Howard Gillman

Howard Gillman was appointed by the University of California Board of Regents as the sixth chancellor of UCI in September 2014. He is an award-winning scholar and teacher with expertise in the American Constitution and the Supreme Court. He holds faculty appointments in the School of Law, the Department of Political Science (within the School of Social Sciences), the Department of History (within the School of Humanities), and the Department of Criminology, Law and Society (within the School of Social Ecology), and every year he teaches an undergraduate seminar. He also provides administrative oversight to, and serves as co-chair of the advisory board of, the University of California’s National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement.

Chancellor Gillman previously served as provost and executive vice chancellor (from June 2013) and interim chancellor (from July 2014). As provost, he established a wide range of multidisciplinary research, teaching and hiring initiatives designed to ensure campus-wide attention to important global and regional challenges, prioritized an agenda of “inclusive excellence” for faculty hiring and student support, transformed the campus’s approach to technology transfer and commercialization, expanded commitments to fundraising and community engagement, and reformed the campus budget model to prepare the university for an era of diminished state support.

Chancellor Gillman came to UCI after spending more than two decades at the University of Southern California, where he held faculty appointments in the Departments of Political Science and History, and, by courtesy, in the Gould School of Law. From 2005 to 2012 he served as dean of the Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, the largest, oldest, and most academically diverse unit at USC. Prior to his service as dean, Chancellor Gillman also served as associate vice provost for research advancement, chair of the Department of Political Science, and director of graduate studies within the Department of Political Science.

Chancellor Gillman has long been recognized for teaching excellence and dedication to students. Among his teaching honors are: the Teaching and Mentoring Award from the Law and Courts section of the American Political Science Association, 2013; the USC Associates Award for Excellence in Teaching, 2001 – the highest honor the university bestows on its faculty for career achievement in teaching and dedication to students; the General Education Teaching Award from the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, 2001; and an appointment as a Distinguished Faculty Fellow of the USC Center for Excellence in Teaching, 2001-2013.

His academic and scholarly honors include the Law and Courts Service Award, recognizing exceptional service to the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association; the Enlund Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Depaul University College of Law; the American Judicature Society Award for best paper on public law presented in the previous year; the C. Herman Pritchett Award for best book in public law published during the previous year; and the Pi Sigma Alpha Award for the best paper presented at the previous annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association.

A prolific author of academic papers, articles, and book chapters, and a frequent invited lecturer, Chancellor Gillman’s most recent book is Free Speech on Campus, co-authored with Erwin Chemerinsky (Yale University Press, 2018).

A native of Southern California, Chancellor Gillman grew up in North Hollywood and was a first-generation college student. He earned bachelor’s (magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa), master’s, and doctoral degrees in political science at UCLA.