The end of an era: Van Harlingen steps down as head

Van Harlingen's legacy as the Department of Physics' 10th department head is characterized by his investment in its people.

Siv Schwink
for Illinois Physics

For 12 years, Head of Department and Professor Dale Van Harlingen has served the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as its top administrator. The 10th department head in the department’s 129-year history, he has capably maintained the department’s long tradition of strong, impactful leadership. He tirelessly advocated for its people and research programs, pushed to modernize and upgrade its facilities, and supported evidence-based teaching innovations in its classrooms. He fostered the department’s strong sense of community and the collaborative “Urbana-style” intellectual culture that underpins its research successes. He supported diversity-building initiatives. And at every opportunity, he has voiced to the campus community and to the broader academic community what he holds to be true, that this department is “the best place in the world to do physics.”

On June 30, 2018, Van Harlingen will step down from his responsibilities as head of department. He has no plans to retire from the university. He intends to invest his regained time and energy into research, traveling, and enjoying his family.

Van Harlingen comments, “The time has gone really fast—I feel like I just started. It’s an interesting job, every day there is something new, and most of it is fun. In 12 years, the landscape changes, but how I approached the job never did—I tried to take care of the people and to keep the department healthy in all aspects. I’ve heard people say it can be hard to manage faculty, but that’s not the job—you don’t manage faculty. For me, it’s been gratifying to be able to work with people high enough in the university’s administration to get stuff done and, at the same time, with the people who are actually doing the work of scholarship. I will definitely miss it.”

“I’ve always thought that taking care of the people was the most important part of the job. That, coupled with upholding and preserving the values and the reputation of the department. That was easy for me, because I have believed in it.”

Professor and Head Dale Van Harlingen, Department of Physics

U of I Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Provost Andreas Cangellaris remarks, “In my role first as a fellow department head, then as a dean, and now as provost, I have been very fortunate to work closely with Dale. Through our many conversations and interactions, I have come to admire his unwavering commitment to the significance of physics and the sciences as a cornerstone of Illinois’s global stature and impact. He has hired some incredible faculty members and has worked diligently and creatively to provide them with the resources they needed to succeed and to thrive. And he has looked after the entire Illinois Physics community with care, dedication, and diligence, fostering a dynamic, interdisciplinary culture of inquiry, discovery, and innovation, inspired by scholarly excellence and bold thinking. I commend him and I thank him for his outstanding service to the University of Illinois.”

A 15-year member of the Illinois Physics Advisory Board, James Garland, professor of physics and president emeritus of Miami University, has known Van Harlingen since he was an undergraduate in Garland’s physics classes at The Ohio State University. Garland, a condensed matter experimental physicist, later served as Van Harlingen’s doctoral adviser.

Garland states, “Dale was a brilliant student at Ohio State, both at the undergraduate and graduate level. His doctoral dissertation research on the thermoelectric flux in superconducting toroidal rings was a remarkable and difficult project, far outside the boundary of most Ph.D. student capabilities.

“I feel enormously privileged to have worked with Dale and to have watched him rise through the ranks to become one of the most recognized and respected condensed matter physicists of his generation. But in addition to his research expertise, Dale is also known for his even-handedness and sensible judgment—traits that have served him well as department head. Successfully leading a large academic department is one of the most difficult challenges in academic administration (speaking from experience!). Few people have the requisite mix of interpersonal and organizational skills and intellectual depth that the job calls for. Dale’s quiet and determined commitment to his departmental colleagues has paid large dividends for Illinois Physics. I know Illinois Physics well, and I continue to believe the department sets the standard for the entire physics world.”

Illinois Physics Associate Head for Graduate Programs and Professor Lance Cooper has worked closely with Van Harlingen on departmental administrative matters. He adds, “Dale’s tenure as head of department has left an indelible mark on the culture of Illinois Physics. Since 2006, Dale’s sense of what is possible has continuously infused the department with optimism and has kept the faculty, staff, and students focused on sustaining excellence in research, teaching, and service. Even in the face of a challenging funding environment, Dale has maintained his ambitious vision for the department and has been tireless in his efforts to preserve the department’s top-ten ranking and the number-one ranking of its flagship condensed matter physics program. His service to the department has been truly exemplary.”

