Dennis Mitchell, senior vice provost for faculty advancement and a professor of dental medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, has been appointed to be the next executive vice president for University Life, University President Lee Bollinger announced in an email to the Columbia community today. Mitchell will also be serving as senior vice provost for faculty advancement and will continue his work as a faculty member at the College of Dental Medicine.

Mitchell’s appointment comes seven months after the departure of former Executive Vice President of University Life Suzanne Goldberg, who is now serving as deputy assistant secretary for strategic operations and outreach in the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Education under the Biden administration. The University Life office was created in 2015 in response to widespread concerns about the Columbia administration’s responses to instances of gender-based misconduct and sexual violence on campus. The office focuses on partnering with student leaders and student affairs offices to provide resources for underrepresented students and tackle issues related to diversity and inclusion, gender-based misconduct, and more. Mitchell’s appointment comes after a long personal record of advocating for anti-racist initiatives and faculty diversity across the University.

The position of executive vice president of student affairs—now known as executive vice president of University Life—was announced in 2014 during the same month that 23 students filed Title IX, Title II, and Clery Act violations against Columbia claiming lenient sanctions for perpetrators of sexual assault, discrimination in adjudication, and insufficient psychological accommodation for survivors. At that time, Goldberg served as a special advisor to Bollinger on sexual assault prevention, drawing on her experience not only as a professor of gender and sexuality at the Law School but also as the founding director of its Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic. Goldberg was appointed to the University Life role just two months after the announcement of its creation.

Mitchell’s time at Columbia, as well as his tenure as vice provost for faculty advancement, has largely been informed by initiatives to support and enhance diversity among the University’s faculty. In 2002, the new dean of the College of Dental Medicine noted that there was only one student of color in the entering class and reached out to Mitchell to address the lack of diversity in the school’s student body. In 2004, Mitchell became the first diversity-focused dean at an American dental school and oversaw the growth of the College of Dental Medicine’s underrepresented student population from 3 percent to over 20 percent.

Mitchell’s new appointment comes amid nation- and University-wide conversations around questions of anti-racism and anti-Blackness on college campuses, in health care, and in policing, reignited by the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the Black Lives Matter protests that took place in response during the summer of 2020. Conversations about the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness on Columbia’s campus were largely led by student groups, including Mobilized African Diaspora, which issued a list of demands, endorsed by over 1,500 students and affiliates, for the University administration.

“A seminal moment for me was May 25 of last year and the murder of George Floyd which I had a personal visceral reaction to,” Mitchell told Spectator. “And having this role at the University … it made it clear that to me—and I’ve shared this with President Bollinger, and at that time, the interim Provost Ira Katznelson—that I genuinely felt that the work and the concentration of work on diversity and inclusion and equity was critically important.”

Bollinger expressed a renewed commitment to anti-racism in a letter penned to students and faculty in July 2020 outlining goals to address class curricula, faculty diversity, and the role of Public Safety.

“As a university, we hadn’t used that language very much,” Mitchell said. “You had not seen that language come out of the central administration prior to last summer. And it was clear to me that unless we were going to be serious about this, then why are we doing it at all?”

Even before Mitchell’s new appointment, he and Goldberg had a longstanding collaborative relationship to align his work in Office of the Provost with that of University Life. One product of that collaboration was their mid-year progress report—sent out after Bollinger’s letter—which outlined anti-racism efforts and initiatives across the University. Some of those projects, such as the Racial Justice Mini-Grant Program, saw heavy involvement from Mitchell.

“As a university with the strength, reputation, and brand as Columbia, and location, among our Ivy peers—our Ivy+ peers—if we couldn’t tackle this, ... if we couldn’t demonstrate leadership in this area, then shame on us,” Mitchell said. “So we began actively beginning those conversations, which began on anti-Black racism, but quickly moved into Asian racism and others over time.”

