Dean Ayers to head U of R

Edward L. Ayers, the Buckner W. Clay Dean of Arts & Sciences and Hugh P. Kelly Professor of History, has been named the University of Richmond’s ninth president and will take office on July 1.

Ayers became dean in 2001 and has been a member of the history faculty since 1980. He was named the National Professor of the Year in 2003 by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.

“As we search for a successor, Dean Ayers is a good model,” said U.Va. President John T. Casteen III. “We will need an established scholar with broad involvement in the whole range of disciplines contained within the College, with the capacity to manage a complex enterprise and to lead many different centers of excellence, with a solid record of commitment to diversity and equity and with the capacity to raise a great deal of money in a relatively short time. This implies that the new dean will need great stamina and self discipline, sympathy for many kinds of academic work and the capacity to build strength in other people. Plus a lot more.”

Ayers earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Tennessee and master’s and doctoral degrees in American Studies at Yale. One of the nation’s leading scholars on the American Civil War, he has authored or edited nine books, one of which was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Another, “In the Presence of Mine Enemies,” won the Bancroft Prize for a distinguished book in American history in 2004.