German Professor Robert C. Holub Becomes L&S Undergraduate Division Dean

By Genevieve Shiffrar, July 16, 2003

German Professor Robert C. Holub has been appointed Dean of the Undergraduate Division in the College of Letters & Science. Dean Holub continues the efforts of former Undergraduate Division Dean Kwong-loi Shun and hopes to bring to the job new initiatives as well. A specialist in nineteen- and twentieth-century German intellectual, cultural, and literary history, Dean Holub is dedicated to undergraduate education and has exceptional administrative experience at Berkeley.

As L&S Undergraduate Division Dean, Holub has assumed one of the most important posts affecting undergraduate education at Berkeley as well as one of the less known and less understood deanships on campus. This unlikely combination is due to the unique structure of the College and its Undergraduate Division. Unlike other schools or colleges at Berkeley, the College of Letters & Science is led collectively by five deans. Other L&S deans oversee units belonging to one of four broadly defined disciplines: the Arts & Humanities, the Biological Sciences, the Physical Sciences, and the Social Sciences. The L&S Undergraduate Division deals with undergraduate issues that span the College.

Dean Holub now oversees the four units of the Undergraduate Division:

• Academic Enrichment comprises a range of curricular and co-curricular initiatives that enhance the liberal arts education of the student participants. Programs include the Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program and the Freshman and Sophomore Seminar Programs.
• Undergraduate Advising is the primary source of academic advising for freshman and sophomore students in L&S, and helps them build a foundation for the successful pursuit of a major in their junior and senior years.
• Undergraduate and Interdisciplinary Studies (UGIS) serves as a center for innovations in undergraduate education that extend beyond traditional departmental boundaries. UGIS offers a number of major and minor degree programs such as Cognitive Science and Creative Writing.
• Undergraduate Policy and Analysis supports the coordination and oversight of undergraduate education in the College.

What do Dean Holub's responsibilities mean for the 18,300 undergraduates in the College of Letters & Science?

To him, they mean that his job is to focus on improving the undergraduate educational experience so that students will be better able to achieve their educational objectives and become informed citizens of the state and of the country.

In many respects, Dean Holub will work to further Dean Shun's priorities, such as increasing student-faculty interaction. He notes, "One of things that I'll do is nurture programs, such as the Sophomore Seminar Program and the Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program, that bring faculty in contact with undergraduates and enable undergraduates to learn from scholars and scientists in the forefront of their fields."

"I will also try to improve access to certain majors that right now are capped or closed. I will be trying to open up these majors as much as possible with new resources so that more students have access to them. This is something that Dean Shun worked on, and this is something the Chancellor's Office has worked to improve with the Near-Term Planning Committee."

Increasing faculty-student interaction and making popular majors more accessible are two of the important issues from a collection of suggestions by Dean Shun. According to Dean Holub, "Kwong-loi Shun gave me quite a long list of things to look at, a kind of 'to-do' list. Since I respect and trust Kwong-loi a lot, I am going to attend to that list."

Additionally, Dean Holub is interested in investigating a new idea: "I would like to look into making more meaningful the breadth requirements so that they better provide a broad undergraduate education." Breadth requirements are also known as distribution requirements or general education requirements. A central tenet of the liberal arts education is to provide a foundation of essential areas of knowledge. He would like to rethink the L&S breadth requirement so that it better serves the liberal arts ideal.

Dean Holub describes this more precisely, "Currently, most courses that satisfy breadth requirements were developed originally to prepare students to major in a particular discipline. They were designed in the context of a certain discipline and of a certain major. Courses satisfying breadth requirements may better serve students if they are designed to give a broader view of the disciplines in which students are not going to major. These would be a better option if students are interested in taking broader courses to satisfy these requirements. After all, these are breadth requirements, not narrowness requirements."

The well-being and productivity of his staff are as important to Dean Holub as is the education of L&S undergraduates. "In fact," he states, "a primary objective of my job is to assist staff so that they are able to perform more effectively. I've been meeting with senior staff members. Just from the few days that we’ve been talking, I have been very impressed. I think it is a very experienced staff and one that has tremendous knowledge and expertise. I really look forward to working with them. At present they have a lot more to teach me than I have to bring to them."

Dean Holub brings incredible insight and experience to the Undergraduate Division. He has served on many of the most important University committees, often within the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate. The Academic Senate represents faculty in the shared governance of the entire University of California system. It sets academic and educational policies and advises the administration on key issues.

Last year, Dean Holub chaired the Committee on Budget and Interdepartmental Relations, which represents the Berkeley Division in academic appointment and promotion matters and in resource allocation. This important position placed him on many other Berkeley Division Academic Senate committees. These included the Committee on Academic Planning and Resource Allocation and the Divisional Council, which oversees the Berkeley Division.

Dean Holub also served on the Divisional Council previously for three years in the mid 1990s. Other Berkeley Division Academic Senate work included chairing the Committee for Educational Policy for two years in the mid 1990s and serving on the Academic Freedom Committee in the late 1980s. Dean Holub also has been a member of the system-wide Academic Senate University Committee on Educational Policy and on UC Berkeley's Strategic Planning Committee.

Within the College of Letters & Science, Dean Holub has been involved deeply in governance and educational issues. Most importantly, he served three years on the L&S Executive Committee, which has general oversight of the welfare of L&S students and sets L&S educational policy. He also chaired the German Department for six years and has served as both undergraduate and graduate advisor for the department.

Despite Dean Holub's extensive administrative duties, he finds time to actively pursue his scholarly interests. He has researched and published on a variety of topics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century German literature and intellectual history, but recent work has focused on the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, and the ways in which Germans came to terms with fascism and the Holocaust.

His views on Nietzsche differ somewhat from those of most Nietzsche scholars in the United States. In contrast to the image of Nietzsche as the philosopher of the will to power or eternal recurrence, Dean Holub is interested in how the philosopher responded to social discourses and movements of his time. "In various contexts Nietzsche wrote about issues such as the women's question, the Jewish question, the colonial question, the worker question, and the nationalist question, but philosophical inquiries rarely take these remarks as seriously as they should," Dean Holub insists. Most commentators have also largely neglected Nietzsche's avid interest in science. Dean Holub is convinced that Nietzsche's readings in evolutionary theory, the new "science" of eugenics, cosmology and thermodynamics, are pivotal for understanding his outlook. Over the past decade he has published widely on these topics and is preparing a monograph entitled Nietzsche and the Discourses of the Nineteenth Century.

Dean Holub has also written recently on Heine's contribution to the discussion of Jewish emancipation in the 1840s and on German literature and philosophy in the postwar era as a response to Germany's troubled past.

Dean Holub assumed his position July 1, 2003. His commitment to strengthen undergraduate education and his considerable administrative experience promise to serve exceptionally well the students of the College of Letters & Science.