NEW: Spies Leaving Brown
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Dick Spies, the powerful face of Brown University and the point person for President Ruth Simmons, is leaving Brown. In a letter to the Brown Community, President Simmons announced the decision and gave no hint of a replacement. At the end of school year the President's position, Spies office and the Athletic Director's position will all be vacant.
According to sources close to the Brown search committee effort, there is a strong effort to announce a new President this spring. Presently, Brown is in the midst of constant friction with the City of Providence over payments to the City.
The letter:
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTI write to share news that Executive Vice President for Planning and Senior Advisor to the President Dick Spies has announced his decision to step down from his position, effective at the end of the first semester of 2012-2013.
Dick came to Brown at my behest in January 2002, bringing with him years of valuable experience and insights in higher education policy, finance, and administration. For more than three decades Dick was integral to the administration of Princeton University, serving as vice provost, vice president for finance and administration, and lecturer in Economics. For the last decade, Dick has applied his depth of knowledge and understanding of all facets of university life to advancing Brown. He has been a strategic partner in developing and implementing the Plan for Academic Enrichment, and he helped to articulate the aspirations for Brown that lie behind these planning efforts. He also helped to translate those aspirations into the specific goals of the Plan and oversaw the development of the Strategic Framework for Physical Planning, which provided a thoughtful and comprehensive plan for campus growth and change over the next decades to accommodate the University’s ambitious academic goals. Some of the early results of that plan can be seen by walking from Lincoln Field north past the Granoff Center, through the Sidney Frank Hall for Life Sciences, and onto the Pembroke campus along the newly expanded green-way we call The Walk.
Dick also championed Brown’s Strategic Growth Initiative, which has as its goal considering and planning for the University’s long-term space needs, moving some activities off College Hill and working closely with the city and the state to serve as an anchor for the development of the knowledge-based economy. His role in strategic purchases of properties in the Jewelry District enabled the University’s development of a new home for the Alpert Medical School and other projects beyond College Hill.
Dick has been a true civic leader and has been actively involved locally and nationally during his time at Brown. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce, Chair of the Boards of the Providence Foundation and The Providence Plan and a member of the Board of the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council (RIPEC). Dick has served as a member of the boards of Tuition Plan Consortium (TPC), the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO), and the Consortium on Financing Higher Education (COFHE).
I am enormously grateful to Dick for his tireless commitment to Brown, for his wisdom, perspective, good humor and friendship. On behalf of the campus community, which lives, works, and studies in spaces made larger and better by his efforts, I thank him for all he has done to improve the University and to make Brown’s future very bright.
Sincerely,
Ruth J. Simmons
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