Erec R. Koch Named Associate Provost for Academic Administration and Faculty Development
April 7, 2014
Dear Faculty and Staff:
I am pleased to announce the appointment of Erec R. Koch, Ph.D. as Associate Provost for Academic Administration and Faculty Development at Baruch College. The Associate Provost for Academic Administration and Faculty Development will lead our college in issues associated with faculty appointments, promotion, tenure, and immigration status, supervise our funded research administration and compliance activities, and work with faculty, department chairs, and deans to promote the development of members of our faculty as teachers, scholars, and members of an academic community committed to shared governance. Koch will join Baruch on Monday, April 21. I would like to thank Dean Myung-Soo Lee and members of the search committee for their work in identifying four excellent finalist candidates for this position. I also would like to note the extraordinary service of Interim Associate Provost Stanton Biddle, who returned from retirement to serve our faculty with grace and wisdom.
Erec R. Koch has served on the faculty of the School of the Liberal Arts and Sciences at Tulane University, the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, and Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. At all of those institutions, he has assumed roles of increasing responsibility in academic administration: he served as a department chair and as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs of Tulane College for two terms; as Head of the Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville; and as Ruth and Harold Newman Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Hunter College. Currently, Dr. Koch is Senior University Fellow in the Office of Academic Affairs of the City University of New York. Dr. Koch has focused his administrative efforts on curricular innovation and on faculty development. In the former sphere, he helped to shape a series of interdivisional minors in business, engineering, and architecture and accelerated MA and professional school programs at Tulane University. He has also stewarded the development of interdisciplinary programs, such as the Literature major at Tulane and the Human Biology program at Hunter College. He has supported faculty in developing compelling uses of technology in the classroom, including video-conferenced classes and hybrid foreign language courses. In the latter sphere, he developed a system of mentoring for untenured faculty, initiated technology roundtables, shaped the enhancement of faculty diversity, and launched initiatives such as faculty research seminars, which he describes as faculty-led teaching and research laboratories. That last effort yielded both new courses and increased faculty research output. Currently at the CUNY Office of Academic Affairs, he has focused on increasing global engagement in the 24 campus system and on assisting campuses in navigating successfully Middle States Commission on Higher Education accreditation processes. Dr. Koch has led strategic planning efforts for his units at Tulane University, the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, and Hunter College.
Dr. Koch has received numerous grants and fellowships from agencies including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Education. A specialist in seventeenth-century French literature and culture, he has published on Pascal and Jansenism, the history and theory of rhetoric, French Classical theater, the French moralists, philosophy and the history of ideas, theories of the passions, and the representation of the body. He is the author or editor of three books, and his most recent articles have appeared in PMLA, Dix-septième siècle, Littératures classiques, and Seventeenth-Century French Studies. Dr. Koch earned an AB magna cum laude from Harvard College and a PhD in French literature from Yale University.
Please join me in welcoming Associate Provost Koch to Baruch.
Sincerely,
David P. Christy
Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs