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A History of Leadership in CUPPA – The Deans

A New UIC College begins in 1994

The Final Report of the Great Cities Initiative at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), published in 1994, recommended the creation of a new College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs. The report noted that UIC faculty and staff were already active in policy development and evaluation of public finance, public housing management, land use and transportation planning, economic development, Chicago’s politics and government, and community revitalization. In addition, fundamental research on the nature and dynamics of cities was taking place alongside important educational and training programs for students in urban planning, public policy, and public administration.

The overall mission of the new college ... "will be to create, disseminate, and apply multi-disciplinary knowledge about urban and public affairs to improve the quality of life in metropolitan Chicago and other urban areas nationally and internationally. It will be the goal of the College to become nationally and internationally prominent in its field.”

Allan Lerner, Interim Dean 1994-96 Heading link

Allan Lerner

Allan Lerner served as deputy associate chancellor, associate provost for external education and director of the Office of External Education, associate dean of the Graduate College, professor of Political Science, professor of Public Administration, and CUPPA’s first interim dean from 1994-1996.

He was instrumental in establishing several key elements of our college that stand today. The Public Administration Department’s PhD program was implemented because of the ten year effort led by Professor Lerner and his PA colleagues. Professor Lerner also successfully established the structure of the college, negotiated the incorporation of the Survey Research Laboratory, founded external education projects for CUPPA, and coordinated the CUPPA Bylaws through faculty approval when the college was formed. At the University level, he served on a committee under then Vice President for Academic Affairs Sylvia Manning, which helped restructure the Promotion and Tenure process across the University of Illinois system. He served on many, many other UIC committees and task forces. He authored five books, countless monographs, conference presentations, articles, papers, and workshops.

Professor Lerner most recently served UIC as associate provost for international affairs and as executive director of the UIC Office of International Affairs until his retirement this past spring. He described his positions in International Affairs as providing strategic leadership, institutional oversight, and active involvement in international collaborations concerning research, education, and public service and developing customized initiatives and related inter-institutional agreements with more than 80 universities, government entities, foundations, business organizations, and organizations of civil society in over 40 countries on behalf of UIC.

Allan Lerner died after a long illness on Sept. 4, 2011.

Wim Wiewel, Dean 1996-2000 Heading link

Wim Wiewel, president of Lewis and Clark, until 2022.

From 1979 to 2004, Wim Wiewel served in a variety of leadership positions at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) including dean of the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs and the College of Business Administration. He also served as special assistant to the chancellor. In these positions, Wiewel played a lead role in establishing the Liautaud Graduate School of Business, at the time, a new College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs, and the UIC Great Cities program. Wiewel also directed the Center for Urban Economic Development.

Wim Wiewel retired in 2022 as Lewis & Clark’s 25th president. He took the helm there on October 1, 2017, after nine years successfully leading Portland State University. He assumed the presidency of Portland State University in August 2008.  Prior to Portland State, Wiewel was the provost and senior vice president of Academic Affairs at the University of Baltimore.

Wiewel holds degrees in sociology and urban planning from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and a Ph.D. in sociology from Northwestern University.

Albert Schorsch, III, Acting Dean 1999-2000 Heading link

Albert Schorsch III

Albert Schorsch, III joined the UIC College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs Dean’s office in 1996 as associate dean. He was acting dean of CUPPA from 1999 to 2000, and associate dean until his retirement in June 2015. From 2004 to 2007, he also was interim director of the Great Cities Urban Data Visualization Lab, which he helped found in 1997.

He received psychology degrees from Loyola University, and later took professional education courses at MIT’s Center for Real Estate, Harvard’s Institutes for Higher Education, Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, and Business Innovation Services of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his doctorate in public policy analysis at UIC in 1992, and he returned to campus in 1994 to work at the UIC Center for Urban Economic Development on the UIC Neighborhoods and Non-Profits Network project.

After retiring in 2015, Schorsch began service in campus ministry as director of the Integritas Institute for Ethics of the St. John Paul II Catholic Newman Center and its School of Catholic Thought on the UIC campus.

Albert Schorsch, III died on Oct. 28, 2017 in Chicago after a lengthy illness. He was 66.

David Perry, Interim Dean 2000-2002 Heading link

David C. Perry

David Perry is professor emeritus of Urban Planning and Policy in the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs (CUPPA) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC).  He served for almost 12 years as director of the Great Cities Institute at UIC and the associate chancellor for the university’s Great Cities Commitment. From 2000 to 2002, he served as interim dean of the CUPPA.

