New dean is 'the whole package'

Though dead for over 400 years, Sir Philip Sidney can still captivate an audience.

"You can imagine it as an engine going down the track," new College Dean and English Professor Rebecca Bushnell tells her class, pausing from a spirited reading of Sidney's 47th Sonnet.

"It's as if the poet was saying, 'I'm in control of this line -- I'm writing perfect iambic pentameter today.'"

Just as Sidney remains in control of his meter, Bushnell doesn't miss a beat in front of the room full of Penn undergraduates enrolled in her "Major British Writers 1350-1660" course.

Nor is she fazed by her new role at the helm of Penn's largest undergraduate school.

Bushnell "has excellent judgment about people and programs and communicates her views very effectively through graceful persuasion rather than declarations," according to School of Arts and Sciences Dean Samuel Preston, who had selected Bushnell as his first choice for the position. "She is the whole package."

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When the proposition for the position left empty by Richard Beeman first came on the table last fall, "I thought twice about it," Bushnell says.

"I really liked the job I was doing."

As associate dean of Arts and Letters, Bushnell oversaw faculty appointments, promotions, budgets and academic planning in the Humanities departments.

"She has left everything in a wonderful condition," said her replacement, Joseph Farrell. "Faculty morale and student satisfaction both reflect the good work that she did."

At the same time, though, "it was a very behind-the-scenes job," Bushnell says. "I don't think students knew I existed, quite frankly."

In accepting the College deanship, Bushnell, who calls herself "quite shy," would take on a much more public role at the University, "talking to people in a very different way than I had before."

"My day is filled with passionate intellectual debate about education."

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Bushnell describes herself as a "a New Jersey Girl, tempered with three years of living in Belgium."

Aside from her time in Europe during middle school, Bushnell has stuck close to home.

She majored in English at Swarthmore College in the early '70s. After college, Bushnell worked in publishing, but discovered that "I wanted to write my own work, not edit other people's." She then attended Bryn Mawr College for a year to earn her master's degree, while teaching sixth, eighth and 10th grade English.

"I discovered that yes, I loved to teach, and also that I'd never set foot in a classroom full of eighth graders again!"

"I didn't have the soul of a disciplinarian," she says.

Having decided that her destiny was to be a professor, Bushnell headed to Princeton University and four years later received a Ph.D. in comparative literature.

And with that degree in tow, Bushnell applied in 1982 for a position at Penn as an associate professor of Renaissance literature -- however, the department turned down the future dean of the College.

"I was told, to quote the rejection letter -- because you never forget these things -- 'Dear Ms. Bushnell, I'm sorry, but we feel your interests are too comparative for our department.'"

But in the spring of that same year, Penn did hire her as a leave replacement for a year.

"I came, and I stuck my foot in the door and I did not leave."

She not only kept her foot in the door, but also worked her way up the stairs. Moving from associate to full professor with tenure, Bushnell eventually did become a professor within the Renaissance group of the English Department. In 1998, she became associate dean for Arts and Letters, and five years later was appointed College dean.

"Nothing at Penn is going to be served up to you on a silver platter. You go out and make it for yourself," she says. "I was given a lot of encouragement and freedom to shape my own ideas, my own courses and ultimately now shape my own vision of what undergraduate education should be."

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According to Bushnell, most of her day is spent talking: to undergraduate chairs, other undergraduate deans, alumni, students and faculty.

"I feel that I will be most effective... working in collaboration with faculty and students in shaping a vision of the College," she says. "I'm trying to find out what they think is important."

"She both develops and defends her own ideas with clarity and passion while proving to be an acute listener," English Department Chairman David Wallace says.

Already, Bushnell is working on some of those ideas. A top priority is to provide more widespread opportunities for undergraduate research.

And like her predecessor, Bushnell has an avid interest in promoting science and technology education.

She is also interested in creating more "clusters of intellectual intensity" within the College.

"If you're a student whose idea of a good time is to talk about existentialism, where do you go?" she asks. "That's a nut I'm trying to crack."

Another nut will be the outcome of the pilot program. Conclusions from the five-year experimental curriculum and subsequent discussions about re-structuring undergraduate education will be a huge part of her deanship.

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Aside from her duties as dean and professor, Bushnell is also still an active scholar.

Her most recent book, Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens, came out this year, and she is already in the process of editing another book, The Blackwell Companion to Tragedy.

"I'm trying to balance the life of a teacher, the life of a scholar, the life of a dean and being a wife and mother," says Bushnell, who has two daughters, one of whom is a freshman at Yale University this fall.

"Rebecca is a role model and a champion for women," says Jean-Marie Kneeley, vice dean for SAS External Affairs. "She is an ambitious woman who has, it seems, found a nice balance between work and home -- no easy task."

Her secret? "I find ultimately that they energize each other," Bushnell says.

"I'm always interested to talk particularly to young women about what it means to do it all," Bushnell adds. "I've learned about teaching from being a parent, and an administrator from being a teacher. Rather than seeing these parts of my life conflict with each other, I try to make it so that they complement each other."

This particular day, she will conquer back-to-back meetings. And later, it is to a back-to-school night.

Staff reporter Spencer Willig contributed to this story.

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