SUBJECT:

An Important Message from President Yudof

Dear UC Colleagues:

I am pleased to inform you that the UC Regents earlier today confirmed my recommendation that Larry Pitts be appointed UC provost.

As many of you know, Larry has been serving as interim provost since February 2009. In this role, he has done a terrific job not only maintaining the academic enterprise but also overseeing the restructuring of the Academic Affairs organization here at the Office of the President in order to better support the campuses and plan for the future.

As provost, Larry will be responsible for academic affairs systemwide, which includes setting academic policies on student admissions, retention and graduation; developing academic priorities; and long-ranging planning activities – ever-important activities given the challenges we are facing.

Larry knows UC extremely well. He is a longtime faculty member and a professor of neurosurgery at UC San Francisco, where he has served since 1975. At UCSF, he has been chief of neurosurgery at San Francisco General Hospital and of UCSF/Mount Zion Hospital, and vice chair and acting chair of the Department of Neurosurgery. He is also past chair of the UC Academic Senate, and has served on a variety of UC Academic Senate committees at the divisional and systemwide levels, including the Senate’s Shared Governance Task Force, the Task Force on Healthcare and the drafting task force on UC's Health Corporate Compliance Plan.

As an accomplished leader and a passionate advocate for UC, I believe he’ll do a terrific job working with University leadership, the faculty and the entire the UC community to help lead the University into the future and to maintain UC’s standards of academic and scientific excellence.

Please join me in congratulating Larry on his appointment.

Sincerely, Mark G. Yudof President