Ithaca College’s School of Music, Theatre, and Dance has started its search for a permanent dean. The school appointed two interim deans for the 2024–25 academic year after Anne Hogan, the inaugural dean of the unified school, departed at the end of Spring 2024. The search committee for the new dean was formed at the end of summer 2024.

At the beginning of July 2022, the Center for Music and the Center for Theatre and Dance officially combined into one school with one dean under Hogan’s leadership. Hogan was the dean from Fall 2022 until Spring 2024, when she left to accept a position as dean of the College of Performing Arts at Chapman University in Southern California. This change adds a new layer to the upcoming dean’s job, which is to continue to unify the three programs.

“It has truly been an honor to serve as the inaugural dean of the School of Music, Theatre, and Dance at Ithaca College, and to witness the talent, team spirit and commitment to ensuring an inspiring and transformative learning community that makes MTD so special,” Hogan wrote in an email announcing her departure.

For the search committee, Melanie Stein, provost and senior vice president for Academic Affairs, chose Crystal Peebles, associate professor in the Department of Music Theory and History Composition, and Marc Gomes, associate professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance Performance, as the committee’s co-chairs. Junior Amanda Haussmann and senior February Schneck are the committee’s student representatives. Besides the chairs and the students, there are 10 other staff and faculty members on the committee. 

Peebles said the rest of the search process will tentatively take place through March 2025. After the leadership profile is solidified, candidates can apply for the job and then the committee will begin to sort through applications. Finalists for the position will come to the college, where students can meet them and give feedback to inform a decision. 

The committee works with the search firm WittKieffer and MTD community members to write a leadership profile. A leadership profile acts similarly to a job description but it focuses more on describing the kind of candidate they are looking for beyond just the scholarly qualifications. The profile will help the committee narrow down the candidates to three to five people and Stein will make the final decision after open sessions on campus. 

The college has previously used WittKieffer for hiring positions like the vice president for Student Affairs and Campus Life and the dean for the School of Health Sciences and Human Performance.

Peebles said a dean’s job is not as noticeable to students as it is for faculty, but if the dean is doing their job correctly, everyone will flourish. 

“I like to think of any dean as having two hats,” Peebles said. “One role that the dean has is an inward-facing role where they work closely with faculty, students and staff to make the institution as strong as possible. The other big part of a dean’s job is very outward-facing. They’re basically the face of the School of Music, Theatre, and Dance because they interact with alumni, they interact with donors and they do a lot of traveling to get the name of Ithaca College out there and tell our story and show how great of an institution we are.” 

The current interim deans are Steve TenEyck and Luis Loubriel. TenEyck was previously the associate dean and has worked at the school since 2001. Loubriel started working with the school in Spring 2024. TenEyck and Loubriel said via email that their roles are not very different from a typical dean but they are also working to prepare for a permanent dean. 

“We hope that students know that our job is to support the faculty, staff and students in their work,” TenEyck and Loubriel said. “We want our community to know we are here, we are available and we hope that folks will reach out.”

Gomes said the role of the new dean will be to further unite MTD by making active efforts to increase collaboration.

“The whole college is like a little organism that works together, so I think [the dean is] an important position and an important step in the right direction for MTD in terms of having somebody to offer a unifying vision and voice for the school,” Gomes said.

Before Hogan, Ivy Walz was the interim dean of the then School of Music for the 2021–2022 academic year and Keith Kaiser was the interim dean of the School of Music for the 2020–2021 school year. The theater programs was part of the School of Humanities and Sciences when Walz departed the college in August 2023. 

Schneck said students in the theater programs want more rehearsal spaces and since one of the dean’s main jobs is fundraising, having a permanent dean would help create a long-term fundraising plan for the new spaces.

“It would be great to have a leader who can implement some of the long-term initiatives because a lot of the challenges that we are having right now don’t have short-term solutions,” Schneck said. “They’re things that are going to take a long time to solve.”

The two schools have been unified for three years, however, sophomore Jada Soltau, an acting major, said the schools do not feel like one.

“We hear very little about the Whalen stuff, and I know it’s still new and they may not know necessarily how to combine the two or make us collaborate more often,” Soltau said. “It still very much feels like Whalen and then Dillingham,” Soltau said. “I think having [a dean] who is willing to advocate for us like a wider MTD program is important to help us grow.”

Schneck said that having a leader who embodies the culture of the college and MTD as a whole is important. 

“There is a distinct lack of unity,” Schneck said. “My hope is that we will have a leader [who] is able to infuse that a bit more. We need someone who cannot just do that in a procedural way but who will implement a more cultural shift where we spend a bit more time with each other in ways that are more tangible.”

Haussmann said the lack of consistent leadership was visible when there were major changes. 

“Since I got here there’ve been big shifts like with the grad programs going away,” Haussmann said. “But, there hasn’t been consistent support from higher up … so we’re at a point where having a dean would make all of these changes be so much easier.”

Haussmann said it would be easy to pick someone who looked good on paper, but they need to be a strong cultural fit for the MTD program. 

“Really, more than anything else, I’d like to see someone who has an excitement for the future,” Haussmann said. “We really need someone who wants to be here and is clearly in it for the long haul.”

Editor’s Note: A previous version of this article incorrectly referred to the Center for Music and the Center for Theatre and Dance as the Whalen Center for Music and the Dillingham Center for Theater and Dance. The latter two names refer to the names of the buildings and not the academic programs.