Executive Dean Ralph Hexter Shares Leadership as One of Five L&S Deans By Genevieve Shiffrar September 20, 2002

The College of Letters & Science is unique among comparable colleges. At Berkeley there is no one Dean of Letters & Science. Instead, L&S is "a college of deans," five in fact, one for each of the college's five divisions: Arts & Humanities, Biological Sciences, Physical Sciences, Social Sciences, and the Undergraduate Division, which comprises both Undergraduate Advising and Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Studies (UGIS). Since the early 1990s, when this structure evolved, one of the deans has served to coordinate the functions of the College's central office and to facilitate collaboration among his or her fellow deans. On July 1, 2002, upon the retirement of Paul Licht, Dean of Biological Sciences, who had that role previously, Ralph Hexter, Dean of Arts & Humanities since 1998, took on the additional assignment of Executive Dean of L&S (EDLS).

Dean Licht and his predecessor in that coordinating role, Bonnie Wade, held the title "Chair of the Deans," but L&S chose a new phrase all the deans felt was both more comprehensible and more descriptive of the job. The EDLS not only oversees the college's core functions and chairs meetings of the deans. While all the deans represent, and speak for, the mission of L&S as Berkeley's college of the liberal arts, Executive Dean Hexter is often called on as a spokesman for L&S both on campus and off.

Thinking and talking about the liberal arts comes naturally to Dean Hexter, who is a Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature with strong interests in the history of education from the ancient world to the modern period. He has frequently spoken on the Roman origins of the artes liberales, from which our phrase "liberal arts" derives, and traced the history of the "arts" through the Middle Ages, when universities as we understand them first formed, and beyond.

Though he often studies aspects of the "Classical Tradition," he is anything but traditional in his own work. Indeed, when interpreting ancient literary texts, he typically "reads against the grain, pulling on what seem to be loose threads" in more traditional interpretations of classic literature and thus unraveling those more pious readings. He is interested in "reception history" —the ways in which a culture understands the canon it inherits or adopts from its predecessors — not to support the illusion of one continuous tradition but rather to reveal discontinuities, the ways in which readers often misunderstand or reappropriate their literary forebears. In his writing and teaching he seems to have a special affinity for the Roman poet Ovid, with his wicked sense of humor and an irreverence that got him banned from Rome by the emperor Augustus.

Hexter's duties as Dean of Arts & Humanities and as Executive Dean unfortunately don't permit him to teach as much as he would like. Since he arrived in Berkeley in 1996, he has taught classes on such topics as the history of Comparative Literature, medieval Latin, and the reception of Vergil's Aeneid. He has introduced a number of students to the joys of working with medieval manuscripts in the Bancroft Library. While serving as dean, he twice found the time to teach a freshman seminar, "Opera and the Classical World," that combined his professional expertise on the reception of the Classics with one of his confessed passions. The high-point, for him and for the students, in each of the semesters was a trip to the San Francisco Opera to see one of the works they had studied, one year Mozart's Idomeneo, the next year Handel's Semele. "Now that I'm serving as EDLS as well, time is even harder to come by, but when Berlioz' Les Troyens is on the opera program, you can be sure I'll teach this course again."

Photo: Genevieve Shiffrar