Executive Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

The Opportunity

Indiana University Bloomington, the flagship campus of Indiana University and a member of the Association of American Universities, invites nominations and applications for the next Executive Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

The College is the academic core of IU Bloomington. It provides the foundational liberal arts and sciences education for the campus, advances research and creative activity across the arts and humanities, social and historical sciences, and natural and mathematical sciences, and prepares students for lives of meaning, leadership, discovery, democratic engagement, and public contribution. As IU Bloomington continues to strengthen its standing among leading public research universities, the College will be central to every major ambition: student success, transformative research and creativity, service to Indiana and beyond, and the renewal of a broad liberal arts education for the world students are entering.

The next Executive Dean will lead the College at a moment of unusual importance. The College has deep historic strengths, a broad and talented faculty, strong student demand in many areas, and new momentum from major investments in high-potential fields including biosciences, quantum science, artificial intelligence, environment, health, and data-rich discovery. Recent Faculty 100 hires have seeded new talent and interdisciplinary strength across the College. The College is ready for its next chapter, one that creates exciting opportunities to support growth and build on its many strengths. The College seeks a courageous leader who communicates with honesty and candor in the face of challenges. At the same time, the College must continue the hard work of financial sustainability, academic accountability, curricular renewal, and strategic investment in fields whose future demand, public value, and research impact must be made newly compelling.

This is one of the most consequential academic leadership roles at IU Bloomington. The successful candidate will bring top-scholar credibility, political judgment, operating discipline, and creativity in resource generation. The next Executive Dean must honor the College’s breadth while setting priorities clearly and helping the College move confidently toward its next era.

About the College of Arts and Sciences

The College of Arts and Sciences is IU Bloomington’s largest and oldest academic unit. It is home to the core disciplines of the liberal arts and sciences and includes the Natural and Mathematical Sciences, the Social and Historical Sciences, and the Arts and Humanities. The College also includes the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture and Design, the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, and The Media School.

The College offers more than 225 undergraduate and graduate degrees across more than 70 academic departments and programs, three schools, and more than 50 research centers and institutes. It teaches thousands of undergraduate courses each year, supports instruction in more than 80 languages, and serves more than 30,000 IU Bloomington students through majors, graduate programs, general education, service courses, research opportunities, and experiential learning. The College’s faculty include nationally and internationally recognized scholars, scientists, artists, teachers, and public intellectuals whose work shapes knowledge and creative practice across disciplines.

The College is also a major driver of IU Bloomington’s research strength and national reputation. Its faculty contribute to all four IUB 2030 research themes: Aging, Environment, Human Side of AI/ML, and Applied Quantum Information and Science. In FY25, College faculty secured $62 million in research awards across 307 grants and produced substantial scholarly and creative work, including 51 books. The College is central to IU Bloomington’s membership in the AAU, doctoral education, and ability to compete for research talent and external funding.

The College is renewing its educational mission for a changing student landscape. The Pillars Undergraduate Experience integrates undergraduate research, life design, immersive educational experiences, and career readiness. Recent College efforts include required career-readiness courses, expanded recruiting and student ambassador programs, accelerated and professional master’s programs, pre-professional clinical health pathways, new collaborations with IU’s Kelley School of Business and Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, and continued work to align degree offerings with student demand, workforce opportunity, and the enduring value of broad liberal arts preparation.

The Role of the Executive Dean

The Executive Dean reports directly to the Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor of IU Bloomington and serves as the chief academic and administrative officer of the College of Arts and Sciences. The Executive Dean is responsible for the College’s academic vision, faculty and staff leadership, research and creative enterprise, educational portfolio, student success, budget, resource generation, advancement, external partnerships, and long-term institutional health.

The Executive Dean works closely with fellow IU school deans, College associate deans, department chairs, program directors, faculty governance leaders, staff leaders, students, alumni, donors, campus leadership, and external partners. The role requires visible, principled, and consultative leadership, paired with the capacity to make clear decisions in a large and highly complex academic environment.

