A Fond Farewell to Rachél Fester

March 2, 2021

Dear Colleagues,

I’m writing to let you know that Dr. Rachél Fester, Baruch College’s Assistant Provost for Assessment, Accreditation, and Institutional Effectiveness since fall 2017, and leader of Baruch’s successful reaccreditation effort with the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, will be leaving Baruch for a position as Interim Dean of Institutional Effectiveness at Queens College. Her last day at Baruch will be Friday, March 19.

Rachél’s experience at Baruch has been more diverse than that of most of us, having been both a Master’s student in the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, where she received her MSEd in Higher Education Administration in 2006, and a member of that program’s adjunct faculty before eventually joining our administration.

Dr. Fester began her career in higher education with a BA from Harvard University in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. She followed up those interests while pursuing an MA (1995) in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at The University of Chicago. In 2010 Rachél earned a PhD in Higher Education from the University of Pennsylvania, with a dissertation entitled, “Participation in precollege outreach programs and the transition from high school to college.”

Prior to coming to Baruch as Assistant Provost, Rachél spent three years as Associate Vice President of Institutional Effectiveness at Berkeley College, New York, NY. That position was preceded by two years each as Executive Director of Assessment and Planning at The College of Mount Saint Vincent and as Associate Research Scholar at the Center for Institutional and Social Change at Columbia Law School. Earlier, Rachél was Director of Institutional Research and Assistant to the Vice Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.

As Assistant Provost at Baruch, Dr. Fester’s engagement with the college has been both wide and deep. She worked across organizational silos to help build a common framework and language for integrating research, assessment, planning, and resource allocation activities into our ongoing operational work; she partnered with the President’s office on strategic planning and performance management; she offered workshops on assessment and institutional effectiveness, and built an accessible resource library of mission-critical topics including teaching, pedagogy, research, assessment and planning. In furtherance of her long-term interest, she advocated for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and her services on the President’s Advisory Council on DEI facilitated ongoing integration of and provided consultative support for college- and school-wide DEI research.

But the work and achievement at Baruch for which Dr. Fester will be best remembered by most of us was her leadership of the Middle States re-accreditation effort. It began essentially the moment she arrived at Baruch in September 2017 and culminated with our successful reaccreditation in spring 2020. Rachél was the project manager and co-chair (with Prof. Cheryl Smith and myself) of the college’s self-study, itself the result of an extremely transparent and collaborative process that engaged the efforts of many faculty, staff, and students across the campus. The report of our “site visit” team from Middle States included commendations about the process of the self-study, its inclusivity, and its effectiveness, as well as about compliance with all standards.

The members of the “site visit” team left our campus in early March 2020, just before the pandemic changed our lives. When we can once again comfortably relate to colleagues and friends in a face-to-face environment, we will invite Rachel to return and celebrate the great success of our reaccreditation process with us!

Dennis Slavin, PhD
Associate Provost and Assistant Vice President
Baruch College, CUNY
dennis.slavin@baruch.cuny.edu
https://provost.baruch.cuny.edu/about-us/leadership/