Distributed January 28, 2003
For Immediate Release

News Service Contact: Mark Nickel



A statement from the President

Montero to become vice chancellor for student affairs at UCLA

Janina Montero, vice president for campus life and student services, will be leaving Brown University at the end of the current academic year to become vice chancellor for student affairs at UCLA. David Greene will serve at acting vice president.


PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Janina Montero, vice president for campus life and student services, has accepted a position as vice chancellor for student affairs at UCLA. Brown President Ruth J. Simmons sent the following statement to members of the Brown Corporation, the University’s governing body.


January 28, 2003

I am writing to inform you that Janina Montero, Brown's vice president for campus life since January 2000, will be assuming the position of vice chancellor for student affairs at UCLA on July 1 of this year. This is a very exciting opportunity for Janina and it is understandable that UCLA would invite her to join their community and take on these new challenges. I am very pleased for Janina and I congratulate UCLA on having made a really excellent choice. She will be very much missed by friends, colleagues and students here at Brown.

At Brown Janina has provided leadership for the Office of Student Life and the Student Activities Office, the offices of Admission, Financial Aid, Athletics, Health Services and Psychological Services, the Chaplain and Religious Life, Residential Life, Food Services, the Sarah Doyle Women's Center, and the Third World Center. We will have other opportunities between now and July 1 to applaud her many accomplishments in these areas and to thank Janina for her service to Brown, but it is clear to all of us how much she has meant to Brown – especially the Brown students who have been under her care and tutelage – during her time here.

Before beginning a search for a new vice president, we will take this opportunity to re-examine the ways we support students in these important aspects of their Brown education and review how we are organized to provide that support. The timing for such a review is excellent. The faculty is just now completing a review of the ways in which academic matters are organized and administered, the Corporation is examining its own structure and procedures, and we have just launched a review of our administrative organization and structure. With the plans for Academic Enrichment beginning to become a reality, it seems only right to examine what we are doing and how we are doing it in the very broad area of campus life.

I have asked Executive Vice President for Finance and Administration Elizabeth Huidekoper, who is already engaged with these issues as part of the ongoing review of our more general administrative organization, and Vice President for Planning Richard Spies to assist me in that review and to help develop recommendations about an appropriate structure for our efforts in this area. We plan to talk extensively with student leaders and with other administrators and members of the relevant faculty and Corporation committees, and we will look closely at earlier reviews in this area, including the work done by a special Task Force on the College and Student Life in the spring of 1998. Once this process is completed – which I hope will be before the end of the spring term – we can then move to develop a strategy for the search for a new leader for campus life.

Given the timing of this announcement and the importance of the issues involved, it does not appear sensible to try to try to launch the search this spring. Among other things, that would require that some of the most important work of the search take place over the summer, when students are not regularly on campus. Accordingly, I have asked David Greene, who currently serves as assistant to the president at Brown but has previously worked in student affairs, admissions, and career services at other institutions, to assume the role of acting vice president when Janina departs at the end of the spring semester. David will serve in that capacity until a search can be completed for that new leader. I am very grateful to David for his willingness to take on this assignment and I know that he will have the support and assistance of Janina and all the people with whom she works as he prepares to assume these responsibilities at the end of the semester.

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