Tennessee official to become chancellor of UMass-Amherst
By Peter Schworm, Globe Staff
Robert C. Holub, provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Tennessee, is poised to become the next chancellor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Jack M. Wilson, president of the University of Massachusetts, announced this afternoon he will recommend Holub over three other finalists to become head of the university's flagship campus at a special board of trustees meeting Monday. The 22-member board is expected to approve Holub decisively.
"Robert Holub is a distinguished scholar, a proven administrator and is driven by a desire to make UMass Amherst one of the premiere public universities in the nation," Wilson said in a statement. "Excellence has been the hallmark of Dr. Holub’s academic career and will be his watchword and goal at UMass Amherst."
Before coming to Tennessee, where he served as the Knoxville campus's chief academic officer the past two years, Holub was a professor and administrator at the University of California at Berkeley for nearly three decades. In 2003, he was named dean of the College of Letters and Science, which has 18,000 undergraduates.
Holub, 58, said he was honored by Wilson's recommendation.
"This is an outstanding university that aspires to rise even higher," he said. "I was attracted to this position because President Wilson, the Board of Trustees and the UMass Amherst community all harbor an ambitious vision for this campus. It is a vision that inspires me and calls me to this great flagship campus,” Holub said.
Holub specializes in 19th- and 20th-century German intellectual, cultural and literary history, and has written extensively on the poet Heinrich Heine and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Holub and his wife Sabine have three young children.
Holub's appointment comes after a lengthy national search. If approved, he will succeed interim chancellor Thomas W. Cole Jr., who took over for John Lombardi when he departed last year to become president at Louisiana State University.
Last spring's news that Lombardi would be stepping down as UMass-Amherst chancellor as part of a restructuring of university leadership outraged faculty members, who cast a vote of no confidence in Wilson and the board of trustees.
