Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the College Wendy Sternberg makes sure to ask potential faculty candidates, “What is your academic journey?” In her third-floor office at the Arthur G. Coons Administrative Building, she sits them down in a cushiony chair that overlooks the Tiger Cooler, the Marketplace and the house-freckled hills of Eagle Rock through floor-to-ceiling windows that subtly flaunt the college’s campus.
It’s the same landscape that Sternberg strolled through 34 years ago as a fresh graduate of Union College in Schenectady, New York, when she began her own academic journey. Following a boy and a career in academia, the departing chief academic officer came to California with her now-husband of 30 years, who is from Pasadena, before beginning graduate school at UCLA. A tradition in her husband’s family since the 1970s, Sternberg said she accompanied them to Occidental’s summer theater festival in the Greek Bowl and the then-brand-new Keck Theater.
“I spent a lot of time those summers wandering around [Occidental’s] campus thinking this would be my dream job,” Sternberg said. “I would love to be a professor here.”
Sternberg’s academic journey will take another leap as she leaves Occidental June 15 to become provost at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania.
While she never imagined she might become a dean at a college, Sternberg, who was the first woman in her Staten Island, New York, family to go on to higher education, knew from the jump she wanted to be a professor.
“That was what I decided, I believe, during freshman orientation was I wanted to stay in college forever,” Sternberg said. “And I was like, ‘OK, well, how do you get to stay in college forever?'”
While working towards her Ph.D. in behavioral neuroscience at UCLA, Sternberg wrote letters to Occidental’s psychology department for an adjunct position and sent resumes to the college. When nothing came out of it, she returned to the East Coast at Haverford College, where she became an assistant professor at 26 years old. After 18 years of teaching in the psychology department, she took on an associate provost role at Haverford where she dipped her toes in the administrative side of higher education.
“The kinds of things that I really enjoyed about working with students — helping them achieve their goals, watching them develop, watching them formulate who they were — that’s what’s so rewarding about being a professor. I was noticing that when I could work with faculty in that way, I could see how much broader my reach could be where, if I could support 20 faculty this year in that kind of work, think about all the students, the impact,” Sternberg said. “I could see that I could achieve what I wanted to achieve in my career through working with faculty and helping them be successful and have that follow-up effect on students.”
This realization led Sternberg to return to her alma mater as the dean of academic departments and programs for a four-year stint. To make matters more reminiscent, her move from upstate New York was prompted by another motive in LA — an open administrative position at Occidental.
“When I saw the solicitation from Occidental to participate in their search, I was like, ‘I could finally have my dream job,'” Sternberg said.
When Sternberg started working at Occidental in 2017, so did Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of Students Rob Flot. Flot said at some institutions, matters of student and academic affairs can lack a connection, but he found the opposite with Sternberg.
“We have an extraordinary connection and I count Wendy as my friend and confidant and colleague,” Flot said.
Associate Dean for Student Academic Affairs Carolyn Brighouse said that the collaboration between Flot and Sternberg’s office was a change brought by both deans that shifted the landscape of trust between student and faculty affairs.
“It took two people at the top to encourage and allow and support that interaction, which I think happens all the way down,” Brighouse said.
Flot and Sternberg were both hired in 2017 and Flot said that allowed them to become closer and learn about each other through experiencing the college together.
“Wendy has always been a huge supporter of student affairs, whether it’s SLICE, REHS, mental health, COVID support when we were in the midst of it,” Flot said. “She’s been a supporter of athletics, of the Intercultural Community Center. Her value on equity and justice has always been clear to me.”
Seven years later, Sternberg humorously said it is only natural now that she’s feeling pulled back to the East Coast where she will serve as a provost at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, according to a Feb. 6 email to the Occidental community sent by President Harry Elam.
“There’ll be a lot for me to learn and it’s closer to my geographic center of gravity, [which] is still kind of East Coast,” Sternberg told The Occidental.
Sternberg’s departure was entirely her own decision, Elam told The Occidental via email.
“This is a bittersweet moment for Occidental,” Elam said via email. “While we are sad to see her go, this is a wonderful opportunity for her to advance her career at a larger university, and one for which she is extraordinarily qualified.”
In the meantime, the college has created an internal committee for choosing nominees for the interim dean role, according to Faculty Council President John McCormack. From those nominees, Elam will choose an interim dean, McCormack said.
Flot said that as a new president will not be named until April, the workings and timing of the search for a permanent new dean will begin at the discretion of the new president.
“The relationship between the president and the academic dean is extremely important because the academic dean is the number two person at the college. If the president is unavailable or on business somewhere, Wendy’s role is the number two,” Flot said. “So that relationship is incredibly important, which is in part why I think we don’t want to rush to try to select a new permanent dean, but we want the new president — she, he, they — to engage in that process to pick that person. Others will be involved, but it’s ultimately the president’s decision.”
