Robert Iuliano | |
|---|---|
 | |
| 15th President of Gettysburg College | |
| Assumed office July 1, 2019 | |
| Preceded by | Janet Morgan Riggs |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Watertown, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Education | Harvard University (AB) University of Virginia (JD) |
Robert W. Iuliano is an American attorney and academic administrator serving as the 15th president of Gettysburg College. Previously, he worked as the senior vice president, general counsel, and deputy to the president at Harvard University.[1][2][3]
Iuliano was born in Watertown, Massachusetts. He attended Harvard University and earned a Juris Doctor from the University of Virginia School of Law.[4]
Upon graduating law school, he held a judicial clerkship and worked as a federal prosecutor before joining the counsel's office at Harvard University. In addition to his administrative role at Harvard, Iuliano taught various seminar classes at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.[5]
In January 2019, Gettysburg College announced that Iuliano would succeed Janet Morgan Riggs to become the college's 15th president. He assumed office in July 2019.[6]
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Pennsylvania, Iuliano designated a one-week lockdown period for all students at Gettysburg College in September 2020.[7][8] Iuliano also required all upperclassmen to return home for the fall semester, being the first American college to implement such a measure.[9]
In October, 2023, Iuliano's provost Jamila Bookwala announced the closure of The Gettysburg Review, a highly-regarded literary journal based at Gettysburg College. The journal's editors claimed that Iuliano and Bookwala did not understand the purpose of the journal or its unique value to Gettysburg students, to the college's reputation, and to the wider literary community. Moreover, the editors claimed that the journal consistently fulfilled the college's revenue expectations, and that Iuliano had never approached them to discuss any specific concerns, prior to making the decision to close the nationally-renowned journal. According to the editors, Iuliano did not attend the meeting to deliver the news that the journal would be closed and the editors would lose their jobs: "The President, Bob Iuliano, wasn’t even there. He sent his hatchet person [Bookwala] to do this work." The journal's editors raised suspicions that Kennedy & Company, a management consulting firm, may have been involved in the decision to cut the journal. Faculty from the Gettysburg English Department, as well as students and alumni who had served as interns at the Review, and the wider literary community, spoke out against Iuliano's decision, questioning his commitment to equity and liberal-arts education.[10][11][12][13][14]