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Susan Herbst was named the 15th president of the University of Connecticut on December 20, 2010. Herbst is currently the executive vice chancellor and chief academic officer for the University System of Georgia. She will officially begin at UConn in July 2011. She succeeds Philip Austin, who has served as Interim President since May 2010.

The University of Connecticut has campuses in Storrs, Farmington, Groton, Hartford, West Hartford, Stamford, Torrington, and Waterbury enrolling more than 28,000 students, with a total operating budget of approximately $1.4 billion. Herbst is the first woman to be selected as the University of Connecticut’s president since the school’s founding in 1881.

Administrative and Academic Career

In her current position with the University System of Georgia, Herbst leads 15 university presidents and oversees the academic missions for all 35 public universities in Georgia. She also works closely with the system’s Board of Regents on all aspects of finance and higher education policy for the state. The system has more than 311,000 students, roughly 10,000 faculty members, and a budget of more than $6 billion a year. She has been with the Georgia system since 2007. Herbst also currently holds a faculty appointment as a professor of public policy at Georgia Tech.

Herbst was previously provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at SUNY-Albany from 2005 to 2007, and also served as acting president of the school for a year. She also served as the dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Temple University from 2003 to 2005.

Herbst joined Northwestern University as an assistant professor in 1989 and remained there until 2003. There, she rose to become chair of the political science department and associate dean for faculty affairs.

Herbst has authored many scholarly journal articles and books, including her most recent book, Rude Democracy: Civility and Incivility in American Politics (Temple University Press), released in September 2010. Her publications also include Reading Public Opinion: Political Actors View the Democratic Process (University of Chicago Press, 1998) and Politics at the Margin: Historical Studies of Public Expression Outside the Mainstream (Cambridge, 1994), among others.

Philip Austin will continue to serve as the University of Connecticut’s interim president until Herbst begins her tenure in July.

Education

Herbst received her B.A. in political science from Duke University in 1984 and her Ph.D. in communication theory and research from the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communications in Los Angeles in 1989.

Background

Herbst was born in New York City and raised in the mid-Hudson Valley town of Peekskill, N.Y. She and her husband, Doug Hughes, have two children.

External Links

Office of the President – University of Connecticut