Aimée Dorr, the former UC provost and dean of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, died Jan. 25. She was 83.
Dorr joined the UCLA faculty in 1981 as a professor in the education department who researched the impacts of electronic media on children. She served as dean of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies for 13 years before becoming UC provost in 2012.
Tina Christie, the current Wasserman Dean of the School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA, said Dorr was passionate about hiring faculty that connected research to real-world impact.
“If we define ourselves – and we do – as a school that has an authentic emphasis on the implications of our scholarship on practice and policy, it is Aimée who pulled us in that direction,” Christie said. “She did it through her developing and leading the development of relationships with local school districts, with policymakers but also in the faculty that she hired.”
Dorr led collaborative efforts with school districts and policymakers, Christie said. She also played a leading role in the early years of the late-1990s “iSchools” movement – an international effort to reimagine how universities study and teach information with new technology – said Anne Gilliland, a professor of information studies.
The iSchools movement created a multidisciplinary approach to information studies and incorporated fields such as library science, business, sociology and anthropology, Gilliland added.
The movement, an international organization, consists of more than 130 schools with a common interest in understanding the intersection between social and behavioral sciences, computing, and linguistics, according to its website.
UCLA hosted one of the earliest iSchools conferences under Dorr’s leadership, Gilliland said. Dorr was one of the few women who played an active role in the iSchools movement, as the field was largely dominated by male administrators, Gilliland added.
“She made sure that UCLA was on the map,” Gilliland said. “When they decided to start doing an annual conference … she made sure that we were probably, maybe, the third school to host one of those conferences, so it definitely anchored us in that movement.”
Christine Borgman, a distinguished research professor in information studies, said Dorr earned the respect of scholars across diverse disciplines.
Dorr was named a fellow of the American Educational Research Association, the Association for Psychological Science and the American Psychological Association.
“Her contributions resonate far, far beyond her immediate field,” Borgman said. “She had a very broad network – far beyond what any of us could identify.”
Gilliland, who worked under Dorr during her tenure as dean, added that Dorr combined fairness with administrative rigor in her leadership.
“It would be hard to find somebody else who had such a good eye for detail and really stayed on top of things and tried as hard as possible to be fair and transparent,” she said. “Those qualities are hard to come by, particularly in an academic administrator.”
Christie said Dorr provided her guidance and advice during her transition from an interim dean of the School of Education and Information Studies in 2020.
Dorr invited Christie to her home front porch, where they exchanged guidance in maintaining student-teacher relationships during the COVID-19 pandemic. The two often discussed how faculty could continue supporting students during the pandemic, Christie added.
“She would always say, ‘Think carefully about the decisions that you make,’” Christie said. “’Think about it from a staff person’s perspective. Think about it from the institution’s perspective’ … I would always appreciate when she would say, ‘Think carefully about that.’”
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