New College names president

SARASOTA - New College of Florida hired Dr. Donal O'Shea, dean of faculty and vice president for academic affairs at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass., as its next president.

O'Shea succeeds Gordon “Mike” Michalson Jr., who will retire July 1. The appointment must still be approved by Florida's Board of Governors, which is scheduled to meet in Jacksonville March 22.

“Donal O'Shea's intellectual abilities, his personal values and his visionary determination to make New College a national leader in the liberal arts really stood out from the other candidates we interviewed for the presidency and made him a natural fit to lead New College,” Board Chair Bob Johnson says in a press release.

O'Shea has been dean of faculty and vice president for academic affairs at Mount Holyoke College, a top-25 ranked private liberal arts women's college, since 1998. A Harvard-trained mathematician, O'Shea has been at Mount Holyoke since 1980. He previously headed sponsored research and chaired the college's mathematics department.

Michalson plans to rejoin the New College faculty as a professor of religion in the fall of 2013 following a one-year sabbatical.