Academically, Mitchell’s work has focused on the dental needs of underserved populations, as well as diversity among health care workers. Administratively, he has overseen a $185 million investment to faculty diversity across Columbia’s schools. In the past year, he has spearheaded a race and racism cluster hire program, created grants to fund faculty anti-racism work, and held an anti-Black racism conference with the School of Social Work.

[Related: Columbia has $185 million in dedicated funds. Why is hiring diverse faculty still so difficult?]

Mitchell will also oversee new Inclusive Faculty Pathways initiatives designed to enhance diversity across academia by creating opportunities for underrepresented students to advance through graduate programs for potential faculty appointments.

Mitchell will assume his role at the same time that students will, for the first time in over a year, live on Columbia’s campus at full capacity. Months prior to the onset of the pandemic, University Life was contending with a Public Safety crisis in response to the death of Tess Majors, a first-year Barnard student.

The tragedy, coupled with a highly publicized incident of racial profiling by Barnard Public Safety earlier in 2019, reignited an existing debate about Public Safety’s mission and efficacy. That debate was only further inflamed during the pandemic in the aftermath of Floyd’s murder, which spurred protests from several student groups to “defund” Public Safety. Seemingly in response to that student pressure, Barnard rebranded its Public Safety unit into CARES: Community Accountability, Response, and Emergency Services—a “first response” team handling both physical and mental health crises on campus.

As part of the University’s commitment to anti-racism, an administrative working group released a progress report on Columbia Public Safety last December, citing surveys and rankings to mostly praise the unit’s effectiveness. Mitchell lauded Columbia for not arming its officers, but acknowledged the existence of Public Safety and its equivalents as a “hot-button issue” at universities nationwide. He suggested the possibility of rebranding Columbia’s unit in the future.

“I’m hoping that when we come out of whatever our rebrand will be, that it will be holistic and that the relationship that we have will be a supportive relationship with a dialogue, rather than a monologue,” he said.

In addition to assisting with the University’s efforts to address racism and discrimination, Mitchell’s tenure will require him to contend with a fraught relationship with students, as Goldberg’s term as executive vice president was defined by a slew of contentious decisions regarding Title IX policies and cases of gender-based misconduct. Goldberg oversaw the high-profile cases of Emma Sulkowitz, CC ‘15, as well as the rollback of Title IX protections under the Trump administration. In 2016, Goldberg came under fire for defending a University policy that barred individuals from recording meetings with investigators, which critics claimed discouraged students from coming forward with assault allegations out of fear of legal retribution. In 2017, her undergraduate Topics in Sexuality and Gender Law seminar was disrupted by student protestors.

Despite the rollout of the Sexual Respect Initiative and promises of greater Title IX protections, Goldberg’s record left many students across the University skeptical about the Office of University Life’s ability to perform effective investigations in cases of gender-based misconduct, which has led to a pattern of underreporting. Mitchell acknowledged students’ widespread mistrust of the office and reemphasized its commitment to protecting community members from gender-based misconduct.

“It’s hurtful, the misrepresentation that’s felt from students on this, because clearly, there are some really dedicated professionals actively working as hard as possible to try to do the best and the right thing for our students and our community overall,” Mitchell said. “And yet, it’s clearly not received appropriately. So we have real work to do.”

Mitchell also noted that Columbia’s culture of student activism and its manifestation on social media play a large role in student wariness of the University’s misconduct procedures. He hopes to balance the confidentiality required of misconduct proceedings with increased transparency to foster within the student body a better understanding of the University’s internal policies and avoid the spread of misinformation.

“It’s really hard, in the social media era, to be perfect at anything, right? It feels as if it doesn’;t matter what you do—someone, from some perspective, is going to have an issue and make that issue public,” Mitchell said. “But it’s our responsibility to you, our students, to try to move past that and make sure that you have an understanding that what we’re doing is appropriate. So, I think [in terms of] that level of transparency and clarity, we can do better, and we’ll try to, but you must understand the challenge.”