Philip E. Lewis, acting dean of Cornell University's College of Arts and Sciences since July 1995, has been nominated to serve a five-year term as dean of the college beginning July 1996. He was nominated to the post by a search committee headed by the college's former dean, Don M. Randel, who is now the provost.

President Hunter Rawlings enthusiastically supported the nomination and will recommend that it be adopted by the Executive Committee of the Cornell University Board of Trustees at its meeting on May 25.

According to Randel, the committee made its selection following an intensive six-month search that considered candidates from both within and without the university, as well as their reputations in both academia and higher education administration.

"Phil Lewis is as deeply thoughtful as anyone could be," Randel said, "and he brings to the deanship the highest possible intellectual standards. One member of the faculty wrote to the search committee saying that we should not have a dean who did not have Phil's qualities. In that light, Phil was the obvious choice.

"There will inevitably be differences of opinion with any dean worthy of the name," Randel continued. "With Phil, one can be confident that those differences, as well as the agreements, will be profoundly principled and that the level of discourse surrounding them will represent the standards to which a university community ought always to aspire." President Rawlings added, "Phil Lewis' commitment to Cornell and his depth of intellectual rigor make him an excellent choice as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. His colleagues on the faculty recognize and applaud those qualities, and I am delighted that he will continue to provide in the years ahead the leadership to the college that he has already demonstrated so ably."

Before becoming acting dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Lewis, 53, was an associate dean under two consecutive deans. He has served on the faculty of the college's Department of Romance Studies since 1968 and was the department's chair for much of the 1970s and 1980s. Lewis also has participated in several Cornell committees, including the Provost's Task Force on Graduate Student Life, Provost's Advisory Committee on Public Policy and two Strategic Planning Task Forces, one on university administration and governance and another on administration and finance.

After approval of his nomination at a meeting of the Arts and Sciences faculty on May 6, Lewis underscored his gratitude to the search committee, the president and the faculty for their expression of confidence.

"I am at once honored and humbled by the responsibility my colleagues have invited me to assume," Lewis said. "Arts and Sciences, with its splendid faculty and wonderful students, is the heart of the university. In protecting the values we associate with a liberal education, the college aims to preserve Cornell's distinguished academic traditions and to support wisely and reliably the diverse missions of our sister colleges.

"I am keenly aware of the difficult challenges we face but would not take this post if I did not believe we can and will meet those challenges successfully," he added.

Born in Kingsport, Tenn., Lewis earned his bachelor's degree from Davidson College in 1964 and his doctorate from Yale University in 1969. Known for his work in 17th-century French literature and contemporary critical theory and practice, he is the author of La Rochefoucauld: The Art of Abstraction (1977) and Seeing Through the Mother Goose Tales: Visual Turns in the Writings of Charles Perrault (1996). He has been a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, Danforth Fellow and Research Fellow with the National Endowment for the Humanities and the editor of Diacritics, a journal of criticism produced in the Department of Romance Studies and published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

As dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Lewis will oversee the academic experience of approximately 4,000 undergraduate students, 1,500 graduate students and 600 faculty members.