Perry is the author or editor of eleven books, including The Global University and Urban Development:  Case Studies and Analysis and Universities as Urban Developers:  Case Studies and Analysis, and over 150 articles, book chapters and reports on urban “anchor” institutions, urban and regional economic development policy, race, politics and urban violence, contested cities, public infrastructure and the production of urban space. He is presently working on two new books on the role of universities and community foundations in American cities, one to be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press and one by M.E. Sharpe. Perry’s work has appeared in such non-academic places at the New York Times, The Nation and Metropolis magazine. David is an equally experienced policy practitioner having worked with numerous community partners and having served on national and local public boards and commissions, including Chicago’s Zoning Reform Commission, the Urban Land Institute’s National Public Infrastructure Committee, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the Rudy Bruner National Award Selection Committee, the National Task Force on Anchor Institutions and the Strengthening Communities Strand of the Coalition of Urban Serving Universities of the Association of Public Land Grant Universities.

Perry received his PhD from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University and went on to teach in the Government Department at the University of Texas at Austin and chaired the Urban Planning Program at the University at Buffalo. He also held the visiting Albert A. Levin Chair at Cleveland State University and was a senior faculty fellow of the State University of New York’s Rockefeller Institute.

Robin Hambleton, Dean 2002-2007 Heading link

Robin Hambleton, retired CUPPA dean 2002-2007

Robin Hambleton is emeritus professor of City Leadership at the University of the West of England, Bristol and director of Urban Answers, a company he founded in 2007, in the United Kingdom.

He has been an adviser to UK local government ministers, to select committees of the UK House of Parliament, and has worked on place-based leadership with cities in many different countries. He has held professorial positions in City and Regional Planning at Cardiff University, in City Management at UWE, and in Urban Planning and Policy and Public Administration at UIC.

He was the founding president of the European Research Association (EURA) and was the dean of the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois at Chicago (2002-07). He has published eleven books and over 400 articles.

Michael A. Pagano, Dean 2007-2021 Heading link

Michael A. Pagano, Dean, 2007-2021

Michael A. Pagano is the former dean of the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois at Chicago, former director of UIC’s Government Finance Research Center, professor of public administration, Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration (elected 2006), former co-editor of Urban Affairs Review (2001-2014), and former Nonresident Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program.

He has published eleven books, including The People’s Money,  Metropolitan Resilience in a Time of Economic Turmoil , Cityscapes and Capital and The Dynamics of Federalism, and over 80 articles on urban finance, capital budgeting, federalism, transportation policy, infrastructure, urban development and fiscal policy; since 1991, he has written the annual City Fiscal Conditions report for the National League of Cities. He has delivered more than one hundred papers and speeches and received funding from John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the National Research Council, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Pew Charitable Trusts, Brookings Institution, CEOs for Cities, National League of Cities, Chicago Community Trust, U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, and elsewhere.

He has served on a variety of professional organizations, including NASPAA (Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration), the Governmental Accounting Standards Board, the Metropolitan Planning Council (Chicago), the Pension Committee of the Civic Federation, and the Urban Land Institute.

He is the 2019 recipient of the Aaron Wildavsky award for a lifetime contribution to the study of budgeting and financial management from the Association for Budgeting and Financial Management of the American Society for Public Administration, the Donald Stone Distinguished Scholar award from the Section on Intergovernmental Administration and Management of the American Society for Public Administration (2015), and the Daniel Elazar Distinguished Scholar Award, from the Section on Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations of the American Political Science Association (2011).

He earned a B.A. in Latin American Studies from the Pennsylvania State University and a PhD in Government from the University of Texas at Austin in 1980.

David Merriman, Interim Dean 2021-22 Heading link

David Merriman

Professor David Merriman was appointed interim dean of the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs (CUPPA), beginning August 1, 2021 until June 30, 2022, by the UIC Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs.

At the time of his appointment as interim dean, Merriman, was in his fifteenth year at UIC and was an expert in state and local tax and budgetary policies. He held the title of Stukel Presidential Professor in the Department of Public Administration, an appointment in the Department of Economics, where he also served as head of the department from 2009-2010, and an appointment in the Institute for Government and Public Affairs. In CUPPA, he served as associate dean for faculty affairs from 2011-2012 and as interim head in Public Administration from 2019-2020.

Stacey Swearingen White, Dean 2022+ Heading link

Stacey Swearingen White

Stacey Swearingen White is dean of the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs (CUPPA) at UIC. She joined the college on July 1, 2022 coming from the University of Kansas (KU), where she began her career as an assistant professor of Urban Planning. At KU, she served as the chair of the Urban Planning Department, co-founder and director of academic programs for the KU Center for Sustainability, and associate director of the Environmental Studies Program. Most recently, she served as director of the KU School of Public Affairs and Administration.

Dean Swearingen White’s research focuses on sustainability innovation at the local level, including emphases on water quality and campus sustainability. She has also contributed to recent work on the role of emotions in planning.

Her research and teaching interests reflect her interdisciplinary training. She received a B.A. in Philosophy from Emory University, a M.S. in Environmental Studies from the University of Montana, and a Ph.D. in Land Resources from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.