Illinois Physics Associate Head for Undergraduate Programs and Professor Mats Selen states, “The department has thrived under Dale’s watchful and caring leadership. He is smart and decisive, but more than that, he is just a very kind person. Dale’s warmth and good humor come through every time he addresses the faculty, staff, and students, whether he has prepared his words or is speaking off the cuff. His efforts on behalf of the department have lifted others up and enabled their accomplishments—he has always welcomed and supported others’ ideas, without needing to claim recognition for himself. He has especially looked after our younger faculty members and helped them to be successful. And, as busy as he has been and as much as he has seamlessly juggled, he has always made himself available. He never showed the slightest irritation when I regularly poked into his office without an appointment to share an idea—to the contrary, he seemed to welcome it. He really is an extraordinary leader. I hope our next department head will have the same kind of openness, positivity, and caring that Dale has in spades.”

Van Harlingen has led the department through tumultuous times for the State of Illinois and for the University of Illinois System. Leadership changes at the top levels of the university’s administration were the norm: he served with a total of five U of I presidents, five chancellors, seven provosts, and four College of Engineering deans. 

Van Harlingen first came into the position during a time when the financial woes of the State of Illinois limited hiring of new faculty members at the U of I. At the same time, retirements were taking a toll on physics faculty numbers. Van Harlingen knew that to sustain the department’s internationally recognized research programs and to be able to offer the highest quality education and research opportunities to graduate and undergraduate students, the department would need to make strategic hires, and he pushed hard to get tenure-track positions allocated and to open faculty searches, to return the department to its critical mass of about 67 core faculty members.

Over the course of his tenure as head, Van Harlingen made 28 faculty hires—that represents more than a third of the current core faculty and about half of the women faculty in the department’s history. He also oversaw 18 retentions, 36 promotions, and 12 appointments to chaired professorships. And though he didn’t hire them, he is also very pleased to have played a big role just prior to becoming head in recruiting Nadya Mason, Smitha Vishveshwara, and Peter Abbamonte.

Van Harlingen also expanded the physics staff in strategic areas, including advancement, communications, course management, and outreach personnel.

One tradition for which Van Harlingen will surely be remembered among the Illinois Physics faculty is his use of popular music to nucleate the challenges and opportunities the department faced during his tenure as head. Fall and spring faculty meetings were an opportunity for Van Harlingen to deliver a state-of-the-department address, and Van Harlingen started each one by naming a theme song that captured the tone of that point in time.

Songs he used include “Happy Days are Here Again,” “Stormy Weather,” “Everything is Awesome” (from the LEGO Movie), “If You Can’t Be Good, Be Gone,” “Don’t Look Down,” “If I Had a Million Dollars,” “Climb Every Mountain,” “We’ll Get By with a Little Help from Our Friends,” “Have I Stayed Too Long at the Fair?” “Aint Nobody Gonna Miss Me When I’m Gone,” “Give Me the Highway,” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” The first theme Van Harlingen offered wasn’t a song, but a quote from A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” And at one point, he used a paraphrased TV show title: “Orange and Blue is the New Black.”

Asked what have been his most important contributions as head, the first answer that comes to Van Harlingen is his improving the quality of food and wine at departmental receptions and opening up the annual faculty reception to staff, to be more inclusive of the entire Illinois Physics family. This response won’t surprise anyone who knows Van Harlingen. He has regularly invited faculty and staff to join together to celebrate the department and its milestones. And as he points out, the quality of the food and wine is not an insignificant thing, as it sets a tone at each gathering.

But in meeting with the candidates for the next head of department, what he shared wasn’t about the wine or the food—it was about taking care of the faculty and staff and preserving and improving the department.

