Professor Van Ry

Dawn Dekle, provost of the American University of Afghanistan, is used to dealing with volatile situations that most administrators would probably find terrifying.

“We just had an attack in the city,” Ms. Dekle said in a phone interview with The Chronicle,from Kabul. “Insurgents attacked a bus in front of the Supreme Court—so I had to send out security alerts.” The attack by Taliban militants was not close to campus, and Ms. Dekle decided not to shut down the university but to caution students and faculty members to avoid that part of the city.

Such decision making under pressure will probably serve Ms. Deckle well in her new appointment as president of the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani, which was founded in 2006 by prominent Kurdish politicians and businessmen.

The 46-year-old Ms. Dekle, who has a doctorate in experimental psychology from Dartmouth College and a law degree from Stanford Law School, has spent most of her career abroad. She says that after Stanford she wanted to “try something different” and became interested in “building the capacity for American-style education in developing countries.” For 12 years she worked in Singapore, helping the National University of Singapore adopt a rigorous core curriculum based on Harvard’s, and overseeing a teaching excellence center for the faculty at Singapore Management University. <Read more.>

Via Ursula Lindsey, The Chronicle of Higher Ed.