John Margolis, the dean of Northwestern University in Qatar, is keeping a promise he made to himself three years ago: to return to Evanston at the age of 70.
Margolis will retire in June after serving as the founding dean of the Qatar campus in 2007. Though he described the process of establishing a satellite campus as challenging, Margolis said he is grateful for his time in Doha.
“It was just a wonderful experience that I wouldn’t have traded for the world and I feel very fortunate to have had the opportunity to participate in NU-Q,” he said. “All of the members of the NU-Q team – and here I include our pioneering students – rose brilliantly to those challenges and showed a flexibility and ingenuity and good spirit.”
Margolis joined the NU faculty in 1966 as an English professor and was appointed associate dean for studies in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences in 1975. He was named associate provost six years later.
NU-Q has benefited from Margolis’s leadership experience, said Richard Roth, dean of the Medill School of Journalism in Qatar.
“We’ve been lucky for the first three years, having Margolis,” he said. “He essentially moved the Northwestern way of doing things to the new branch.”
Margolis received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and is author and editor of several books about British and American literature. He taught briefly at the University of California, Los Angeles and was a visiting scholar at Cambridge University prior to his time at NU. However, he considered NU to be his first teaching job.
The dean is stepping down after what was agreed to be a three-year term. The administration wanted someone with mainly administrative experience to set up the campus but envisioned a long-term dean having extensive experience in communication or journalism, which Margolis said he does not have.
Roth said his colleague presided over the Qatar branch’s communication and journalism schools fairly.
“He was evenhanded,” he said. “He didn’t bend the school to journalism, and I think that is very important of a dean.”
Margolis said he looks forward to having extra time to read and travel. Although he will miss his time at NU, he said he will follow the growth of NU-Q intensively.
“The future is extremely bright,” he said. “We are where we are thanks to the quality of our students, the dedication of our faculty and staff and the support we’ve received from our Evanston colleagues and the Qatar Foundation.”
Succeeding Margolis is Everette Dennis, the chair of the Communication and Media Management department and director of the Center for Communications at Fordham University. A full story profiling Dennis will run later this week.
Brian Rosenthal contributed reporting.
