Susan Carlson

Vice Provost

Susan CarlsonSusan Carlson has served as Vice Provost for Academic Personnel and Programs (APP) at the Office of the President since 2010.  She has responsibility for systemwide policy and practice in faculty recruitment, retention, diversity, and compensation; she also has responsibility for eight hallmark systemwide UC programs, including the University of California Press, The California Digital Library, the UC Education Abroad Program, the UC Washington Center (UCDC), the UC Center in Sacramento, the President's Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, UC Scout, and UCTV. She works closely with the Executive Directors and Directors of these programs and collaborates with UC campus colleagues and with faculty senate leadership. She is a Professor of English at UC Davis.

Her office serves as the steward of the Academic Personnel Manual (APM) with its systemwide policies that cover over 50,000 academic personnel: faculty, researchers, postdoctoral scholars, among others. Her office is responsible for maintaining salary scales for all academic personnel and provides the academic perspective on labor contracts. She has led taskforces and working groups on compensation innovations (like the Negotiated Salary Trial Program) and on faculty compensation, salary equity, benefits, and total remuneration.

While at UC, she has prioritized development of programs to support faculty excellence and diversity. She led efforts to establish UC Recruit -- an on-line tool for faculty recruitment processes -- first in her role as PI on an NSF ADVANCE award and subsequently in partnership with other researchers who will use the UC Recruit data set to understand when and how we make progress in diversifying faculty. She is currently partnering with colleagues at Harvard (the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education) on a faculty exit survey that will establish systematic data on faculty retention and departure. She led a series of five campus roundtable discussions on faculty diversity in STEM disciplines from 2012-2014 and ten Leadership Seminars for UC Chairs and Deans in 2014-15, providing an original theatre-based intervention to focus academic leaders on implicit bias and micro-aggressions that occur in faculty peer review.

She has served on external advisory boards for several NSF ADVANCE Programs (including The University of New Hampshire, North Dakota State University, and Lehigh University) and has served as a consultant on the ACE/Sloan project on faculty retirement. She was on the Executive Advisory Board for the Women's Network of the American Council on Education, has served in various leadership roles in women's organizations, and has won awards for her successes.  At Iowa State University, she was the PI on two NSF grants on faculty diversity totaling over $4M.

She has published two books on women and comedy and numerous articles and essays on Shakespeare, women playwrights, and the British suffrage theatre. Her teaching has ranged from modern drama and political theatre to writing and women's studies. Together with Professor Michael Mendelson, she has directed study abroad courses in London and at British literary sites. She has a PhD and MA from the University of Oregon and a BA from the University of Iowa. Previously, she was a faculty member and administrator at Iowa State University.