Education: Poetry Scholar Appointed Humanities Dean at UCLA

Pauline Yu, a renowned scholar of Chinese poetry, has been appointed dean of the humanities at UCLA.

Yu’s appointment comes as the university’s departments and programs in the humanities face budget cuts of $1.4 million, or 5.2%.

With the cutbacks, Yu said, “it becomes particularly important to defend the value of studying literature, language, philosophy, the arts of other cultures, for their own sake and for the crucial exposure to modes of analysis, judgment and expression they provide.”

Yu studied French and German history and literature at Harvard University before attending Stanford University, where in 1976 she earned a doctorate degree in comparative literature.

She went on to teach at the University of Minnesota and Columbia University before joining UC Irvine three years ago and founding the East Asian languages and literature department.