“I told each of them, I’ve always thought that taking care of the people was the most important part of the job. That, coupled with upholding and preserving the values and the reputation of the department. That was easy for me, because I have believed in it. It’s important to recognize that the quality of the department is measured by its scholarship. And to maintain an environment that continues to produce world-class scholarship, the head of department has to support faculty in their research and teaching, treat the staff as a vital part of the team, and maintain the camaraderie that has been the hallmark of this department since long before I came here—this is what’s most important. Beyond that, if there is time, then you can try to accomplish the things you want to do—and for me, that had to do with upgrading our infrastructure.”

And in fact, Van Harlingen managed to complete an impressive list of infrastructure upgrades while head, improving communal spaces, teaching spaces, and public areas using funds from the college and campus, offset by departmental funds and generous financial contributions from alumni. These projects included reclaiming the closed physics library as a communal meeting space and naming it the Interaction Room, modernizing the graduate student lounge and study rooms, modernizing the classrooms in the Walnut Hallway including technology upgrades, adding a large modern classroom space on the second floor where the defunct publications room had been, updating the furniture in the first-floor lobby, adding an ADA-compliant ramp to the Green Street entrance, adding a patio with tables and chairs outside the Green Street entrance, renovating the first-floor bathrooms and adding a women’s restroom on the fourth floor, installing a breakroom with a modern kitchen and furnishings for faculty and staff, and remodeling the main office.

An additional project is currently underway, a $5 million expansion of the upper-level instructional laboratory space slated to open in 2019. These labs will increase intro-lab teaching capacity by 50 percent. The new labs are located next to the existing labs on the fifth and sixth floors of the Engineering Sciences Building, in close proximity to the Institute for Condensed Matter Theory.

Another project now underway was inspired by undergraduate students. At a recent town hall meeting, students expressed how much they enjoyed the faculty-run drop-in “Help Room,” held in the Interaction Room during the campus-wide graduate-student-employees strike earlier this semester. They asked the administration to make the drop-in-anytime office hours permanent after the strike ended. To satisfy this request, rooms on the second floor of Loomis Laboratory that currently house a classroom, an undergraduate physics major lounge, and a TA commons will be merged to form one large Help Room hosting all-day drop-in office hours.

Van Harlingen’s proposed infrastructure improvements actually went above and beyond this extensive list. In order to be shovel-ready should state funding for capital improvements be made available, he ordered architectural feasibility studies in 2013 for an advanced experimental research building (estimated at $20 million) and for a multi-story addition to Loomis Laboratory above the lecture halls (estimated at $40 million). And while these projects have not been funded, they do demonstrate Van Harlingen’s confident vision for the future expansion of the department.

Underlying all of these efforts is Van Harlingen’s can-do outlook and his steadfast dedication to the people in the physics department. He himself describes his leadership style as an inverted pyramid, with him at the bottom supporting everyone else in the department. His unique brand of servant-style leadership trusts and invests in the abilities of the people around him to do their best.

Director of the Illinois Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (I-MRSEC) and Professor Nadya Mason comments, “I think Dale’s time as head can be summed up by one word: Vision. That’s with a big V. Because Dale has Vision for us as the best physics department in the world, now and always. And he’s been extremely thoughtful and effective in implementing plans that align with this vision, pushing forward with big grants, stellar new hires, classy building renovations, and more.

“I think his successful tenure boils down to the fact that Dale really loves this department. All of his actions show this. He loves the Urbana style of collaborations and friendships and the occasional martini lunch, and he’s worked to keep this spirit alive. He cares about people, faculty and students, fostering an inclusive climate, and is always open to good ideas that make this place better for everyone.”

Professor Brian DeMarco agrees, “Dale has led the physics department for the last 12 years with incredible ambition and vision. His impressive legacy includes 28 faculty hires, the new patio and interaction room in Loomis, upgraded classrooms in the Walnut Hallway, and the creation of a women’s restroom on the fourth floor of Loomis. The tireless effort that Dale invested into these initiatives and our faculty, staff, and students is an expression of his great love for the Department of Physics.”