CAHSS Dean Sahara Byrne on Trust, Collaboration, Free Discourse and Embracing Our Future Together
Prior to her new role at CAHSS, Byrne served as senior associate dean at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and inaugural director of the University-wide Cornell Center for Social Sciences and led the establishment of a new faculty governance structure in the college.
When Sahara Byrne received a call that she had been nominated for the position of dean of the University of Denver’s College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences (CAHSS), she had no intention of upending her life. But while she loved her role as senior associate dean of Cornell University’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, something about this position, this moment in time, just kept calling her.
The more she learned about CAHSS and considered channeling her deep leadership and communication experience into helping our community embrace our future, the more the possibility captured her heart and mind. “It’s up to thinkers and creators, those in the humanities, social sciences and arts to make sense of it all and I wanted to be part of what was going on here,” she said.
A self-described “California girl” raised in a close-knit family of public-school teachers in the then small beach town of Encinitas, Byrne discovered the power of filmmaking while working on a weekly news program in high school. She studied film and learned to talk and think fast as an undergraduate at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. By taking community college classes back home in the summer, she saved money and was able to graduate in three years.
Landing a job as a television writer in Hollywood very soon after college enabled her to sample life as a creative in the entertainment industry and forge lifelong friendships. Eventually drawn to exploring the psychology of media messaging, she earned a master’s and PhD at the University of Santa Barbara where her graduate research dove deep into why well-intended messaging — especially interventions aimed at protecting children — can have an opposite impact.
She went on to teach and conduct communication research at Cornell, continuing to explore what kind of public-policy-driven messaging does work. Meanwhile, she gleaned a rich understanding of student, faculty and staff roles in successively broader leadership positions in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, where Cornell’s media communication program is based.
“I was largely supporting fields that I have no training in, but I trusted the experts in the fields,” she said. “I listened and learned from them. That is the biggest lesson I learned as a leader — to trust the experts.” She intends to implement the same approach in CAHSS, where she feels “lucky to work alongside so many people from creative, liberal arts backgrounds who are deeply committed to the mission of this college and the value of a liberal arts education.”
In her previous leadership roles, Byrne relished collaboration with her academic community. “I loved being able to provide support by helping my colleagues walk through solutions,” she said. “Leaders need peers. We need each other, or the work is really lonely.” She will bring that mindset to her new position, with an eye toward building mutual trust and identifying and eliminating obstacles to moving forward.
Byrne sums up our shared goal for the near future in two words: “attract students,” she said. “This is crucial to our shared success. If all members of our community are happy coming in to CAHSS to do their work, I believe it will reflect that we worked together to generate new resources and opportunities for faculty and staff, elevating our students’ experience in the process.”
She intends to find ways to directly connect and communicate the value of liberal arts majors to career outcomes for students. “I don’t believe that every member of this college needs to jump on the career-after-college effort, but all fields in a college like ours must engage and I’m hoping those who are interested will bring their passion to it and knock it out of the park,” she said.
As for her communication style, “as someone who has delved into unintended messages, you’re going to see a combination of being as transparent as humanly possible, but also being very cautious about sending misleading, unclear, or premature messaging, as those types of communications often instill unnecessary fear and create distrust,” she said. “I might overcommunicate now and then, just to be sure, it’s so important to me.”
“Our faculty and staff play a huge part in shaping what the future will look like for new generations coming in and what they will take with them out into the world. I hope each faculty and staff member knows how important they are to our students.”
Byrne revels in thinking about the future and also believes “we’ll need to understand how to best collaborate with AI as humans and this is something our college is uniquely suited to creatively address and critique. But we must act fast and crack open innovative ideas soon.”
When asked how CAHSS can foster greater understanding across ideological divides, Byrne cited the importance of protecting conversations around difficult topics that faculty are able to have in their classrooms. “We must hold the classroom environment dearly as a place where both students and faculty can engage in free discourse without fear, try out ideas and learn how others react to those ideas. I didn’t feel safe putting my ideas out there as a college student until I was truly equipped to listen and respond to the reactions that came my way because of what I said. I got tougher, but also more empathetic, along the way.”
She expressed gratitude to our faculty and staff “who play a huge part in shaping what the future will look like for new generations coming in and what they will take with them out into the world. I hope each faculty and staff member knows how important they are to our students.”
Byrne was thrilled to have her children — son, Bravo, who just started law school at Willamette University in Oregon and daughter Charlotte, a civil engineering student at Cooper Union in Manhattan, visit her recently for the first time in Denver. She and her husband, Topher Byrne, who will be visiting faculty in CAHSS’ Media, Film & Journalism Studies Department (MFJS), have been trying out neighborhoods and local ice cream shops before deciding where to put down roots. The family visited Chief Mountain near Idaho Springs after two faculty in philosophy showed Byrne the path just a few weeks earlier.
