Gene Awakuni still sounds more like the psychologist he was trained to be than the vice provost for student affairs he is now. Listen to him talk, and you’ll hear more about empathy and respect than budgets and policies. “I want my staff to have a student-centered philosophy,” he says in an interview. “Every encounter is an opportunity for development to occur.”
After all, Awakuni didn’t set out to become an administrator. But as director of psychological services at UC-Irvine in the mid-’80s, he was called in to help defuse student conflicts involving race and sexual orientation. Awakuni’s mediation efforts were so successful that, in 1988, he was asked to become Irvine’s special assistant to the vice chancellor for student affairs.
Since then, Awakuni has led student affairs at several universities, most recently as vice president for student services at Columbia University. At Stanford, he replaces James Montoya, ’75, MA ’78, who left the University to serve as vice president of the College Board. Awakuni will face several pressing problems, including insufficient student housing and rising costs of student health care. He is familiar with both areas: at Columbia, he had just completed a review of the student health-care plan, and during his tenure at UC-Irvine, he helped build one of the first residential education programs in the country. He is also the co-author of Resistance to Multiculturalism: Issues and Interventions (Bruner/Mazel, 1999).
Although Awakuni officially began work in Tresidder Union on January 2, he was a visible presence during Orientation in September. Fresh from a morning watching resident assistants clap, cheer and scream out the name of each approaching freshman, Awakuni said he could already tell there is no place like Stanford. “I want to immerse myself in Stanford culture and talk to as many people as I can,” he says. Sounds like the psychologist is still in.
