Janet Weiss is the new Dean of Rackham Graduate School.

The Gerald Ford School of Public Policy
University of Michigan
Contact: lklee[at]umich.edu

Excerpt from U of M news and information, 6/23/2005

Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy Professor Janet A. Weiss has accepted an offer to become the next Dean of the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies and Vice Provost for Academic Affairs - Graduate Studies at the University of Michigan. Professor Weiss was the Associate Provost for Academic Affairs and the Mary C. Bromage Collegiate Professor of Organizational Behavior and Public Policy. Besides the Ford School, she has a faculty appointment in the Stephen M. Ross School of Business.

Professor Weiss has been on the faculty of the University of Michigan since 1983. Appointed Associate Provost for Academic Affairs in May 2002, Professor Weiss has been responsible for a broad range of academic and faculty issues, including faculty promotion and tenure, family friendly policies affecting faculty, facilities planning, strategic planning, and oversight of museums and libraries. She was Associate Dean of the Business School between 1992 and 1997, with responsibility for the doctoral program and research, and before that served as Associate Director of the Institute of Public Policy Studies at Michigan (before it became the School of Public Policy). Before joining the University of Michigan faculty, she was on the faculty of the School of Organization and Management at Yale University.

Between 1998 and 2002, Professor Weiss founded and directed the Nonprofit and Public Management Center at the University of Michigan, a collaborative effort of the Schools of Business, Public Policy, and Social Work. This center is available to professional degree students, and stimulates research and inquiry in nonprofit and public management among faculty and doctoral students. She has been actively engaged with a number of schools and colleges, and has served on the executive committees of the Ross School of Business, the Ford School of Public Policy, the Institute for Social Research, the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and the Rackham Graduate School.

Professor Weiss' research is focused on public management and public policy. She has published over fifty papers and chapters in academic journals on the roles of information and ideas in the policy process. She has also done extensive research on the challenges of public management, and the interplay between policy design and the management of public programs. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute for Mental Health, and the National Institute of Education.

Her work on education policy, in particular, led to her involvement in the early 1990's as an expert advisor to a group of major corporations in Michigan, and more recently as an advisor to the Education Commission of the States' Project on Governing America's Schools, a member of the National Working Commission on Choice in K-12 Education at the Brookings Institution, and a member of the MacArthur Foundation Network on Teaching and Learning. Her research on public and nonprofit management led to her engagement with several major foundations and consulting to non-profit and public sector clients at the federal and state levels. She has been active in the Association of Public Policy Analysis and Management, and served on a number of editorial boards

Professor Weiss received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in Psychology and Social Relations and a B.A. from Yale University, where she was in the first class of women at Yale. She has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

For more information please contact: lklee[at]umich.edu