UC Davis Provost-Vice Chancellor Stepping Down After 8 Years

DAVIS, CA -- Ralph J. Hexter, who's been the provost and executive vice chancellor of the University of California, Davis, since 2011, has announced that he will step down from campus leadership at the end of the 2019-20 academic year to refocus his energies on his teaching and research in classics and comparative literature.

He announced the news Sept. 17.

By June of next year, his tenure as provost and executive vice chancellor will have spanned 9½ years, including 15 months as acting and then interim chancellor. He filled in as chancellor from late April 2016 until Aug. 1, 2017, the day Chancellor Gary S. May’s appointment took effect.

Hexter has had a major impact on the makeup of campus administration. He recruited all but one of the 17 deans and vice provosts currently serving in their roles, the new associate vice chancellor for enrollment management and, while acting chancellor, the director of athletics.

He also presided over the openings of major new campus facilities, including the Ann E. Pitzer Center for music instruction and recitals, the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, the International Center, and the Betty Irene Moore Hall of the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing at UC Davis Health. A strong champion of the idea of “One UC Davis,” which encourages stronger connections between the Davis and Sacramento campuses, he also serves on the governing body of the UC Davis Medical Center.

As provost, Hexter has been a champion of community engagement for faculty, students and staff, both to facilitate the positive real-world impacts of their work and to make its value more visible to the public. In 2015, he created an advisory committee to explore ways to advance community-engaged scholarship at the university, in September 2018 establishing the Office of Public Scholarship and Engagement. In part because of the university’s record in this area, Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, a national consortium, selected UC Davis to be its institutional home.

“UC Davis has been rising in achievement and reputation for many years,” Hexter observed. He said he has been “honored and privileged” to serve in UC Davis leadership over the last decade, a period during which “the university seems finally to have achieved a significant portion of the recognition it deserves.” He praised UC Davis leadership as “remarkably diverse, able and innovative,” calling Gary May “a visionary chancellor who will continue to lead us to yet greater heights.”