Juanita P. Jackson was named Director of Academic Personnel for the School of Humanities, and started in her role in November 2024.
Juanita joins the School from UC Riverside (UCR), where she worked in academic personnel for over 10 years. Having served as Assistant Director of Academic Personnel for the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CHASS), Juanita provided strategic oversight of all academic personnel policies and practices, managed grievances, supervised teams of personnel staff and advised college leadership on sensitive issues. At UCR, her portfolio included academic personnel matters for 12 departments housing over 100 senate faculty and nearly 200 non-senate faculty, a variety of initiatives for the School.
During her time in CHASS, Juanita also served as the Lead Subject Matter Expert for UCR’s efileplus system, where she worked with the Central Office’s Director of Technology and campus programmers to help design, test and assist with the deployment of system features. In particular, she oversaw the academic personnel for the arts – the only college on campus with faculty whose primary work was considered “creative.” Because the efileplus system was not initially designed to appropriately capture creative work, she spent several years working directly with department chairs and faculty collecting insight and suggestions to help recreate a more comprehensive “creative activities” functionality in the efileplus system that met faculty needs.
She has an Ed.D. in Higher Education Administration and Leadership from USC, and an M.A. in Anthropology from CSU Fullerton. In addition to her work at UCI, Juanita teaches physical anthropology courses a few times a year at Moreno Valley College. The course is an introduction to human biological evolution, where she teaches students about genetics, fossils, primates, comparative anatomy and modern human variation through an evolutionary lens. Juanita is also involved in two national research projects; one project focuses on Black student experiences of microaggressions in higher education, and the other project is a study on Afro-Latina experiences and belonging in the Black and Latinx community.
Juanita has a reputation for being a team player dedicated to leading her team with a cool head, patience and care – even in chaotic situations. At the School of Humanities, Juanita will oversee the academic personnel team.
Fun facts: She has one son and a deep love of music, camping, the mountains and the forest. Some of her favorite hiking spots include Nugget Fall in Juneau, Alaska, John Muir Woods in Northern California and Crater Lake in Oregon. When she retires, her dream would be to retire somewhere beautiful with enough land to support an animal rescue/sanctuary.