The Executive Dean will be expected to strengthen the College as a unified academic enterprise while respecting the different cultures, methods, and needs of its major areas of study. The next Executive Dean must build trust across Natural and Mathematical Sciences, Social and Historical Sciences, and Arts and Humanities, while also helping the College make choices that support future excellence, financial sustainability, student demand, research growth, and public impact.

Leadership Agenda

The next Executive Dean will be expected to:

Advance a future-facing vision for the liberal arts and sciences. The Executive Dean must articulate why the liberal arts and sciences matter now, not only as inherited tradition but as a living framework for knowledge, creativity, discovery, citizenship, technological change, and social impact. This vision must speak credibly to faculty, students, families, alumni, donors, employers, public leaders, and academic peers.

Prepare the College for the new age of AI. The Executive Dean will lead the College in preparing faculty, students, and staff for the opportunities and challenges of artificial intelligence. This includes integrating AI literacy and critical, ethical engagement across the curriculum and supporting faculty as they adapt their teaching, research, and creative work. The Executive Dean will also position the College's breadth across the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities as a distinctive strength in understanding the human, social, and ethical dimensions of AI.

Build on high-potential areas of research and creative strength. The College has strong momentum in fields such as biosciences, quantum science, artificial intelligence, environment, health, cognition, data-rich discovery, and other disciplinary and interdisciplinary spaces. The Executive Dean will need to support recent and upcoming faculty hires, build the research and instructional infrastructure needed for success, and connect College strengths to campus, university, state, national, and global opportunities.

Help long-standing fields respond to changing student demand. Parts of the humanities and other long-standing fields remain central to the College’s identity and intellectual breadth, but face changing student demand, public skepticism, and evolving disciplinary relevance. The Executive Dean must help these areas develop stronger cases for student engagement, new investment, research and creative productivity, reputation growth, and societal impact.

Strengthen student demand, outcomes, and curricular innovation. The Executive Dean will support undergraduate and graduate education that is rigorous, coherent, and responsive to student aspirations. This includes modernizing programs, supporting general education, growing high-quality professional and accelerated master’s pathways where appropriate, expanding experiential and career-connected learning, and strengthening retention, persistence, completion, and post-graduation outcomes.

Lead toward long-term financial sustainability. The College must continue to move toward a balanced and sustainable budget while protecting academic quality and strategic capacity. The Executive Dean will need to manage complex tradeoffs involving faculty hiring, graduate education, instructional capacity, staff support, space, research infrastructure, program mix, revenue generation, philanthropy, and operating efficiency.

Build accountability and organizational discipline. The Executive Dean will advance clear expectations for workload, annual review, faculty and staff performance, resource allocation, and unit-level planning. This work must be done with respect for shared governance and academic culture, but also with the clarity required to sustain a large public research campus in a constrained environment.

Generate new resources and partnerships. The Executive Dean will work with Advancement, alumni, donors, industry, government, foundations, and academic partners to develop new philanthropic, research, instructional, and partnership resources. The College’s next chapter will require a leader who can represent its strengths externally and convert ambition into support.

Lead through complexity with trust, transparency, and candor. The College is large, decentralized, and central to nearly every part of IU Bloomington. The Executive Dean must be a skilled listener and communicator who can engage difficult issues directly, bring people into the work, and maintain confidence while leading change.

Qualifications and Experience

IU Bloomington seeks an Executive Dean with the scholarly stature, administrative experience, personal integrity, strategic judgment, and institutional courage required to lead one of the nation’s most significant public liberal arts and sciences colleges.

A terminal degree is required. Candidates must have a record of scholarly, scientific, or creative accomplishment meriting appointment as a tenured full professor in a discipline represented in, or closely related to, the College of Arts and Sciences.

