SBCC announces hiring of two new deans

As Santa Barbara City College prepares for the Fall 2020 semester, two well-respected employees will be assuming new roles as deans.

Paloma Arnold has been selected as the next Dean of Student Affairs. A native of Santa Barbara, Arnold earned her Bachelor of Arts in History from UCLA and later went on to earn a master’s degree in Psychology from Antioch University. She has worked in Student Services at SBCC for almost 20 years, beginning her career in the Financial Aid office and eventually taking the position of the Director of Extended Opportunity Programs and Services (EOPS). The EOPS program also houses the CalWORKs and Guardian Scholars programs along with three award-winning summer bridge programs: SPARC, Running Start and Transitions. Through her work in the Financial Aid and EOPS programs, Arnold has developed a passion for serving students and believes that Student Services plays a very important role in students’ academic journey. Additionally, she brings strong experience as well as a commitment to equity and serving SBCC’s most vulnerable and marginalized students.

In addition to serving on various college committees at SBCC, Arnold serves on the Board of Trustees for Marymount School of Santa Barbara and Santa Barbara High School’s Multimedia Arts and Design (MAD) Academy. In 2019, she was honored to receive SBCC’s Administrator of the Year Award.

Elizabeth M. Imhof, Ph.D., has been chosen as the new Dean of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. Previously, Imhof served as the Faculty Director of the Faculty Resource Center (FRC) at SBCC where she was the principal investigator for SBCC’s Title III Hispanic Serving Institution STEM grant, “Removing Barriers to STEM.” She is also an activity director for the Title V Hispanic Serving Institution grant, “Student-Ready: Degree Completion for the Flexible Learner.”

Before settling into her academic career, Imhof worked as the Assistant Director of the American Jewish Committee in San Francisco, Associate Director of Project Interchange in Washington DC, and the Executive Director of the American Sephardi Federation in New York City where she facilitated programs to build dialogue and understanding between diverse religious and cultural groups. She now combines her academic interests and her desire to promote equity and diversity-based education at SBCC where she has taught Middle Eastern History, World and Western Civilization, Social Science and co-founded SBCC’s Middle East Studies Program. Midway in her career, confronted by falling student success rates, she began to employ a wide range of affective student-centered pedagogies with great success. Her position as FRC director enabled her to expand her work and research in affective learning, curriculum design, and to facilitate experiential workshops in Affective Learning and Culturally Responsive Pedagogy. Imhof has a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago.