E. Bruce Pitman will resign as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Provost Charles Zukoski announced Friday.
Pitman will stay on as dean until the end of the academic year and will continue to teach at UB as a professor in the math department. Zukoski will begin his search for a new dean in early 2016.
Pitman was not immediately available for comment, but he promised to talk to The Spectrum about his resignation.
Pitman’s resignation continues a trend of UB deans resigning. He is at least the sixth dean to resign in the past year and half, including former Law School Dean Makau Mutua, who resigned in September 2014 amid allegations of lying under oath, and former School of Management Dean Arjang Assad, who resigned this summer to become the University of Pittsburgh’s business school dean.
And Pitman’s resignation comes as UB is engrossed in implementing an overhaul of general education requirements that are scheduled to begin next fall.
Pitman became dean in 2011, and in that time, he recruited 120 new faculty members to the College of Arts and Sciences and oversaw the College’s first-ever strategic plan, CAS@20, which plans to increase the College’s reputation nationally.
Pitman also oversaw the creation of the Department of Materials Design and Innovation and the Computational and Data-Enabled Science and Engineering program, as well initiatives like UB RENEW and the Communities of Excellence.
UB’s controversial Shale Resource and Society Institute was also formed under Pitman’s tenure in 2011. Many questioned the institute’s positive findings about fracking and whether or not it received industry funding. Pitman defended the institute and denied that it received funding from the oil industry, but UB ultimately shut down the institute for its “cloud of uncertainty.”
Pitman joined UB’s Department of Mathematics in 1989 after receiving his bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University and his Ph.D from Duke University.
This story has been updated to include additional information.
Tom Dinki is the editor in chief and can be reached at tom.dinki@ubspectrum.com. Follow him on Twitter at @tomdinki.
