Warren is expected to serve mainly for the coming fall semester.
