Quick Take
UCSC Campus Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Lori Kletzer will step down from her post on July 15 after six years in the role, returning to a faculty position. Earth and Planetary Sciences professor Paul Koch has been named interim provost as the university prepares a national search for her replacement.
UC Santa Cruz Campus Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Lori Kletzer is stepping down from her administrative position as second-in-command after six years and returning to her faculty role starting July 15, Chancellor Cynthia Larive announced this week.
Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences Paul Koch will serve as interim provost. He previously served as dean of Physical and Biological Sciences from 2011 to 2023.
Kletzer first served as interim provost from July 2019 to June 2020, when Larive announced she would be appointed to the role permanently.
Larive said Kletzer has “worked tirelessly” to support the school.
“Under her leadership, UC Santa Cruz has made important progress in student success with increased retention and graduation rates and improvements in curricular coherence and the use of data to improve teaching practices,” said Larive in a statement. “Through Lori’s leadership, the campus has invested significantly in the faculty. … This faculty growth has improved our student-to-faculty ratio, and strengthened our research and teaching enterprise.”
Larive noted that in Kletzer’s time as provost, the university has “overcome unprecedented challenges” including power outages and the COVID-19 pandemic.
More recently, the university has had a tumultuous year-plus of campus protests over the war in Gaza, along with a police raid last May on a student-led Gaza solidarity encampment where 124 people were arrested. Kletzer faced intense scrutiny for the raid, as protesters shared a photo and video on social media of her appearing to smile as she walked her dog across the street from protesters while they were being arrested.
The university has also been implementing budget cuts as it attempts to manage ongoing deficits that first emerged in 2020. A May report showed low faculty morale amid the budget deficit, with the report’s authors also saying the deficit was largely due to administrative error and pointing to Kletzer’s comments during a faculty meeting last fall.
In the meeting, Kletzer said revenue projections were “overly optimistic” and expense projections “not as timely and informative as they should have been.”
“I take responsibility for not asking some questions that I should have asked,” she said, according to the minutes.
In an email response to Lookout, campus spokesperson Scott Hernandez-Jason rejected the notion that the school’s budget deficit is because of administrative errors, saying it was due to a combination of increasing costs and flat revenues. On Friday, he said that Kletzer was unavailable for an interview.
Chris Connery, a professor in the literature and history of consciousness departments, said via email he was surprised to learn about Kletzer stepping out of her role.
“Lori always treated me fairly and my relations with her were cordial, and I have had agreements and disagreements with her over the years,” he said.
Connery said his “biggest disagreement recently” was a change Kletzer implemented in how funding is allocated to departments. Connery said the model used to make those determinations is too “rigid” and “concentrates too much authority in the central administration.”
“I think that the university is best when it operates with firm and clear commitment to principles of shared governance, but this has been eroding in recent years here at UCSC and across the [University of California] system,” he said. “It will be important that the next [provost] is strongly committed to those principles.”
Prior to becoming provost, Kletzer served in other administrative roles, including vice provost and dean of graduate studies, acting and interim dean of the Division of the Arts, chair and vice chair of the Academic Senate, and chair of the Economics department. She’s been affiliated with UCSC since 1992, except for about seven years where she worked at Colby College from 2010 to 2017 as faculty and provost and dean.
Outside of her administrative career, Kletzer is a labor economist focused on the domestic labor market effects of globalization and policy responses. In 2003, she was recognized with an Academic Senate Excellence in Teaching award.
UCSC officials will begin a national recruitment for her successor starting in early fall.
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