The First-Year Office and the Upperclass Dean's Office have been merged together to create the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students in order to more consistently provide advising to students, the College announced Wednesday.
Dean of the College Tom Crady was out of the office Thursday and unable to comment on how the decision was made to restructure the advising system or whether the restructuring was done in response to budget cuts.
Each dean will work with an equal number of students from all four undergraduate classes, Rovana Popoff, one of seven deans in the new office, said.
In the past, students were assigned a first-year dean when they arrived at the College and a different dean for their final three years. The new structure eliminates the system of having "class dean," she said.
"With the merger of the offices, we didn't have the same amount of resources and couldn't support the class deans system," Popoff said.
Popoff was the Dean of Upperclass Students before the merge occurred.
If a current student has a strong relationship with a particular dean, that person will remain their dean, she said. Otherwise, students will be divided between the deans so that each one has an equal number of students overall.
Popoff said that she didn't know what other options had been considered, but emphasized that the new system would result in a more coherent and accessible advising system for students.
"Students were consistently expressing frustration when they built a relationship with a dean in the first year, and then switched and had to build a new relationship," Popoff said. "Over their career, a student could even have three deans if they switched deans once or spent more than four years at the College."
Having one dean will enable students to be better served, Popoff said.
"This restructuring gives students and deans time to develop long-term relationships, and a dean will be more likely to understand where a student is coming from when they need support," she said.
Under the new structure, she said, the only reason a student would switch deans during their time at Dartmouth would be if he or she asked to do so and Popoff herself deemed the request legitimate, she said.
"At the end of the year students who feel like their relationship isn't working like it's not facilitating their experience can request a talk with me," she said.
Students' issues with deans are generally resolvable, Popoff said, but sometimes requests to switch are warranted.
Under the new system, two fewer deans will be available than in previous years. Former Dean of First-Year Students Gail Zimmerman was laid off at the end of February following the implementation of College-wide budget cuts. Dean of First-Year Students Meg Hancock's one-year contract was also not renewed for this year.
The standards and procedures that the office follows, however, will remain the same as those that were previously followed in the First-Year and Upperclass Dean's offices, Popoff said.
"While they were separate offices, we pretty much did the same work because for students to have a consistent experience, our standards and practices had to be the same," she said. "The tasks that the Dean of the Faculty sets for us haven't changed, so students won't experience an actual interaction with the office any differently."
