BSOS Dean Edward Montgomery is resigning from his position to work for President Barack Obama’s administration.
Montgomery, who served on Obama’s transition team and had been working as an adviser to the Labor Department while remaining as dean, will be on leave from the university while working on the auto industry bailout but is expected to return to the university as a professor at a later date.
Montgomery’s departure leaves the university’s largest college without a dean as it deals with implementing the university’s strategic plan and struggles with chronic underfunding that has left it with class sizes twice as large as the university average. Students plan to protest the underfunding with a mass walkout Thursday.
“It’s a very important time for the college and for the university,” said College of Behavioral and Social Sciences Associate Dean Robert Schwab, who will serve as interim dean until Montgomery’s replacement is found.
Schwab said he hopes the dean search will be mounted quickly and, ideally, name a new head by this summer. He said with both the university and the college implementing long-term plans, “now is not the time for interim leadership.”
Schwab said he was made aware of Montgomery’s departure Thursday and even Montgomery was not aware of the position or his appointment until just a few days before that.
“It really caught me by surprise,” Schwab said. “It’s a whole new position. It wasn’t a question of who was going to fill the spot. There wasn’t a spot there before.”
Montgomery, who was deputy secretary and chief operating officer at the Department of Labor in former President Bill Clinton’s administration, will serve as the director of recovery for auto communities and workers on the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry, a committee that includes the secretaries of transportation, commerce, labor and energy. His position is only expected to last for 18 months to two years, but Schwab said it could last beyond that.
According to Obama, the committee was formed to help alleviate the economic strains put on manufacturing-centric towns such as Detroit and Lansing, Mich.
“Ed will help provide support to auto workers and their families and open up opportunities to manufacturing communities in Michigan, and Ohio, and Indiana, and every other state that relies on the auto industry,” Obama said in a speech Monday.
Montgomery, who was already only on the campus twice per week because of his work with Obama and was being assisted by Schwab, is the university’s third faculty member to be snagged by the administration.
John Frece left his post as associate director of the university’s National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education to begin work as the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Development, Community and Environment Division March 16.
Similarly, Steve Fetter, former dean of the School of Public Policy, went on leave earlier this year and is now serving as an assistant director in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Provost Nariman Farvardin said appointments like these were valuable political capital for the university.
“It enhances the stature of the university and increases the university’s influence,” he said.
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