While no one candidate will embody every desired attribute, the strongest candidates will bring many of the following qualifications, experiences, and qualities:

• A distinguished record of scholarship, research, or creative activity and the intellectual credibility to lead a broad College faculty.
• Successful senior leadership experience in a complex academic organization, preferably including responsibility for faculty affairs, budget, strategy, research, graduate education, undergraduate education, advancement, and organizational change.
• A compelling vision for the future of the liberal arts and sciences at a flagship public research university.
• Demonstrated ability to lead across disciplinary cultures, including natural and mathematical sciences, social and historical sciences, arts and humanities, and interdisciplinary fields.
• Experience recruiting, retaining, developing, evaluating, and supporting excellent faculty and staff.
• A record of supporting high-impact research, creative activity, graduate education, and faculty productivity.
• A strong commitment to undergraduate education, student success, career readiness, experiential learning, and the role of general education in a comprehensive research university.
• Evidence of financial stewardship, including experience managing complex budgets, setting priorities, allocating resources, and moving an academic unit toward long-term sustainability.
• Demonstrated capacity to generate resources through philanthropy, grants, partnerships, new programs, entrepreneurial activity, or other mission-aligned revenue sources.
• Commitment to academic freedom, free inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and the open exchange of ideas.
• Respect for shared governance, paired with the ability to make timely decisions and hold units accountable for performance, quality, and sustainability.
• Political acumen, emotional intelligence, resilience, and the ability to build trust in a large, decentralized, and highly engaged academic community.
• Excellent written, oral, and interpersonal communication skills, with the ability to represent the College to internal and external audiences with clarity and force.
• A deep commitment to the mission of public higher education and to IU Bloomington’s service to Indiana, the nation, and the world.

About Indiana University Bloomington

Founded in 1820, Indiana University Bloomington is the flagship campus of Indiana University and one of the nation’s leading public research universities. A member of the Association of American Universities and the Big Ten, IU Bloomington combines the scale and ambition of a major research institution with the traditions of a residential liberal arts education and a distinctive commitment to public service.

The campus enrolls more than 48,000 students from all 92 Indiana counties, all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and more than 130 countries. Its academic enterprise includes a broad range of highly regarded schools and programs in the arts and sciences, business, education, global and international studies, informatics, law, medicine, music, nursing, optometry, public affairs, public health, social work, and other fields. IU Bloomington is home to world-class collections, libraries, museums, performance venues, research centers, and student experiences that make Bloomington one of the nation’s most recognizable college towns.

IU Bloomington’s work is organized through IU 2030 and IUB 2030, strategic frameworks focused on student success and opportunity, transformative research and creativity, and service to the state and beyond. The campus is investing in faculty excellence, new and modernized degree programs, student outcomes, research growth, biosciences, engineering, artificial intelligence, experiential learning, and stronger alignment between academic strengths and the needs of Indiana, the nation, and the world.

Application Process

Applications should include an updated curriculum vitae; a letter of interest addressing the candidate’s qualifications, vision for the College, and experience with fundraising and alumni engagement; and the names and contact information for five professional references. Please direct all inquiries and applications to Parker Executive Search.

The priority deadline for applications is Tuesday, December 15, 2026. Review will continue until an appointment is made.

The anticipated start date for this position is Summer 2027.

Laurie Wilder, President
Porsha Williams, Vice President and Managing Director, Higher Education
Parker Executive Search
Five Concourse Parkway, Suite 2875 | Atlanta, GA 30328
(770) 804-1996
lwilder@parkersearch.com | pwilliams@parkersearch.com

Nominations, including self-nominations, and inquiries may also be directed to the IU Executive Search Group at exesrch@iu.edu. IU Executive Search will facilitate the process in partnership with the external firm. Inquiries and nominations will be handled with appropriate confidentiality.

Before a conditional offer of employment with tenure is finalized, candidates will be asked to disclose any pending investigations or previous findings of sexual or professional misconduct. They will also be required to authorize an inquiry by Indiana University Bloomington with all current and former employers along these lines. The relevance of information disclosed or ascertained in the context of this process to a candidate’s eligibility for hire will be evaluated by Indiana University Bloomington on a case-by-case basis. Applicants should be aware that Indiana University Bloomington takes matters of sexual and professional misconduct very seriously.

Equal Employment Opportunity

Indiana University is an equal opportunity employer and provider of ADA services and prohibits discrimination in hiring. See Indiana University Notice of Non-Discrimination here which includes contact information.

Campus Safety and Security

The Annual Security and Fire Safety Report, containing policy statements, crime and fire statistics for all Indiana University campuses, is available online. You may also request a physical copy by emailing IU Public Safety at iups@iu.edu or by visiting IUPD.