Brighouse said she hopes the college will find a new dean who is just as energetic, positive and hardworking as Sternberg.
“Wendy worked really, really hard,” Brighouse said. “It’s not a 40-hour-a-week job or a five-day job, it’s a seven-day-a-week job and you’re on the hook whenever you need to be.”
The career progression of a chief academic officer is typically seeking a presidential role, Sternberg said.
“I’ve had that thought a lot — do I want to be a president — and I’ve always rejected the idea. And then it occurred to me that I was so uncertain about whether I wanted to participate as a candidate in the presidential search, that that should be telling you something,” Sternberg said.
Sternberg also considered Elam’s early departure and what it might mean for her role at Occidental.
“I would start to pay attention when a role came across my desk that was still a chief academic officer role, but one where I could see myself being able to grow and learn something new. I have not been at all interested in being a chief academic officer at another college just like Oxy because what’s there to learn? Solving the same problems, maybe in a different location, maybe with a different set of resources, but every time my mind would go down that road, I’m like, ‘Yeah, why bother? What’s the point? That’s your job now,'” Sternberg said. “So I wouldn’t say that I was really actively looking for another opportunity, but there are certain kinds of opportunities where I could be a chief academic officer in a liberal arts college and grow in my own professional development and be able to solve different kinds of problems.”
Sternberg found that challenge at Bucknell, she said. With an undergraduate population of 3,846 students, Bucknell has a college of arts and sciences, a college of engineering, a college of management and a small graduate program, according to the college’s website.
“One of the things that I really am excited about this opportunity is, at its core, Bucknell is a liberal arts college, but it is also a university and it has multiple colleges,” Sternberg said. “And, in a small town with a different set of challenges, I think the resources and the opportunities that are available to members of our community by virtue of us being in Los Angeles is unparalleled, so this will be how do you make those kinds of connections with your community when your community is a small town of 5,000 people?”
That focus on community engagement in academic curriculums, specifically the creation of the Occidental Promise strategic plan, is one contribution to Occidental that Sternberg will be remembered for, Elam told The Occidental via email.
The plan, which seeks to integrate immersive, community-engaged practice into academic curriculums, was one of Sternberg’s main contributions to the college, according to Elam, and is gradually coming to fruition. According to McCormack, Sternberg laid the groundwork for the plan and has been one of its biggest advocates and proponents.
McCormack said that while faculty seemed somewhat concerned about a president and chief academic officer leaving at the same time, especially when the college’s integrated strategic plan is just being implemented, Sternberg assured them of the future of the strategic plan at a recent faculty meeting.
“What she said was, ‘I’m an expendable piece in this strategic plan. You don’t need me to implement this because this came from you, the faculty, and your hopes and dreams for this institution are embedded in this strategic plan,'” McCormack said.
As the dean of academic affairs, Sternberg said her role was centered around faculty’s goals and their relationship to the college. While Sternberg said she didn’t achieve her goal of growing faculty in the capacity she wished to — she partly attributes this to the pandemic year that saw 12 faculty retire — she is proud of the institutional commitment to attracting, growing and retaining tenure-track faculty. That includes the 46 faculty members she hired throughout her time at Occidental who are now listed on the faculty index, she said.
“I hope that the faculty will see that I have created a sense of order in the academic program, regularized some of the non-tenure track faculty positions that have continuity and predictability in their work,” Sternberg said. “And I’ve tried to make life better for all of the faculty because I think as the faculty are more satisfied in their work and committed to staying at Occidental and not looking for other opportunities, that only benefit the students.”
According to Brighouse, Sternberg did just that. Brighouse, who has worked at the college for 31 years, said that Sternberg’s arrival implemented concrete processes and policies that created transparency in how curricular decisions would get made.
“[Sternberg] tends to want faculty voices to help shape clarity of policies rather than saying it has to be this way, she wants to work with faculty to develop processes and move forward,” Brighouse said. “In that way, she’s very democratic in her leadership.”
Despite her proud moments of personal achievements, Sternberg will be the first to credit the talent and strength that constitute Occidental’s faculty, specifically during the pandemic. Typically in academic spaces, Sternberg said, any academic curricular change that occurred during the pandemic would move at a glacial pace.
“If you want to do a new initiative, if you’re going to try to get it done in a year, that is like breakneck speed,” Sternberg said. “The fact that we transitioned our entire academic program to remote over the course of a few weeks is just mind-boggling.”
Sternberg said she considers the pandemic to be one of the hardest challenges of her career, but was amazed by the college’s resilience throughout those online semesters.
