Dean of education awarded endowed chair
A $3 million gift from alumni Renée K. and Richard M. Goldman will establish the Renée and Richard Goldman Dean’s Chair in the School of Education.
The gift has established an endowment that will support the salary, professional development, recruitment, expenses and other scholarly activities of the dean of the School of Education.
Alan Lesgold
Alan Lesgold, who has been dean of the school since 2000, will be the inaugural holder of the Goldman dean’s chair.
The Goldmans have a legacy of educational experience and innovation. In 1996, they founded The Sagemont School, a college preparatory school in Florida that was among the first schools in the nation to establish a laptop program for all of its students.
They have established other educational ventures including Another Generation Preschools, among the first to receive national accreditation from the National Association for the Education of Young Children.
In addition to being dean, Lesgold is a professor in the School of Education and also a professor of psychology and intelligent systems in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences.
He is a lifetime national associate of the National Research Council.
As dean, Lesgold was instrumental in the founding of the Center for Urban Education and has hired 32 of the school’s 55 tenured and tenure-stream faculty members, with several new faculty members set to arrive in the fall.
He has seen the school move from 47th to 22nd in U.S. News and World Report’s rankings of graduate programs in education; helped raise more than $57 million for the school while also increasing its overall grant funding to an average of $500,000 per faculty member, and led a push to improve the school’s physical space.