Regan Crotty ’00 will serve as Princeton’s new dean of undergraduate students, according to a University announcement made July 15. Crotty will now lead the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students (ODUS), which is responsible for co-curricular and extracurricular aspects of student life.
“I think if you had asked me 15 years ago what my ideal or dream job was, I would have told you it would be dean of undergraduate students at Princeton,” Crotty told The Daily Princetonian in an interview.
Crotty brings to the role a decade of experience serving in various capacities at the University. After graduating from Princeton in 2000, she went on to earn her law degree from the University of Chicago Law School before returning to Princeton as an ODUS investigator, responsible for investigating alleged violations of University policy. Following that role, she was Interim Executive Director for Planning Administration in the Office of Vice President for Campus Life (VPCL) where she managed travel oversight, supervised ROTC and Outdoor Action, and represented the VPCL on various committees.
From 2012 to 2014, Crotty served as Director for Student Life, now called Assistant Dean for Student Life (ADSL), in First College, which was named Wilson College at the time. With the position falling under ODUS, Crotty sees her experience in this “mini dean” role as important in shaping her understanding of student life and the office.
“[The role is] so varied. You work on student support, student crisis situations, discipline, programming, overseeing the RCAs. That was invaluable in terms of understanding the life of the undergraduate student,” Crotty said. “Hopefully I can support them [the ADSLs] in ways that maybe you couldn’t if you hadn’t had that job before.”
In 2014, when the University was found to be in violation of Title IX over sexual harassment charges by the U.S. Department of Education, Crotty became the inaugural Director of Gender Equity and Title IX Administration and held the position for eight years.
Student protests against the Title IX office took place in 2019 after the University took disciplinary action, including four semesters of academic probation, against a student who graffitied “Title IX protects rapists” on a University walkway. The protestors created a list of 11 demands, one of which called for Crotty’s dismissal, but was later amended to call for a review of her actions.
Crotty said that as a result of the protests, both an external and internal review containing students, faculty, and staff, took place to review the processes and procedures of the office.
“In both of those reviews, they identified areas where things were working well and areas where we could make improvements. So I think ultimately, as a result of those protests, our systems or processes improved,” Crotty shared.
Some members of Princeton Students for Title IX Reform (PIXR) have said that the University’s changes did not address the “root problems” of the office, such as not expanding services for survivors.
Trump administration-era revisions to Title IX in 2020 regarding transgender people, prompted another round of changes for the department.
“First of all, they’re very complicated, and they’re going to be confusing for the community to understand,” Michele Minter, Vice Provost for Institutional Equity and Diversity, said at the time during an Undergraduate Student Government meeting. “In general, we think they’re going to have a chilling effect on people’s willingness to go through the process.”
Crotty said that the University would guard students regardless of gender identity, as policies floated at the time by Secretary of Education Betsy Devos threatened to curtail resources for transgender students.
Crotty left her position in the Title IX office, passing the torch to Randy Hubert who still serves in the role. Over the past two years, Crotty left the University as an Assistant General Counsel at Morgan Lewis from 2022 to spring 2024.
“When the opportunity came up to be Assistant General Counsel at Morgan Lewis, it seemed like a good professional change,” Crotty said. “That all said, I really missed Princeton, I missed students, missed my colleagues, … I missed the culture. And so when I learned that Dean [Kathleen] Deignan had retired, I knew that I’d regret it if I didn’t look into coming back in this role.”
One of Crotty’s main goals as Dean of Undergraduate Students is to foster belonging as a central and crucial aspect of the Princeton student experience.
“I was really struck [when] I read a quote from President [Christopher] Eisgruber, and he had taken it from President Bowen,” Crotty explained, “that all students should feel that they’re at Princeton as hosts and not merely guests. That really resonated with me. We know that feeling like you belong is important in wellness and mental health.”
To accomplish this goal, Crotty wants to place an emphasis on student input and relationships.
“I want to hear directly from students what’s working well, where we could make improvements, how we can collectively make this a better place for everyone,” Crotty said. “If a student has an idea about a student organization or an event we should plan, we want to facilitate that. We want to make it as easy as possible for you.”
Crotty also plans to routinely assess University discipline, drawing on her experience in the Title IX office.
“My office oversees discipline, and we’re really continuing to look at ways to make our disciplinary processes more compassionate,” she said.
“Being an investigator and being in the Title IX Office and being a Director of Student Life, it seemed like it all came together in the role of dean of undergraduate students,” she concluded.
Thomas Catalano is an assistant News editor for the ‘Prince.’
Please direct corrections requests to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
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