“In the beginning, it was so charged. There were moments when it was really energizing and really fulfilling. You’re solving complex problems in real-time with high stakes and with a lot of people depending on you,” Sternberg said. “There were moments when I was so jazzed about that, but then you get to the point where you’re just overwhelmed and you realize the weight that’s on you and the importance of the decisions that you’re making and how it’s going to affect people all the way downstream, like the relatives of the people that are depending on this or that. You don’t have many moments in your life when you’re in such high gear.”
Brighouse said Sternberg was instrumental in implementing key curricular changes that accounted for difficulties brought by the pandemic, including the Credit/No Credit and Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory grading policies that gave students the options to adjust how the course would fit in their transcript until the last day of classes.
“I think she was very much aware of how much more difficult the pandemic was for faculty and students alike, and helped us move forward with policies that tried to reduce the inequities as best as she could,” Brighouse said.
When Occidental returned to in-person teaching, Brighouse said Sternberg was part of the COVID-19 Task Force that determines masking and testing policies, regulations on visitors to campus and classroom settings (remember those tents at Weingart?).
“Her leadership during the pandemic was part of what helped us get through it sucessfully,” Brighouse said.
McCormack said he has worked closely with Sternberg since he began his role as faculty council president in May, but in his 13th year at Occidental, McCormack said he has witnessed Sternberg face challenges and criticism gracefully — a collateral consequence in any leadership position.
“What I’ve seen from Wendy is always an ability to listen and to adapt and to make a course correction where necessary,” McCormack said. “And that’s really, you know, that’s all you can really ask from leadership.”
Brighouse said that she admired Sternberg’s firmness in times of doubt.
“It’s not always an easy job because you will never end up making everybody happy and certainly anybody in that position won’t make everyone happy, but staying on course with faculty-led initiatives even if some faculty aren’t happy with them — that requires some strength,” Brighouse said.
ASOC president Zander Patent (senior) said that he admired Sternberg’s decision to remain a neutral party during the recent period of national controversy where assuming a position on the Israel-Palestine conflict came to the forefront of college campuses.
“There was a lot of debate with the faculty letter and I think there’s pressure on both sides for her to do one thing or the other,” Patent said. “And I think she did what she needed to do in her role, which is looking at the Code of Conduct and say, ‘You have the right to do this,’ basically and make sure the faculty have the right to dissent without being punished or fearing that their jobs are being lost.”
Patent, who works primarily with Flot and Elam, said that while he has worked with Sternberg in a more professional capacity, she has always been approachable and accessible to students in general.
“I hope the school can find someone that is as caring and empathetic and open to the students and faculty as Wendy,” Patent said. “I think Wendy allowing me to talk with her — it’s by no means part of her job description at all — so I was very grateful to be able to sit down with her.”
Sternberg formed friendships along the way, too. Flot, who lives near the FEAST Garden, said he’ll miss getting together with Sternberg and her husband for dinner at their home near Collins House. But more than that, he’ll miss the joint presentations he and Sternberg would give to prospective families.
“People would ask us to do that and they would always say, ‘The two of you are just so natural on stage together.’ And after seven years together now, roughly, we didn’t have to really prepare — not that we weren’t prepared — but we had done it like a dozen times,” Flot said. “So we would get up and Wendy would do her spiel, I would do my spiel, and I think our synergy and energy were really compatible. It was a great partnership. I’m going to miss her.”
While Sternberg will brave winter snows in Pennsylvania, her colleagues said that the policies and structure she implemented within the academic administration will only bloom in the California sun.
“She set so many policies and procedures and clarity in how we do academic affairs, so we’ll continue to have that and we’ll be in a better place because of her in that regard, and that won’t move back with her,” Brighouse said.
Meanwhile, Sternberg said she is taking advantage of the California weather in her last few months at the college, specifically for attending her swim practices for the Rose Bowl Masters’ Swim Team. McCormack said he hopes she’ll take some sunshine to Bucknell.
“She’s going to need it in Pennsylvania,” McCormack said.
Sternberg said that she is taking what she’s learned about diversity, equity and inclusion in higher educational spaces from Occidental to Bucknell, but Flot said those values are now the legacy she will leave behind.
“I think she’s leaving the place in a better place than when she came,” Flot said.
As a forever college student, Sternberg’s academic journey is like a never-ending story. Her experiences are learned lessons, she said, and luck brought her to the adventure she calls Occidental, just as it shows her the way out.
“I’m grateful for everything and every time I’ve had to deal with a difficult challenge, difficult person,” Sternberg said. “I consider every experience I’ve had here to be a valuable one.”
Contact Mia Anzalone at anzalonem@oxy.edu
This article was updated Feb. 28 at 7:20 p.m. to reflect that Sternberg pursued a career in academia, not education. It was also updated to specify that the faculty meeting Sternberg addressed the strategic plan to was not at a Faculty Council meeting, but a Faculty Meeting with the entire faculty.
