J. Douglas Toma, an associate professor in the Institute of Higher Education, has been named dean of UGA’s Franklin Residential College. He will begin his new position on April 1. Toma succeeds Michelle Garfield, who is now associate dean of the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.
“We are so pleased that Dr. Toma will be joining us in this important position,” says Wyatt Anderson, dean of the Franklin College. “He will bring a rich background to the job. Michelle Garfield did an outstanding job at the Residential College, and we are sure Doug will follow in her footsteps.”
Based on the residential college model of Oxford, Cambridge and the Ivy League schools, the Franklin Residential College was founded in the fall of 2001 in Rutherford Hall on the Myers Quad on UGA’s South Campus. Some 150 students live in the facility-the first of its kind on campus-and share a close-knit community through faculty-student interaction and an academic-social environment in which students govern themselves.
“The FRC subscribes to the belief that small communities provide the best environment for learning and for social growth,” says Garfield, who was dean for three years.
Before his appointment to UGA in the fall of 2003, Toma served on the Graduate School of Education faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, where he organized and directed the executive doctorate in higher education management. He earned his Ph. D. in higher education from the University of Michigan. He also has a J.D. from the same university and a bachelor’s degree from James Madison College. Before entering academe, Toma practiced law for five years.